That Australian,” Sibongile Kenneth Sonjica muses, “is killing us with money. He is turning us into dogs. Two dogs can play together nicely, but throw a bone between them and they will fight.”
The 58-year-old Sonjica is a 15-year veteran of Gauteng’s gold mining industry and returned to his Mpondoland birthplace, in the Eastern Cape, after his 1997 retrenchment. His only fond memories of those times are of him in the ring – he was a useful boxer in mine hostel tournaments.
“That Australian” is Mark Caruso, a Perth-based venture capitalist and Executive Chairman of Mineral Commodities (MRC), who is going toe-to-toe with a community opposing a proposed 22-kilometer long and 1.5-kilometer wide strip mine of coastal dune titanium deposits within its midst.
“The mine will destroy the land forever; I know this from working on mines. It will not be possible for the cows to graze, there will be soil erosion and you cannot live close to a mine. I know mines,” says Sonjica.
There is no middle ground between the pro and anti-mining lobbies, this fight is all about the last man standing; there will be no split decision. Titanium is tough, lightweight and has the highest strength-to-weight ratio of any metal. It provides for the demands of the 21st century’s new technologies from the medical and sporting fields through to the aeronautic industries.
<img loading="lazy" decoding="async" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-5010" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/010-Siyabongo-Ndovela-ACC-exiting-Mbizana-courts-facing-charges-of-possession-of-an-unliscenced-fiream-25-April-2016-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200" />
Facing off is the Amadiba community who live on communal land with collective agency. It is a land tenure system that has survived such interlopers as Shaka Zulu, British colonialism (Mpondoland was the last territory to be annexed by the British in 1894) and patronizing apartheid-era rural improvement projects that became a catalyst for the Pondo Revolt in the late 1950s.
South African Pulp and Paper Industries (Sappi) misjudged the land arrangement in 1999 when it began to implement a tree planting project by paying some residents a cultivation rental fee. In what became known as the Gum Tree Rebellion, 14 homesteads of those participating in the initiative were razed in two weeks of violence. The community saw neither development value nor any synergy with the multinational’s land use.
Nonhle Mbuthuma, the 38-year-old spokesperson for the Amadiba Crisis Committee (ACC) that opposes the mine, went into hiding following the March 22 killing of the organization’s chairperson Sikhosiphi “Bazooka” Rhadebe.
“My grandfather was a leader during the Pondo Revolt. What I learned from him is that it is very important that if you want to live a better life, you have to protect the land,” says Mbuthuma.
The ACC wants economic development through an eco-tourism model on the economic ethos of a rising tide lifts all boats, allowing for both small-scale farming and the amaMpondo culture to flourish. The Pondoland Centre of Endemism, which will be impacted by any mine operations, is recognized as one of the world’s 235 richest eco-regions.
“People think we are poor. We do not feel we are poor. We feel richer than other people. Here we have land. You can go to other places and people have nothing. We have crops and cattle and bigger plans for tourism. In cities, people are poor. Caruso says we are poor, but he is from the city,” says Siyabonga Ndovela, a 23-year-old supporter of the ACC.
The ACC says the promise of 600 mining jobs will come at the expense of creating a strip of desert stretching between the Mzamba and Mtentu rivers, pollute the marine environment, as well as arable and grazing land far beyond its area of operation, exhaust and choke fresh water sources, displace communities and serve as nothing more than a burial mound for a community.
Zeka Mnyamana is the spokesperson for MRC’s Black Economic Empowerment partner, the Xolobeni Community Empowerment Company (XOLCO). Mbuthuma labels Mnyamana as “a traitor”, as she says he once opposed mining, saying there is no reason why mining and eco-tourism cannot co-exist. “Tourists go to Johannesburg and there are mines there.”
The decades-long struggle against the proposed mine is not without its consequences. The corrosive effect is in the acts of betrayal and alleged murder calcifying positions and redefining relationships into pro or anti-mining camps. It is no glib assessment to say this could emerge into an internecine conflict in its most sincere form – destructive, deadly, among family and inherited by coming generations as blood feuds.
Sinegugu Zukulu, the Eastern Cape Environmental Program Manager for the NGO Conservation South Africa, and originally from Amadiba’s Baleni area, about 15 kilometers inland from the proposed mining site, acts as an ACC advisor.
“The Amadiba are a clan, we are all related,” he says.
His opponent is Zamile Qunya, who head ups XOLCO.
“We are brothers, his great-grandfather was also mine. We were friends from Standard Six and beyond school,” Zukulu says of a friendship since soured.
“We have never had a direct fallout. When we meet, we meet as brothers. But we are no longer friends. It is the things he says in my absence, not in my presence, like ‘Sinegugu is a troublemaker’ and lately he has been spreading lies that I started XOLCO with him.”
“The social fabric of the community is being destroyed. When say an uncle dies and is pro-mining you are still obliged to attend the funeral. But people end up not eating the food for fear of being poisoned,” he says.
There are accounts of women being assaulted by herdboys for accepting food parcels from pro-mining interests, unexplained fires razing tourist infrastructure, reports of cash handouts by mining interests in exchange for support and anti-mining activists subjected to police raids and harassment.
Russel Hartshorne, 32, concedes the opportunity for a community lease agreement for the Mtentu River Lodge Guest House in 2011 came about when Qunya was wearing two hats, as XOLCO representative and also chair of the eco-tourism community body, the Amadiba Coastal Communities Development Association Trust. The trust was on the cusp of signing a deal with a major player in the eco-tourism field, but it was rejected at the eleventh hour by Qunya.
Hartshorne and his business partner stepped into the gap with little capital and have a written agreement with the community, including profit share and local employment, but admits it has little validity.
“If the community says go, than we go,” he says.
The pro-mining lobby claims 80% of the 2,000 to 3,000 people directly impacted by the proposed mine support it. Anti-mining activists claim the same percentage is against it. A 2007 report by the South African Human Rights Commission said “despite a chronic lack of infrastructure, the majority of the affected community are not in favor of mining.” Mbizana municipality is ranked as South Africa’s worst performing local government by the research and advocacy group Good Governance Africa.
Sebenzani Mchebi, at the age of 73, lives on a homestead among arable fields and livestock within the proximity of the proposed mining operation with 32 other adults and “I don’t know how many children”.
“If they bring the machines here where will we live? Where will the animals get their grass? Our water will be poisoned. Where do we get land like this? It will be the end of our lives. The government does not care, they are on the side of mining,” she says.
“We are prepared to die for this land, everyone is. Bazooka is not the first person to die (three other anti-mining activists are believed to have been poisoned),” says Ndovela, who is facing a charge of the possession of an unlicensed firearm after police confiscated the weapon while he was on his way to a community blockade to prevent officials gaining access to the dune site.
“We have no say about our land. Our ancestors fought for this land. Why are we going to sell our land to Australia?” says Ndovela.
Caruso did not respond to detailed questions from FORBES AFRICA.

‘Our Ancestors Fought  For This Land.  Why Are We Selling  It To Australia?’

Soccer-loving young girls in northern Kenya may never have heard of Elham Sayed Javad, but they have a lot to thank her for. If it was not for the Canadian-based fashion designer, they would not be able to play in official tournaments.
Javad created a hijab which operates magnetically. It opens and releases if it is pulled from anywhere around the neck area. Her design was one of the two approved by FIFA in June last year, when it lifted its ban on the religious garment, which had been in place for five years due to safety concerns.
<div id="attachment_5872" style="width: 268px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-5872" class="size-medium wp-image-5872" src="/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/000_Nic502245-258x300.jpg" alt="" width="258" height="300" />Bahraini player Muna al-Edaysi (R) vies with Palestnian Nivin al-Kolayb during their Women&#8217;s Arabia Cup football match in Manama on October 27, 2010. AFP PHOTO/ADAM JAN</div>
The ruling means women and girls who wear the hijab for religious reasons can now play in competitive soccer competitions. Having overcome that hurdle, all that was left for the girls from the Horn of Africa (Hodi region) was to find a competition to participate in.
Last year’s East Africa Cup presented them with a rare opportunity. The event is organized for youths between the ages of 11 and 16. It combines a range of sporting and cultural events and is lauded for highlighting gender issues. Apart from that, the team have little else.
There is no girls’ or women’s league to play in, and any ambitions of representing the country, while admirable, may prove little more than a pipe dream.
The level the Kenyan girls would have looked at, the under-17 event, appears to be one of the most problematic in their country and many others on the continent.
Kenya withdrew from the under-17 World Cup qualifiers in August because of what they claim was a logistical issue with their opponents, Equatorial Guinea. Kenya claimed the Equatoguineans’ communication regarding match details such as the venue and the kick-off time, as well as confirmation of visas, was received too late.
What actually occurred is not clear. Equatorial Guinea’s media had reported that Kenya may not arrive, but on the match day, August 16, activities went ahead as planned. The officials were present, the Equato-
guinean team warmed up, and stood to attention for their national anthem.
They were even instructed to kick off, and did, scoring a goal before the match was awarded in their favor because of the Kenyan no-show.
Farce aside, Equatorial Guinea have now qualified for the final playoffs which will decide which three African sides travel to Costa Rica for next year’s under-17 women’s World Cup. They will play Ghana in a two-legged tie this month.
The other clashes will be between Zambia, who beat Botswana to advance to this stage, and South Africa, who received a bye into the deciding stage. Nigeria were also given a free passage to the last six and will face Morocco.
For Kenya, all that’s left is disappointment and questions. While some of their aspiring players received a boost in the form of the lifting of the ban on the hijab, others were left high and dry by the under-17 shenanigans.
Their coach, Florence Adhiambo, says incidents like this make it difficult for the girls to stay motivated.
“It’s heartbreaking to see things like this happen. It discourages girls who have just started with their careers,” she says.
She is not alone in these sentiments. Former Nigeria captain Flo-rence Omagbemi, who was on the organizing committee for the 2012 under-17 World Cup, and remains on it for next year’s event, echoed those thoughts at a meeting in Zurich.
“All is not well with the game at the moment in Africa and we need to act fast to salvage the situation,” she says. “We have a lot of talented young girls with great passion for the game but they have no support from their federations. The soccer administrators are not doing much to help improve women’s soccer.”
The most obvious example of that is in the lack of fixtures. The African Women’s Championship has been taking place biennially since 1998 (the men’s has been going since 1957) and age-group qualifications are also held every two years. But the number of countries pulling out means the competition is often marred by the cancellation of fixtures.
More tellingly, there are no fully professional leagues in the women’s game on the continent. That leaves it lagging behind places like the United States, where the women’s game is run the same way as the men’s.
As a consequence, Nadi Sora, the coach of the Hodi girls’ team, explains they don’t have much to aspire to.
“There are no female role models, so there is still discrimination against girls. The whole community enjoys sport, but the girls do not have leagues, we just have tournaments, so we have to wait for a tournament to compete,” she says.
One woman to look up to is the president of Burundi’s football association, Lydia Nsekera, the first woman on FIFA’s executive committee, and who was profiled on these pages last month. Nsekera agrees that without regular competitive matches, women’s soccer will continue to lag behind. She has also identified financial reasons as one of the main roadblocks to developing the women’s game.
“In Africa, there are people who question the rationale for funding female football. But I am confident that, with the right encouragement, women’s football will evolve and reach the level of men,” Nsekera says decisively.
South Africa is one place where corporates have been captivated by the women’s game. In June, Sasol announced a four-year extension of its sponsorship for Banyana Banyana, the national women’s team, and the semi-professional soccer league for women. Many players in the league combine playing soccer while they are still studying.
At least in South Africa, there is some form of encouragement for girls to think seriously about the game. In other countries, especially those with more traditionalist ideas of the role of women, it is frowned upon for girls to take up the game.
FIFA’s unbanning of the hijab has helped for some, but Sora reveals that the Hodi girls’ team still face reprisal from their neighbors.
“The community looks down on us, they curse us and say things to us like, ‘you should not disrespect your culture’, but we continue to play, because when we play football, we are free.”
What the youngsters need are more people like Nassra Juma Mohammed, the founder of Zanzibar’s Women Fighters FC. Mohammed was inspired by the Swedish women’s soccer team, who visited the island in 1998, and wanted to start her own club.
The team are another of Africa’s success stories. They are sustainable because they draw funds from a small shop Mohammed started. And they are successful because their determination, more than their love of the game, allows them to challenge everyone from teachers to their husbands as they fight for their right to play soccer.
Some of the people standing in their way are hard-line religious men who claim women should not play soccer because “they shouldn’t wear shorts”. Even though these women continue to rebel against such restrictive ideals, if any one of them was to agree with the idea or felt she would have a better chance if she covered up, she need only don one of Javad’s hijabs to adhere to Islam, stay on the right side of the FIFA’s laws and still play the beautiful game.

Hijhab scores a goal against FIFA

Unlike the more glorified test of man and machine (such as Formula One), rally racing has for decades been relegated to an inferior position in the hierarchy of tests of endurance. Yet this demanding sport actually predates F1; finding its roots in 1894 when horseless cart races dominated the city of Paris. Monte Carlo was the scene for the first official rally in 1911 and soon, city-to-city road races sprang up across France and Europe.
These races gave birth to those elements we still enjoy in modern rallying, such as time trials and the use of road books and route notes. Drivers had to weave between pedestrians and animals while covering distances as great as 1,178km—sometimes without any rest periods in between. Safety naturally became an issue, as the clunky vehicles got increasingly faster along those inhospitable tracks. The sport was banned in France for a brief period but soon, purpose-built tracks were developed and the sport came into its own.
A name we now associate with two-wheeled competitions, the Tour de France, began originally for rally drivers and kicked off in 1899. The most famous of all rallying competitions began decades later in 1977. Thierry Sabine was travelling through the Libyan desert on his motorbike when he got lost. Struck by the austerity and beauty of the landscape, he vowed to share his discovery with as many people as possible when he finally made it back to France.
Sabine mapped out a 10,000km route from Europe into Algiers, across Agadez and finishing in Dakar. To mark the birth of the Paris-Dakar rally, he coined the following motto: “A challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay behind.”  But this competition became a nightmare for 58 competitors who, since the inception of the challenge, lost their lives in pursuit of glory. One of South Africa’s most renowned Paris-Dakar competitors, Alfie Cox (who’d made the transition from bikes to cars), narrowly escaped death in January this year when his Volvo XC60 suffered power-steering failure. The car burst into flames and both Cox and his co-driver, Jürgen Schröder, had to be airlifted from the scene. Unforgiving terrain and mechanical difficulties are not the only threats to competitor safety. The rally had to be cancelled in 2008 due to security issues in Mauritania and the competition shifted to South America in 2009. It has stayed there ever since.
Thanks to its challenging conditions, Africa has hosted some other, perhaps lesser-known events, such as the FIA African Rally Championships (which takes place in Zimbabwe, South Africa, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Madagascar), the Kenya Airways East African Safari Classic, and the colloquially-termed Put Foot Rally.
Legend has it that the East African Safari Classic grew out of a conversation motorsport enthusiast Neil Vincent had with his cousin Eric Cecil. Vincent is attributed with saying: “I can imagine nothing more boring than driving round and round the same piece of track. But if you will organize an event where we can get into our cars, slam the door, go halfway across Africa and back, and the first car home is a winner, I’ll be in it.” In 1953, the competition took off under the guise of a tribute to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.
The Put Foot Rally, unlike all the rest, emphasizes the social element rather than competition. It is aimed at bringing attention to tourism in South Africa and an appreciation for the wildlife and natural beauty that make up this fair land. But ultimately, rallying is about rivalry and economics—it’s a proving ground where manufacturers test their latest technology (which we as consumers benefit from). These competitions also generate financial rewards for the local areas hosting them.
Take the Toyota Kalahari Botswana 1000 Desert Race for example, which takes place on June 22-24 every year. Since 1975, this has been considered the ‘Comrades Marathon’ of all off-road events. At the launch of this year’s race, Onkokame Kitso Mokaila, Botswana’s minister for environment, wildlife and tourism, mentioned that the rally contributed “millions of pula” to their country’s economy with the bulk of the money being spent on food, transport, accommodation, entertainment and petrol. Businesses in the vicinity of the race route also mentioned increased sales during the annual event.
The technology required to build a car that’s capable of taking on extreme terrain is simply astonishing and begins with a frame that’s not only lightweight but capable of withstanding severe punishment. The frame doubles up as a roll cage and, according to FIA regulations, needs to be able to withstand up to 16.9 tons for a defined area. Driver and passenger safety of road-going cars has enjoyed many benefits, all as a direct result of the conditions experienced in rally (and other forms of) racing.
Keeping these cars in contact with the roads—where there is one—is the job of the suspension, yet this needs to allow enough ground clearance (spring travel is limited to 250mm) while still maintaining stability. Production cars make use of these developments, but naturally the emphasis here isn’t only on performance but also on ensuring comfort levels as well.
Four-wheel drive is crucial in rallying, yet the Paris-Dakar regulations stipulate that any form of electronic control is prohibited. As a result, manufacturers often opt for viscous locking for the car’s three differentials. One might think that, as these cars can’t travel as fast as their road-going counterparts, aerodynamics wouldn’t be a major factor—it actually is. A rally vehicle’s drag coefficient enjoys the highest priority in the design phase (which is obviously of great importance for road-going cars; ensuring high levels of fuel efficiency), all the while taking into account the need for short overhangs that allow easy entry angles when climbing over hills or obstructions.
Creating downforce, unlike in Formula One, is not a necessity as sand has high rolling resistance. In terms of bodywork, the carbon fiber shell on the 2012 Volkswagen Race Touareg for example, weighs in at a measly 50kg. Carbon fiber has now been extensively used in production cars where performance is key and many modern vehicles now make use of engines machined from lightweight yet durable aluminum.
Weight distribution in terrain that can easily flip a car demands serious attention. Typically, an equal weight distribution is placed over the front and rear axles and fuel tanks are placed very low to assist with an optimal center of gravity. While packing components in as compact a manner as possible, mechanics need to have ease of access to exchange parts or service the cars quickly. Support teams also need to carry as few spares as possible so they can be mobile and efficient.
Tire development goes hand-in-hand with racing and again, translates directly into the types of compounds available for production vehicles. Tires need to be capable of handling rough terrain, while offering resistance to wear-and-tear.
Stopping a standard 4&#215;4 has become easier thanks to the testing that goes on in rally races, which is why disc brakes have become an industry standard rather than the antiquated drum configuration. Thanks to these brave drivers and manufacturers, road-going cars have become exponentially safer and far more capable and will continue to do so in the future.

Tag: Tournaments

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Hijhab scores a goal against FIFA

Pushing The Limits Of Endurance