The government seems quite happy to turn Vaalputs into a "Sacrifice Zone" which is a place where the health of people and landscapes are brutally sacrificed for the economic gains and prosperity of others who live elsewhere, writes Neil Overy.
During a fact-finding mission to
South Africa in August last year, Marcos Orellana, the UN Special Rapporteur on
toxics and human rights, called on the South African government to do more to
overcome the "crude legacy of pre-1994 environmental racism" that is
still so apparent in South Africa.
The term "environmental racism" refers to the practice whereby the distribution of environmental harms deliberately and disproportionately falls onto low-income groups and along racial lines. It is a form of racialised "spatial injustice".