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‘Everything is a being’ for South Africa’s amaMpondo fighting to protect nature

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MPONDOLAND, South Africa — The day the prospectors came, so did the storm. It was 2007, and clouds barreled toward the coast, driven by a wind that churned up dust and foretold of the downpour to come. Beyond the rusty dunes, the Indian Ocean surged with equal force. “It was scary,” says Mamjozi Danca, a traditional healer who has lived here all her life. Her family couldn’t bring the cattle in from grazing, and “even cooking wasn’t easy.” They hunkered down in their rondavel, a round homestead with a thatched roof not far from the mineral-dense dunes of Xolobeni on South Africa’s Wild Coast, to wait it out. Xolobeni is a village on a 24-kilometer (15-mile) stretch of wilderness about four hours’ drive south of the port city of Durban. It has become synonymous with a two-decade-long fight by the Indigenous amaMpondo against extractive mining interests that had sites on the powdered titanium in the dunes. There have also been more recent attempts to conduct seismic surveys for offshore oil and gas. When traditional healer Mamjozi Danca was born into a violent apartheid state that tried todispossess her people of their land and culture, the amaMpondo fought back. Now they are fighting to protect their heritage from mining corporations. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay. Herbalists burn imphepho, African sage (Helichrysum odoratissimum), as an incense during prayer. This fragrant herb grows wild in the Mpondoland grasslands. Image by Leonie Joubert for Mongabay. On the day the mining prospectors came for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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