Normalising mining company towns in Emalahleni, South Africa

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Original article

Normalising mining company towns in Emalahleni, South Africa Phia van der Watta, Lochner Maraisb,* a b

Centre for Development Support, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa Professor of Development Studies, Centre for Development Support, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

A R T I C LE I N FO

A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Company town Mining town Transnational corporation Multinational corporation Neoliberalism Normalisation South Africa

Worldwide, the trend is to ‘normalise’ towns that were previously managed by mining companies. The literature tends to take a negative view of mining company control of a town, seeing it as socially damaging. Normalisation, a neoliberal approach, proposes a focus on core mining activities, clean wages, new labour regimes, and collaborative planning with local government. Mining companies are actively handing over their traditional role to democratic local governments as part of a sustainable approach. Taking the example of mining towns in Emalahleni (formerly Witbank) in South Africa, we use evidence from interviews, newspaper articles and social media to reconstruct life in these towns before the companies relinquished responsibility. Although residents are adjusting to the new life during the handover, we find a nostalgia for life as it used to be. Sustainability problems we find with normalisation in Emalahleni are that it shifts the responsibility for basic service delivery to a local government that is struggling to cope, and it does not take into account the long-term risks associated with mine decline.

1. Introduction Mining company towns, common across the world, originate from the days when companies made the decisions for their workforce, providing houses and social services. Criticism as that the companies were too dominant in managing these towns. By 2002, the mining industry had changed its approach and was now formally supporting normalisation or open towns (MMSD, 2002) in line with the “new natural resource agenda” (Arellano-Yanguas, 2008). Through normalisation, the mining industry now supports collaborative planning with local governments and democratic governance – all part of an attempt by mining companies to portray sustainability. But despite this shift in approach, in Africa many towns are still run by mining companies, often transnational or multinational corporations. Company towns are familiar in South Africa. Indwe, established in 1895, was South Africa’s first company town (Mabin, 1993), and company towns like Lime Acres and Ulco still exist. However, South African mines have normalised most mining towns, for which they received support from government and the labour unions (Marais et al., 2018a, 2018b). Normalisation has had three main consequences in South Africa: local governance, collaborative planning between the mines and the municipalities, and the privatisation of mine housing (Marais, 2018). In this paper we investigate life in company towns in Emalahleni Local Municipality, Mpumalanga Province, South Africa. In 1903 the

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town of Witbank (Afrikaans, ‘white ridge’) was established here. In 2006 it was renamed Emalahleni (Nguni, ‘place of coal’). The Emalahleni Local Municipality, which includes the town and also the surrounding rural and mining areas) was established in 2001. The municipal area is home to about 400,000 people some of whom live in several smaller company towns or normalised towns close to mines and power stations (for example Ogies and Kriel). However, the mining companies have actively closed a large number of these towns over the past three decades. The closure of these towns is central to the discussions in this paper. We use the term ‘Emalahleni’ to refer to the land area of the Emalahleni Local Municipality and ‘Emalahleni town’ to refer to the old town of Witbank. Marais et al. (2019, p. 779) define normalisation as “the take-up of the operation and provision of services and facilities by local and other authorities, which had previously been provided and operated by companies”. Although we primarily use this definition, we expand the interpretation to include the closing of former mining towns and the expectation that mineworkers would find housing in a town managed by local authorities. The literature often portrays the continuing existence of company towns as a neoliberal response by mining companies (Gough et al., 2018; Obeng-Odoom, 2014). Researchers often treat normalisation as a way to overcome the dominance of mining companies and as the sustainable way to deal with mine-community relationships. In this paper,

Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (P. van der Watt), [email protected] (L. Marais).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.11.008 Received 15 July 2019; Received in revised form 11 November 2019; Accepted 11 November 2019 2214-790X/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Phia van der Watt and Lochner Marais, The Extractive Industries and Society, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2019.11.008

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influenced the management of company towns. Gough et al. (2018) argue that the continued establishment of company towns in Africa is the result of the dominant position of transnational and multinational corporations. Littlewood (2014, p. 39) describes this as “the dominance of a single industry with company ownership of land, housing and services, company control over local government” and the mining company taking “center stage in local economic and social life”. Company towns also mean that the mining company controls social life. According to Obeng-Odoom (2018, p. 447), the neoliberal management style of mining companies means they “arrogate to themselves statutory municipal power” and “ignore or manipulate various channels of accountability, and privately appropriate socially created rents.” We argue that both the company town system and normalisation, two different policies for managing mine employees’ housing and other facilities, are both the result of neoliberalism. Neoliberalism in the mining industry has increased the mining companies’ focus on value for the shareholders, outsourcing, shift work and the core activities of mining. Governments are also often influenced by neoliberalism, emphasising property rights, free markets and local planning responses. Such governments often reduce their role in the mining industry (Haslam McKenzie, 2013). Bryceson and MacKinnon (2013, p. 515) argue that neoliberalism causes the state to adopt “a narrow sectoral approach to mining as a source of export revenue and a magnet for investment.” Table 1 shows how changes in the mining industry have affected mining towns since the late 1980s. The dominance of transnational and multinational corporations has shifted the balance of power away from government control and regulation. The change in labour regimes has changed the nature of mining towns. Block-roster shifts and contract work mean that workers commute between host communities and the mines and few of them settle permanently in the mining towns. The Australian fly-in-fly-out model is particularly well known (Haslam McKenzie, 2016). The table also shows how normalisation coincided with the rise of neoliberalism. Although company towns still exist, normalisation has become standard since the late 1980s. By the late 1980s mining companies had realised that normalising their towns could counter the accusations of dominance. The document Breaking New Ground: Mining, Minerals and Sustainable Development formalised normalisation as an industry response (MMSD, 2002). Some researchers described Breaking New Ground as a significant shift in thinking by mining companies (Franks, 2015), while others labelled it a neoliberal response within the “new natural resource agenda” (Arellano-Yanguas, 2008). Reasons given for the shift to normalisation vary (Marais et al., 2018a,b). In Canada normalisation has long been standard and communities have learned how to co-exist with mining booms and busts. In Australia it has resulted from changes in tax regimes, labour regimes and commuting patterns, supplemented by the rolling back of the state. In South Africa it is an integral part of neoliberal management practices in the mining industry and coincided with the opening up of the South African economy after apartheid. To be globally competitive, mining companies had to spend less money on peripheral activities (Crankshaw, 2002). This meant cutting their spending on non-mining issues such as housing, and in many cases withdrawing employees’ fringe benefits. The companies initiated a clean wage (often a bigger wage but with no fringe benefits such as cheap housing) and stopped subsidising housing, recreation facilities and health services. However, the government and the labour unions also supported normalisation. The South African White Paper on Mining and Minerals emphasises the role of mining in local development, collaborative planning, democratic governance for mining towns (normalisation), and the dismantling of the single-sex compound, which hosted mainly black workers (DME, 1998; Marais, 2018). These ideas were in line with Breaking New Ground that the mining industry released a few years later. Labour unions supported normalisation indirectly by arguing for living-out allowances for black mineworkers in order to bring parity to the

we deviate from this line of thinking as we also consider normalisation a neoliberal response by the mining companies and show that it holds long-term risks. For this paper, we view neoliberalism in the mining industry in terms of the rise and power of global mining companies, the changing labour regimes and their focus on core mining activities, as opposed to peripheral aspects such as employee housing. We discuss the reasons for the closure or normalisation of the mining towns in Emalahleni and critically assess the sustainability implications of normalisation in the context of an uncertain economic future for coal mining. We make two arguments that have a bearing on the mining industry. First, we argue that normalisation in Emalahleni is also the result of neoliberal practices in the mining industry and that in transferring their long-term liabilities to local governments and individual households the mining companies overlooked some of the practical implications. We question the uncritical application of normalisation in South Africa in the context of the likely decline of mining in Emalahleni. Second, we argue that, despite the criticism of company towns in the international literature, which views company towns as a means by which the private sector extends its footprint into the public sphere (Gough et al., 2018; Obeng-Odoom, 2014), people living in the towns in our case study experienced their living environments positively, before the towns were closed through the policy of normalisation. 2. Mining company towns and neoliberalism Mining towns are the result of the resource industry’s need to have stable workforces available near mining sites (Bradbury, 1979; Carrington and Pereira, 2011). Deacon et al., 2019 argue that company towns sought to address housing issues in RBC’s [Resource-based communities] by providing accessible, affordable housing for workers to create new opportunities for workers to bring their families with them, alleviating some of the negative social conditions that ultimately affect worker health and productivity. The planning and design of these settlements had various outcomes. In some cases, companies created these towns as model towns. In other instances, they followed more economical approaches (Deacon et al., 2019). Yet, a range of problems persisted because of the dominant nature of mine companies in these towns. Mining and resources towns have received a fair amount of research attention globally. Early studies on resource towns used social disruption theory and the social realities of high population growth in “boom” towns (Gillmore and Duff, 1975; Freudenberg, 1984). Later studies continued to show how these towns struggle to deal with the influx of people, inflated housing costs, the lack of permanence, pressure on the urban infrastructure and the inability to create a sense of community (Smith et al., 2001; Chapman et al., 2015; Deacon et al., 2019). Smith et al. (2001) argued that social disruption associated with boom cycles erodes over time, resulting in normal towns. Yet, concerns remain about the viability of these towns. Deacon et al. (2019) argued that, over the years, the mining industry has reduced its role in the planning and management of mining towns and resource-based communities (this reduced role is associated with the normalisation that we use in this paper). Yet, planning of these towns globally has become unpredictable because of the changes in labour regimes (Haslam Mckenzie, 2016) (closely associated with neoliberalism, discussed later in the paper), technological changes in mining (Ruddell, 2017) and price volatility because of speculation on the global markets (Deacon et al., 2019). All of these factors make planning in mining towns difficult (Keough, 2015). It is in this context, that the paper investigates the link between changing patterns of production and the changing role of company towns. The rise of transnational and multinational corporations contributed to the development of neoliberalism in the mining industry and 2

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Table 1 Changing patterns of labour and mining-town development. Source: Marais, van Rooyen et al., 2018.

Nature of mining companies and global mining trends

Changes in the labour regime

Criteria

Modern/industrial period, 1950–mid 1980s

Post-industrial/neoliberal period, since mid 1980s

How far multinational corporations dominate mining Major trend in the mining economy Working hours

Largely dominated by local mining companies

Largely dominated by multinational and transnational corporations Boom since early 2000s ended in 2014/15

Boom period ended in the mid-1980s 40-hour working week Daytime work only Full-time mine employment

Nature of employment Duration of work Salary package Mining production methods

Labour legislation Changes in mining towns

Impacts of mine closure

a

Employed full-time by the mining company Lifelong or for as long as the mine is in operation Large-scale non-salary benefits Moderate salaries Labour intensive

Housing types

Strict labour legislation Labour is unionised Mostly permanent (as long as mine production continues) Company towns Houses provided by the mining company

Town management Community cohesion Implications for host communities

Many towns initially managed by mines Seen as permanent Positive local implications but long-term negative consequences depending on mine’s lifespan

Local financial risks Social infrastructure Governance models

National government Some underinvestment Mining towns managed by mines, or by local municipalities (where they existed) that depended heavily on mine housing

Settlement permanency

Local impacts

Block-roster shifts (e.g. 4 days on, 4 days off, or 2 weeks on, 2 weeks off) Shifts (usually 12-hour periods day or night) 24-hour production cycles Contract work Production 7 days a week Extended periods off Increasingly employed as contract workers Short-term contracts Only salary benefits Large salaries Capital intensive Mechanisation Production oriented Outsourcing – for non-direct as well as direct services Smaller role for unions Mostly non-permanent workforces Worker camps/ ‘fly-in-fly-out’ workers Privatisation Worker camps‘ Hotbedding’a Informal settlement development Re-emergence of compounds Transferred to local government Increasingly seen as temporary Economic exclusion Less local spending Local communities Continued underinvestment Mining companies had withdrawn by late 1980s

Recently, corporate social responsibility (CSR) used as a means of providing social infrastructure Increasing emphasis on partnerships for development Hybrid governance models Local consequences of mine closure reduced by ‘fly-in-fly-out’ mining

Extreme

Hotbedding’ refers to shift work in which two people use the same bed one after the other in a 24-hour cycle.

3. South African policy on mining towns and normalisation

employment benefits of white and black workers (under apartheid only white workers had a living-out allowance) (Crush, 1992, 1994). But, normalisation also meant that the mining companies closed their company towns and compounds and their employees had to find housing in the nearby open towns. Normalisation debates seldom consider the pressure that normalised company towns place on local governments, the vulnerability associated with mining and the longterm financial risks for local government and households. Neoliberalism in the mining industry has come under severe criticism. The literature points out how global competitiveness leads mining companies into: neglecting long-term social planning, ignoring local populations, underplaying sustainability concerns, and supporting cheating in respect of local taxes and damaging the local economy (Brueckner et al., 2014; Bryceson and MacKinnon, 2013; Haslam McKenzie, 2013; Louw and Marais, 2018). The neoliberal period since the 1980s has been accused of contributing to poor housing conditions for miners, such as informal settlements, worker camps and ‘hotbedding’ (Haslam McKenzie, 2013).

Above, we showed how neoliberalism and normalisation developed together. However, the post-apartheid mining policy also embedded normalisation. Mine housing under apartheid had three main characteristics: compounds (linked to a migrant labour system), rental housing and company towns. The mines housed black mineworkers in high-density compounds. For their white labour force, the mines provided rental housing in either company towns or open towns. By the mid-1980s this slowly started to change as home ownership became available for black mineworkers and mining companies began to transfer their housing to their employees. The best example in this respect was the transfer of 60 % of housing stock in the Free State Goldfields from mine ownership to individual ownership (Marais, 2013). Post-apartheid mining policy continued with this trend and developed in line with the international thinking on mining towns. Government policy led to the dismantling of the compound housing 3

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Fig. 1. Emalahleni, towns and mines.

to the company town model and the provision of compound housing. According to Marais (2018), the government promoted home ownership because of the historical exclusion of black people from home ownership, the perception that it would provide societal stability, to promote local economic development and to support a local tax base. These principles in the White Paper were also taken up in the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act and guidelines for Social and Labour Plans and various mining charters (Marais, 2018). Homeownership had to bring stability and prevent ghost towns. The South African policy is in line with thinking that began in the mid-1980s and the official mining industry’s policy approach in

system. However, it had to be replaced by another policy. The White Paper on Mining promotes open towns by emphasising the integration of mining and non-mining communities, homeownership and collaborative planning (DME, 1998). Specifically, the White Paper stated that, The whole structure of mining towns and settlements must be altered to integrate mineworkers into the local economy and to end the racially discriminatory provisions that apply to housing for black mineworkers (DME, 1998, p. 17). The emphasis on open towns and integration is in direct opposition 4

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Breaking New Ground or what some scholars refer to as the “new natural resources agenda”.

boom of the 2000s also meant that some mining companies wanted to mine the land on which these towns were located. One such a town that was demolished was Wolvekrans, which was established in 1972. It housed approximately 250 families that worked on the mine and by 1999 officially was closed. Despite these closures, urban land expanded by 37 % between 1990 and 2014, most of this in Emalahleni town (see Fig. 1). Consequently, many mining companies closed down the company towns, and the compounds, and residents had to settle in Emalahleni town. Normalisation also coincided with the shift towards outsourced work. The mines increasingly employed fewer people directly and therefore had less reason to maintain a company town. However, no one seriously considered the risks associated with the possible decline in the demand for coal and no one anticipated the extraordinary pressure of mining growth and normalisation on local government.

4. Study area South Africa’s coal mining industry has expanded rapidly since the mid-1990s, particularly in the early 2000s when it was driven by high economic growth which required energy. The global financial crises reduced the energy demand, but coal remains a vital source of energy for South Africa, generating 92 % of the country’s electricity. Mpumalanga hosts most of the coal mines and coal-generated power stations. Approximately 80,000 people are employed on the coal mines, nearly half of them on mines in Emalahleni, and Eskom (South Africa’s energy utility) employs a further 50,000 (Strambo et al., 2019). Eskom, which was established in the 1920s, provides energy to South Africa through a centralised distribution network. However, Eskom is under severe financial stress, and experts have criticised its dependence on coal. At the time of writing, the government was in the process of unbundling Eskom, but details of this were still unclear. Furthermore, South Africa signed the Pairs Agreement, which requires the country has to reduce its coal-energy plants. A new resource plan does foresee a smaller role for coal by 2030, but coal will remain the main source of energy for South Africa. The current coal price in South Africa depends on two interrelated factors: the price Eskom pays and the global price of coal. The current export price of coal is at a historic high. However, despite the current boom, the demand for coal is likely to decline (Strambo et al., 2019). Four potential disrupters could influence the price of coal and the status quo in Emalahleni: the restructuring of Eskom, whether Eskom can remain a going concern, compliance with climate change treaties, and cheaper alternatives. Although it is unlikely that the government will allow Eskom to crumble, the restructuring of Eskom is likely to lead to the closure of some of the older coal-generated energy plants (Steyn et al., 2016). Furthermore, economic modelling conducted at the University of Cape Town shows that if South Africa is to comply with international treaties on climate change, it will have to reduce its current coal-energy generation (McCall et al., 2019). Local demand for coal is bound to decline. Predictions are that the demand will decline across the globe, with negative implications for Emalahleni. Besides responding to the local and global markets, the economy of Emalahleni is also vulnerable to the consequences of the development of renewable energy. South Africa’s energy planners foresee a more prominent role for renewable energy sources and a decline in coal-generated energy, which could affect the closure of coal-fired energy plants in Emalahleni. Historically the mining companies and Eskom housed their black workers in compounds and white workers in company towns near the mineshafts. Fig. 1 shows the location of these towns. Table 2 lists Emalahleni’s mines and company towns and shows whether each town has a current urban footprint or acts as an urban node (according to the municipality’s Integrated Development Plan or IDP), whether there was a company town and whether it was demolished, what settlements exist, whether the mine is still operating and whether there is a power station nearby. We were able to identify 16 mining sites and 12 original company towns (see Fig. 1). Ten company towns were partially or fully demolished.. Fig. 1 also shows how these company towns have disappeared since 1990 and how Emalahleni town grew. Many of these towns had their own schools, hospitals and recreation facilities, such as golf courses and swimming pools, all managed by the mining companies for employees and their families. By the end of the 1980s and into the mid-1990s, mining companies had started to revisit their position in managing these towns (Marais et al., 2018a,b). For many mining companies, closing the towns was a way to reduce their non-mining expenditure and establish a clean wage. Our discussions with the mining companies show that the opening up of the South African economy in the 1990s and shareholder pressure on the mines to reduce non-mining activities were instrumental in closing these towns. The

5. Methods This study formed part of a larger project that investigated the likelihood of a just transition for Emalahleni (2017–2019).1 For our larger project, the research team completed 30 semi-structured interviews with key informants from civil society, mining companies and the municipality and 950 household interviews. Our sampling for these semi-structured interviews consisted of a combination of purposeful and snowball sampling. During these interviews we heard about inefficient basic service delivery (potholes in the roads, electricity outages, water interruptions). Some interviewees reminisced about the time when the mines managed their town, usually contrasting those experiences with what they were suffering now. They reminded us that the mines had closed many company towns. Consequently, we conducted five more semi-structured interviews with people who had lived in Wolvekrans, now demolished. One of them had also lived in two other company towns. In the end, we had ten interviews that provided some evidence of living in these company towns (five were directly related to residing in Wolvekrans and five were through our initial interviewees who reflected on living in company towns). Although we did not keep demographic records of these individuals, six were female, four male, and all were white). We transcribed these ten and analyzed them thematically to develop a picture of positive and negative experiences of living in a company town and living in a normalised town. We also examined newspaper articles and found information on a public Facebook site entitled ‘A village of great memories – Wolvekrans’ (https://web.facebook.com/groups/172399040883/?_rdc = 1&_rdr). We also found several newspaper articles and a master’s degree thesis on Rietspruit (Filitz, 2011), a town which the mines normalised with the assistance of local government. The closure of the mine compounds is also a form of normalisation, but that is not our topic here, and it raises different sustainability questions, which have been well dealt with Marais (2018). This paper is about the experiences of people in the company towns, the closure of those towns, and the implications for local government and households at a time of economic vulnerability for Emalahleni. We recognise that this focus is mainly on the white population who lived in these company towns (although some racial integration did occur) and that our interview data is largely retrospective. We also recognise that white people in South Africa often idealise their historical experiences under apartheid. Nostalgia is not an exact science.

1 The project received ethical approval from the Ethics Committee of the University of the Free State.

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Table 2 Company towns and change in Emalahleni. IDP: Nodal area

IDP: Urban footprint

Company town demolished?

Blesbokfontein Douglas Duvha Greenside Colliery Kendal Kriel / Ga-Nala Landau mine Matla New Clydesdale colliery Ogies / Phola

No No Yes No Yes Yes No Yes No Yes

No No No No No Yes No Yes No Yes

No original company town

Rietspruit Saaiwater Springbok Thubelihle Tweefontein mine Van Dyksdrif Wilge Wolvekrans

Yes No No Yes No Yes No No

No No No Yes No No No No

Patially (80%) Partially Yes No Partially Yes Yes No (Ogies was an original small town) No Yes Yes No Yes No original company town Company town still exists Yes

6. Emalahleni, mining towns and normalisation

Other settlement

Active mine?

Power station?

No Training College No Informal settlements on the fringes Some structures still remain Close to Kriel No Large scale informal settlements

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

Yes No Yes Yes No Yes No Yes

Yes No n.a Informal settlements No Informal settlements present No Informal settlements and another settlement

Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes

No No No No No Yes No

There was nothing negative about life in the village because the mine looked after us so well then. They made sure that we had absolutely everything that we needed. In other words, our houses were given to us, our houses were maintained, the children’s transport to school and crèche was organised. Everything was done to make it easy for us.

6.1. Life in company towns Our ten respondents had all moved from a company town to either Emalahleni town or Middelburg (a nearby town very similar to Emalahleni town) when the mines closed their town. Studies of mining towns and company towns belonging to mines often focus on the negative consequences of mining for the residents (Sincovich et al., 2018). We found the opposite when we asked people about their experience in the company towns in Emalahleni. They often referred to those company towns in order to point a contrast with unsatisfactory living conditions in Emalahleni town where they lived because of normalisation. We document these experiences to show that the company towns did not disappear because there was no demand for them: the mines actively closed them. The central theme emerging from our interviews is a deep nostalgia for an era of “total bliss”, as one interviewee described it. The mines created a space for them where it was possible for close-knit communities to live like extended families, in a beautiful setting, and took care of virtually every aspect of their lives. The interviewee who had lived in three of these company towns said the mining companies structured the company towns similarly and the residents had access to more or less the same benefits, services and infrastructure in each one. We chose as a representative example. Five of our interviewees had lived in Wolvekrans and were particularly informative, and we had further data from their Facebook page. Wolvekrans was next to the R544 about 15 km from Emalahleni town, next to the Olifants River and about 4 km away from the mine. Fig. 2 shows a satellite image of the site of the closed town, with the layout clearly visible (https://www.google.com/maps/@ -25.9868161,29.2893055,2024 m/data=!3m1!1e3). The trees that lined the streets are still there, almost 20 years after the mining company demolished the town. According to interviewees, the town consisted of about 100 mine-built houses, either three-bedroom semi-detached or four-bedroom free-standing, all surrounded by big gardens and ample outbuildings. The type of house was determined by the employee’s position on the mine, for example, the managers received four-bedroom houses. The interviewees sketched a picture of a community whose every need and desire had been taken care of by the mines. One respondent summarised it, saying:

The residents paid between R7 and R252 a month for a house in the mid-1990s and this covered, according to a respondent, “Everything – excluding your drinks!” Another boasted of paying “R25 for the house, water and electricity included” and “bathing three times a day.” For this nominal fee, the residents received a house, water, electricity, services, access to all the amenities and transport for their children to schools in Emalahleni town. The mine also maintained the houses and the recreational infrastructure, sponsored the sports clubs and contributed towards social events. An essential feature of the town was the availability of recreational and social infrastructure and opportunities. There was a swimming pool, a community hall, a small park, a golf course, a small shop for basic needs, a canteen with a bar, and a boat club. Sports appear to have played a central role in the community’s life. The Wolvekrans community formed several sports clubs (rugby, angling, snooker) and they competed against teams from the other company towns. The river, the heart of the community’s social and recreational life, was so close by that, as one interviewee explained, you could “just run over the street to your house” to fetch anything you had forgotten for the day’s activities. Social events, such as dances and wedding receptions, were held in the community hall. The Christmas party was an annual highlight in the social calendar. Everybody felt safe, protected and carefree. There was no need ever to be concerned about the children’s whereabouts because they could only be somewhere in the town. They shared “the sweet and the bitter”, noted one respondent. “We all wiped off tears and helped to raise the children”. Indeed, the whole community raised the children and it was reassuring to know that there was no “evil” to tempt them into doing bad things. Everything was within walking distance and the community shared all their good news and their troubles. The mine initiated a town newspaper, the Wolvekrans Focus. Some content from this paper reproduced on the Facebook page reinforces the interviewees’ picture of a close-knit community. The paper showed off children’s achievements and honored mineworkers who received

2

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In 1995 1USD = R3.63.

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Fig. 2. The previous town of Wolvekrans. Source: Google Earth, 2019

They found coal under our houses. So, they started mining too close to our houses. The houses started to crack seriously through the blasting. It was too dangerous to stay there.

the site of Wolvekrans. People’s guesses at the various reasons may be right or wrong, but the mining boom that started in the mid-1990s was indisputably a strong reason for the closure of some of the towns. The towns were located on top of coal reserves. The logical response was to close the towns and mine the reserves. Our interviews with the mines partially supported this view in that the boom of the 2000s drove the mines to mine the immediate reserves that were available on the land on which their employees were living. Some interviewees alluded to “political reasons”, which they seemed to find difficult to explain. This point of view must be read in the context of the transition to a democratic South Africa after 1994. In the new dispensation, all workers were to be treated the same and this implied that black workers should also be accommodated with their families in mining towns. This would require substantial financial investments by the mines. Interviewees concluded that since the mines could not provide equal housing and benefits for all workers, practical necessities outweighed long term risks: they found it easier to provide for nobody. A point to note is that desegregation had already begun towards the end of the town’s life. An interviewee pointed out that some black families did move into the town and that “I had black neighbors.” Relations with these new neighbors were excellent, according to this interviewee. Some believed that the mines did not care about the workers but just wanted to save money and increase their profits. One respondent summarised this feeling, saying:

Another interviewee disputed this, as there is no mining under or on

They could have sold the houses to the people. It is as if they do not

awards at the mine. Sports results were a regular feature, with photos of individuals and teams in action or with their trophies. The newspaper was also the platform to keep track of residents who had left the town and to announce weddings, births and deaths. It informed residents about issues ranging from new safety measures and technological developments at the mine to the latest ideas on fitness and well-being. A regular feature in the paper was people, even small children, showing off the fish they had caught in the river. But then everything changed: the mine closed the town, the people left, and the houses were demolished. 6.2. Normalisation and closing the company towns in Emalahleni We asked interviewees how the mines had explained the intended closure. Some had been given the impression that the company towns had to be closed because the mines wanted to open new shafts under the town or start open-cast mining nearby or because the environmental risks of sinkholes had become too high. Media reports show that mining companies deliberately exaggerated these environmental concerns (Pietersen, 1989). However, some remembered that the houses had started to crack so badly that it was not possible to continue living there. One respondent expressed this reason, saying:

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development in their lives. As one of them put it: “We learnt to stand on our own feet.” One interviewee had not only paid off the mortgage on her house but also bought a second property. She specifically appreciated the fact that she would not have to use their pension money to buy a house when they retired, because the closure of the town had forced them to invest in property. It appears that it had not been common practice for residents of mining towns to buy property while living in the company town. Many struggled to maintain their standard of living when they retired and had to leave the company house. Interviewees noted that when the mines started offering packages (in the early 2000s) to employees who had not only lost a company home but had also been retrenched, they actively supported them and helped them find alternative employment. They even offered bursaries to the spouses of these employees to enable them to get qualifications. An interviewee, the spouse of a retrenched worker, had received such a bursary, obtained a qualification and subsequently embarked on a successful professional career. Overall, the mines managed the closure of the mining towns in sound ways. Despite acknowledging these benefits of normalisation, the residents of Wolvekrans maintain their historical ties. During the interviews and on the Facebook page one wish was repeated often: if only we could raise our children in the town! One respondent said, “The community in a way still exists – and forms a social network: your friends will always tell you about a work opportunity”. Another commented that,

worry about the people; it was only about the mine. And money for them, in their pockets. Interviews with the mines confirmed some of the above reasons. The mines deliberately withdrew from peripheral activities, as they did not contribute to their core businesses and posed long-term risks to them. However, some respondents who viewed the closure in a more positive light believed that the mines had not changed their attitude to the workers; they had no choice as it was a case of financial self-preservation. Some believed that the mines had all along, deliberately, spoilt their workers by providing benefits to “buy their loyalty.” The unintended consequence was that when the benefits disappeared and employees had to take responsibility for their housing, recreation and education, the mines could no longer rely on this loyalty. These interviewees argued that the mines may have saved something in the short term but lost valuable assets in the long term: the properties, the mutual dependence and the good-will of their employees. One respondent summarised the current relationship between the mines and the communities in the following words “Nowadays, the relationship is much colder. Today you are just a number for the mines. It is no longer like in those days”. For some interviewees, the decision to close the towns was a logical event, considering the political and economic developments in the country and the changes in the mining industry. One respondent said that buying her own house “was a wonderful idea because in a way they forced us to buy our own houses. So, it was not simply: take your pension and go and buy a house”.

We are still a close-knit community. It is like family and not like friends you had some time ago. Thinking about the village still elicits a feeling of absolute nostalgia. We had such good times there.

Others still battle to accept this, and to understand how the closure happened. Why did the mines not sell the houses, instead of demolishing them? After all, as one interviewee said, there is still no mining under Wolvekrans. The closure appears to have been phased in gradually from the late 1980s. In the 2000s the process accelerated and by 2010 it was almost complete, with 11 of the 15 company towns in Emalahleni’s having disappeared. In Wolvekrans the mining companies demolished all the houses and infrastructure. According to an interviewee, outside contractors could buy some reusable components or remove the rubble to use as landfill. The community swimming pool was filled in. Our interviewees experienced the closure differently. Some left the town at the beginning of the process or before it started. Others received packages as part of a retrenchment process, forcing them to leave in search of other employment. One found work outside South Africa. Some moved to Emalahleni town and others to Middelburg (located in another municipality). The mine offered various options for those who stayed on its payroll. They could either buy a mine house in Emalahleni town (at below market value) or a house on the open market in one of the towns, with a subsidy from the mine. Some interviewees mentioned a once-off allowance for housing. We could find only one case where a mining company had to obtain a court order to get people out of a house (Pietersen, 1989).

6.4. Normalisation: Rietspruit and Emalahleni town Our ten interviewees did not reflect on the risks associated with normalisation. They all saw the benefits. In contrast, our interviewees in the broader project, as a rule, complained about the poor state of basic service delivery in Emalahleni town – a point also made in other research (Campbell et al., 2017). But the benefit our ten interviewees said they received through normalisation, in being pushed to buy property in a mining town, is extremely vulnerable. If the coal mining industry declines, the economy of Emalahleni might collapse and housing demand plummet. People could find themselves living in a house they cannot sell, and with a mortgage they cannot pay, or owning a second house in the rental market or which they cannot find a tenant. The normalisation of the Rietspruit company town (COGTA, 2007; Filitz, 2011), is a clear example of the problems associated with normalisation. This town differed from the others as the black workers here occupied family houses rather than compounds since the end of the 1980s However, Rietspruit consisted of two adjacent company towns: Reed Stream Park for the white workers and Lehlaka Village for the black workers. The white and black workers had similar, though separate, access to the benefits and amenities. The houses in Lehlaka were smaller than those in Reed Stream Park. The Rietspruit ‘normalisation experiment’(initiated in 2001) was internationally lauded as a leading example of post-mining sustainability. In 2002, after years of mine management, the mining company started handing over the management of the town to local government and the community. The company town became part of the Emalahleni Local Municipality. The municipality would take over the social and infrastructure support and former employees were encouraged through various subsidies to buy their houses. The community would channel the proceeds of the house sales into a Section 21 company, Lehlaka Property Development Pty Ltd, which would manage this development fund for community entrepreneurship and small, medium and microenterprise development. However, the social outcomes of these “high-road” normalisation plans “have been dismal” (Filitz, 2011, p. 22). The housing scheme failed, one reason being that those living in the houses did not want to

6.3. Normalisation and adapting to a new life Moving to another community inevitably requires people and families to adapt. Moving from a mining town where the whole community was like a family into a community of strangers would be difficult. One respondent summarised this, referring to the mines: They have helped us to stand on your own feet. That you are not dependent on the mine. But life on the mine was much nicer. You know, because we were such a small community; we did everything together. Middelburg is big; you have only a few friends there. All the interviewees had bought houses after moving out of the company town. Despite the nostalgia, all agreed that this was a positive 8

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are all related to normalisation. Our study found that there had been a sense of community in a mine managed town. People remembered a very positive experience – despite or maybe even because of company paternalism. Pro-normalisation advocates often argue that company towns create social ills (Sincovich et al., 2018). These towns are often associated with masculinity, mental health problems and an under-investment in social services. Our research shows that such conclusions are simplistic and that people generally found living in a company town a positive experience. Furthermore, the Rietspruit example shows that not everybody wanted to own a house in a mining area and that normalisation over-emphasises ownership. We do not want to leave the impression that normalisation is necessarily wrong and that communities should avoid it at all cost. Instead, we emphasise that normalisation, as driven by mining companies, is the result of neoliberalism, and it is closely associated with what some refer to as the neoliberal “new natural resource agenda”. In the short term, normalisation has gone hand in hand with a sense of people losing their place attachment to the company town but eventually adjusting to living outside the paternalistic company approach. The community concern is that normalisation has shifted the long-term liabilities from mining companies to the municipality and individual households. The long-term consequences of job losses and the responsibility for maintaining urban spaces now lie with local government. We have provided evidence of substantial risk in this respect. If the mines had retained the company towns, the extended liability would have remained with the mining companies – a risk none of the mining companies were willing to take. In our opinion, normalisation has contributed to the dysfunctionality of the local government. In addition to dealing with the usual influx of people into mining areas, Emalahleni town has also had to manage people flocking in from former company towns (and from the compounds). However, the biggest risk, and sustainability puzzle, associated with normalisation remains. Mine downscaling would not only challenge the functioning of the municipality, it could disrupt the emphasis on individual ownership that follows normalisation. This might cause house values to drop dramatically and change people’s current perceptions of the benefits normalisation has brought. Our case study points to a number of crucial concerns about sustainability in the mining industry. Mines, government and unions have a responsibility to consider the longer-term implications of their action. Finally, a just transition to deal with the potential decline of coal production means that the South African government needs to take full consideration of the long-term liabilities that households will face, in the form of not only job losses but also mortgage debt. Finally, how does this link back to the international context of mining towns and mining policies and the operational plans of mines? The policy challenge is two-fold: (1) to find a framework in which mines do not dominate local processes; (2) to find living arrangements that do not affect worker productivity negatively. Normalisation assists in reducing the dominance of mining companies, but it might adversely affect productivity because of poor living conditions. In line with the global context, mining companies are likely to continue to reduce their roles in company towns, although such involvement might continue in parts of Africa. The global competitiveness of mining means that the focus will remain on not taking up activities that are peripheral to their core businesses. Part of the problem lies in what the term collaborative planning means. It probably assumes a hybrid model between local democratic governance and mining-supported development. The pendulum most often moves to the opposite sides, either full management by the mine or comprehensive control by local governance structures. Government and the mining industry should respond to this problem.

buy them. Home ownership was not automatically acceptable. Some of the houses were in a poor condition because of 25 years of mine blasting in the area. Normalisation desegregated the former white town of Read Stream Park, but since almost all the white workers left as soon as normalisation began, in effect the normalisation caused re-segregation. The creation of businesses failed, unemployment was high, properties were vandalised, ‘outsiders’ started to squat in the town and illicit activities were rampant. The Emalahleni Municipality is struggling to provide basic services to a community 40 km outside the city. It appears that this project, praised as a world-leading example of post-mining sustainability, has descended into much misery, aggravated by general blaming and accusations between the concerned state departments, the municipality, a mining company, the unions and the community. The Rietspruit example demonstrates that the mines and the government did not consider the long-term implications of normalisation. The mines off-loaded their long-term liability onto local government, but local government has been unable to cope. Rietspruit is only one example of poor service delivery in Emalahleni Local Municipality. The problem is general. In Emalahleni town there is evidence of corruption, poor management and mismanagement and the local government have been under administration for several years (Campbell et al., 2017). Managing the influx into the population has now been made the problem of the municipality. The influx of new people because of mining and the closure of the company towns have resulted in the Emalahleni town growing at 3.3 % per annum between 1996 and 2016. Consequently, 23 % of households reside in informal housing, compared to the average of 13 % in South Africa and 18 % in Gauteng. The municipality owes Eskom over R1 billion and in the 2017/18 financial year the municipality had total debt of R1.8 billion (R12 300 per household compared to the average for metropolitan areas of R5135 per household). The influx of people and the inability to manage municipal finances have led to severe urban management problems. The roads are in need of repair and electricity cuts and water disconnections are common. Infrastructural development and maintenance are not keeping up with population growth. The result is continual protests about inadequate housing and poorly maintained roads and sewerage systems. Crime rates have skyrocketed, but in the sprawling new settlements there are no police stations. Emergency services struggle to react swiftly, given the poor roads and increasing traffic volumes. The municipality cannot find a way out of this mess. The local newspaper (Witbank News) reports the problems in typical journalistic style: “No more roads left to repair”, “You are not safe in your home, your car or your truck – precinct has highest number of residential burglaries in country”, “Pooh service delivery shows municipality leadership full of holes”, “Positive news from the mayor’s desk: audited report was merely qualified and not a disclaimer”, “Mayor and mayoral committee suspended.” 7. Conclusion: the sustainability of normalisation) The poor service delivery in Rietspruit and Emalahleni town creates the impression that councilors and municipal officials are incompetent and corrupt. In some cases this is true. But this does not take into account the possibility that poor service delivery could also be the consequence of normalisation as it places undue pressure on local government Through normalisation, the mining companies closed their company towns, as they did not want to carry the long-term liability of providing housing to their employees. Apart from one court case we are aware of, the mines closed the company towns responsibly. None of our interviewees complained, and they received strong incentives to move on. Government policy and unions actively supported normalisation. Yet although the changes were, on the whole, handled well, the results in terms of service delivery have been disappointing and the long-term risks have been transferred to local government and individual households. The influx to Emalahleni town, poor municipal finances, largescale informal settlements and poor service delivery in the municipality

Funding National Research Foundation, South Africa (Grant number 91054). 9

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Compliance with ethical standards

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