Written by John Vidal | From The Guardian

The smells drifting into the cramped office of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance range from sweet and sickly to stomach-churning. Volunteers and others who work with the small group can see oil and gas plants, refineries, landfills, agro-chemical works, shipyards, paper mills and a massively expanding port.

“We have high levels of air pollution which would be unacceptable in the US or anywhere in the rich world. Nearly 70% of all South Africa’s industry is concentrated here. It stinks,” says Desmond D’Sa, who co-founded the coalition of environmental, community and church groups in 1995 and who this week has won a Goldman award, the world’s most valuable ($150,000) international prize for grassroots environment work.

D’Sa refers not just to the smells that waft around south Durban, but to the 300,000 people, including some of South Africa’s most disenfranchised, who must live cheek by jowl with more than 300 industrial plants. Many, like D’Sa’s own family, were forcibly moved there in apartheid days.

“I was 15 and we lived in Cato Manor, the biggest community of mixed folk in South Africa. It was a very radical place in the apartheid era. But mum and dad were brutally forced to move by the army and security forces. We were put in a truck, they bulldozed our house and suddenly the family of 13 had to live in four rooms in one of Africa’s most polluted places.”

Racial and environmental injustice went together, he says. “There were smokestacks everywhere, chemical works, emissions. We were gasping for breath. We began to understand something was very wrong.”

By the 1980s, south Durban had become known as “cancer alley” and the toxic capital of Africa, with the highest rates of cancer and asthma on the continent. More than 100 smokestacks belched out over 50m kg of sulphur dioxide each year, children in local schools had three times the rate of respiratory diseases as those living outside the area and nearly everyone had skin ailments and diseases.

The area is still massively polluted, he says, with regular chemical fires and innumerable leaks in the oil and gas pipelines that crisis cross the communities.

“Leukaemia is 24 times the normal there. My mother was ill for years. My brother died of cancer, my daughter has asthma. Eleven of the 12 families in the council block where I live have asthma. In every block you have around 50% of people who have respiratory problems. I still look out of my window and see refineries. I am a victim as much as anyone. We pay the price,” he says.

Read more at The Guardian