TO DIE FOR THE LAND:
THE LAND AND ITS MEANINGS IN A CONTEXT OF EXTRACTIVISM
Dr Dineo Skosana, head of Society Work and Politics Institute (SWOP) and senior lecturer, University of the Witwatersrand
Friday 29 January < 1.00 pm < COURSE FEES R115; Staff and students R58
This lecture explores why land struggles – particularly in the context of mining on indigenous territories – can become matters of life and death. It asks what is at stake when activists risk, and sometimes lose, their lives in defence of land. Rather than viewing these conflicts solely through economic or legal lenses, the lecture foregrounds the deeper social, cultural, and existential meanings of land for indigenous communities: as a source of identity, ancestry, spirituality and collective survival. To make sense of these tensions, the lecture turns to Karl Polanyi’s concept of ‘fictitious commodities’. Polanyi argued that land, labour and money are treated as commodities in capitalist systems despite not being produced for sale. By applying this framework, the lecture examines how mining regimes reduce land to an extractable and tradeable resource, while for indigenous communities it remains embedded in social life and cannot be detached without profound harm. The lecture ultimately grapples with the clash between these competing world views and asks how commodification produces conflict, why resistance can be so intense, and what this reveals about the limits of market-based understandings of nature and territory.
Recommended reading
Polanyi, K. 1944. The Great Transformation, 2. Chapter 6: The Self-Regulating Market and the Fictitious Commodities: Labor, Land, and Money.
Skosana, D. 2022. Grave Matters: Dispossession and the Desecration of Ancestral Graves by Mining Corporations in South Africa. Journal of Contemporary African Studies, 40(1), pp. 47–62.
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