And Mantashe recognition
But Radebe was not as fortunate. Ten years after saving Zukulu’s life, he was gunned down outside his home in the Lurholweni township in Mbizana in front of his teenage son. His murder remains unsolved.
Mbuthuma also had a lucky escape, having been tipped off by Radebe that she was on the assassination list because of her work with the Amadiba Crisis Committee.
Just hours before he was murdered, Radebe called her with a chilling warning: “They are not playing. They want to kill us.”
Undeterred, Mbuthuma has continued her opposition to the dune mining plan, as well as a plan by the South African National Roads Agency to build a new high-speed toll road through the rural homesteads and farmland of her friends and family.
More recently, she was among a group of seven women beaten with knobkieries while trying to stop a new property development – thought to be a hotel – in the village of Sigidi along the Wild Coast.
“Activists are being targeted or assassinated all over the world. I cope with these threats because of the support of my community. They see it as our fight, not my fight. We are fighting for future generations,” she told Daily Maverick.
Nevertheless, owing to the physical and emotional strain of these threats, Mbuthuma says she is particularly grateful that her role as an activist has now been recognised internationally.
“I hope this award will help to strengthen the work we are doing on the Wild Coast and also encourage other local environmental activists to be more supportive.
“I am not ‘anti-development’. In fact, I am for development, but not when it destroys the environment we depend upon. The people and the environment are connected. There is no way they can work without each other, so development and ecology must meet halfway.”
Though she can be feisty and outspoken, Mbuthuma states that she was a “very quiet, very focused student” and some of her former teachers later remarked how surprised they were when she emerged as an activist in adulthood. She believes that her grandfather, who took part in the Pondoland Revolt in the early 1960s, helped to shape and inspire her work.
“The battles that happened in the 1960s were no different to what is happening today. We are defending our people,” she says.
“People try to paint us as being anti-development to pull us down and to try to make us feel selfish or inferior. It’s a colonisation of the mind. We must decide our own future rather than being told what to do. Economic development and megaprojects cannot come from the top down.”
Instead, Mbuthuma promotes a variety of community-led development projects that include eco-tourism, fishing cooperatives, the construction of more community access roads and agricultural support programmes for local farmers.
“It is possible to achieve these things. But we must have a government of the people. There must be an ear to listen.”