Book Review: No Last Place to Rest: Coal Mining and Dispossession in South Africa by Dineo Skosana

Dineo Skosana's No Last Place to Rest is a meticulously researched ethnographic monograph about the social, spiritual, and environmental consequences of coal mining in post-apartheid South Africa. Skosana's book focuses on the provinces of Mpumalanga and KwaZulu Natal, where extractive industries operate on large scales, and have displaced communities and desecrated ancestral graves. The book describes how dispossession continues in Black communities in South Africa even after colonialism and Apartheid. Skosana highlights the ontological dimension of land dispossession that is often overlooked by people. She argues that coal mining does not only alienate people from their land but also severs the vital spiritual connections the people have with their ancestors. This problem constitutes what she called “spiritual dislocation.” Spiritual dislocation in the sense that, the people have a cultural meaning to the land and see the land as what connects them to their ancestors, therefore, the forced relocation of people and graves sever the spiritual, cultural and ancestral ties to the land and creates cultural and emotional trauma.

According to her, coal mining is South Africa's paradox. This is because, while coal provides a source of energy and jobs to the people of South Africa, and generates revenue for the government, coal burning contributes to carbon emissions leading to climate change. In addition, the process of mining coal creates in turn several problems such as dispossession of communities, grave relocations and spiritual dislocation, violence against Black people, health-related problems, water scarcity, and environmental pollution, including water and noise pollution. The book is organised into seven chapters. Chapter 1 sets the conceptual and political stage, exploring how land ownership, mineral law, and rights have evolved over time and how dispossession continues under South Africa's democratic regime. While Skosana does not explicitly label her framework as post-colonial, her analysis is grounded in both post-colonial and decolonial theories. Skosana's examination of how colonial and Apartheid structures still exist and continue to marginalise and dispossess Black people in the South reflects the post-colonial critique. The book explains the spiritual importance of land and challenges the mainstream view of the land that only focuses on the material and economic value. In doing so, Skosana uses the concept of spiritual dislocation to explain the spiritual impacts of mining by disclosing how mining activities generate spiritual issues and not only material losses.

The second chapter describes how the people are connected to the land through ancestry, the presence of ancestral graves and labour, explains the processes of dispossession on private agricultural farmland in Tweefontein, caused by the mining operations of Glencore, and describes how communities are usually excluded in political decision-making. More importantly, the chapter explains that the graves help Black people to make claims to the land.

Similarly, chapter 3 exposes how the chiefs and Tendele dispossess people in Somkhele through promises and deception, and the challenges they face after relocation, including water scarcity, drought and poor sanitation. Chapters 2 and 3 explore the legal and cultural struggles over land and graves, highlighting the state's complicity in favouring mining companies. The fourth Chapter highlights the use of violence as a means of evicting people, particularly in Somkhele, a town in KwaZulu Natal province, and explains why activists and communities go to a greater extent to resist and protect the land. The people resist because they see the land and graves as sacred. The land is the last place to rest when they are dead; therefore, evicting them from their land means that they will have no place to rest when they are dead. The 5th and 6th chapters show how dispossession affects even the dead in mining areas (Tweefontein in Mpumalanga and Somkhele in KwaZulu Natal). The chapters describe how graves are relocated and often desecrated. The chapters highlight the emotional and psychological stress people go through when graves are redug to be relocated. As indicated in the earlier chapters, the graves symbolise permanence and help Black people to claim ownership of the land. Hence, relocation of people and graves is an attempt to erase Black people. This is because, if there is a land reform project in South Africa, they will use the ancestral graves as evidence,7 therefore relocating graves is seen as attempt to erase any evidence that Black people will use to make claims to the land.

One of the author's criticisms addresses how the National Heritage Resources Act (1999) is applied. South African mineral and resources laws such as the Mineral and Petroleum Resources Development Act and the National Heritage Resources Act usually seem neutral on the surface but actually support dispossession and spiritual dislocation because they grant the state the permission to relocate graves and people with little community consultation by legalising them and granting the state mining rights over communal areas instead of protecting them. This reinforces a governance style that puts extractive capital ahead of cultural and spiritual continuity. Even the dead are not let to rest in peace. Some graves were even lost during the relocation process due to inadequate markings, thereby creating emotional trauma and spiritual dislocation. The last chapter focuses on how laws are utilised to deny communities their land and burial rights and how neoliberal market rationalities enable the continued marginalisation, dispossession, and dehumanisation of Africans. The structure is logical and builds cumulatively, making it easy for readers to follow the themes.

Relying on legal analysis, participant observation and semi-structured interviews, Skosana's ethnographic work is a significant contribution to the literature on extractivism, restitution, justice, and African land politics, especially when there are major concerns about how the activities of the mining industry affect the environment and lives of people living in mining regions. Unlike earlier works that frame land as an economic resource, Skosana reintroduces land as a spiritual and ontological entity. Her analysis illustrates how spiritual dispossession operates as an extension of the coloniality of power. The book undoubtedly exposes how extractive capitalism in South Africa enacts spiritual and material violence upon Black communities. Skosana effectively illustrates how mining governance reproduces colonial patterns of dispossession under the veneer of liberal legality. Skosana critiques the land reform and redistribution in South Africa's post-Apartheid political agenda, arguing that the processes involved remain entangled in materialist and economic paradigms that do not fully acknowledge the spiritual and affective connections that these people have with their land. Skosana calls for “epistemic justice,” advocating for the importance of cultural and symbolic recognition in postcolonial studies.

However, the book could have also made detailed comparative case studies beyond South Africa to broaden its analytical scope. For example, in Ghana, thousands of hectares of agriculture were forcibly taken from the farmers and leased to the mining companies as well. Just as the chiefs in Somkhele collaborate with mining companies to dispossess people from their farmlands, many cocoa farmers have lost their farms to mining, bringing poverty, which has left them impoverished and caused emotional and psychological trauma. Also, while coal mining has created water scarcity in coal mining areas in South Africa, gold mining has brought serious water pollution in Ghana, leading to water scarcity. No Last Place to Rest is an essential contribution to studies on mining, land politics, and environmental justice, as well as resistance in Africa. Being a detailed ethnography that focuses on dispossession, mining, and ancestral politics in post-Apartheid South Africa, No Last Place to Rest will be of great interest to practitioners, policymakers, students, and scholars of African studies, environmental humanities, postcolonial theory, anthropology, political geography, and development studies.