I first worked in Hondeklipbaai in my early twenties. It’s one of the places that gave me a start in life. I returned there forty years later to celebrate my 60th birthday. Not because it’s glamorous, but because it’s honest. The wind, the sea, the light, and the way people live squeezed between the ocean and the desert have stayed with me.
So when I read Greenpeace Africa’s article on Hondeklipbaai—the “Fields of gold” blog on extractive economies and coastal communities—I felt a familiar pull. The piece is powerful. It gives space to voices that are usually pushed to the edges. Multi?generational fishing families. People with Nama?linked heritage. Families who have lived off the sea for generations and now see mining and oil creeping in.
All that is important. Vital even.
But I also walked away frustrated. Because the article is true, but it’s not full. It tells a story that fits a certain frame—and in doing so, it leaves a lot of the real Hondeklip out of the picture.
The poor white Afrikaans who are still poor
The voices Greenpeace picks are very specific. They are coastal. Indigenous?linked. Often framed as “frontline communities” versus big mining and oil. That’s not wrong. It’s just incomplete.
Because who else lives there?
There are poor white Afrikaans families who have lived off that land and sea for at least two centuries. They’re not “privileged” in the way people like to imagine. They’re not directors or generals. They’re fishermen, labourers, small?scale traders, and pensioners eating on the edge.
You can’t read this place without remembering Pakenham. His writing about the old South African Republic brings up the ghost of the “poor white”—a political symbol that once terrified the white elite. It was a moral panic about white rural poverty threatening the racial order.
That category never really died. It just changed clothes. Today, that same anxiety about “white rural poverty” is buried under new racialised development language.
In public discourse, poor white Afrikaans are not supposed to count as “truly marginalised.” They’re expected to be the beneficiaries of the past, not the victims of the present. But in Hondeklipbaai, that’s not what it feels like. People who have fished these waters for generations now watch their rights shrink, their markets shift, and their place in the town erode.
You don’t have to romanticise them to see that they too are part of the tapestry of marginalisation. Left out of the story, they become invisible. That’s not justice. It’s just another kind of simplification.
Black workers and the foreign miners
The story is wider than that.
There are black workers in the fishing and service sectors. They gut fish. They clean boats. They run the small shops and cafés. They don’t always appear as the heroic “small?scale fisher” in these NGO pieces, but they keep the economy moving. Their lives are just as shaped by the same structural forces: shrinking jobs, rising prices, and the constant pressure of an unforgiving economy.
And then there are the foreign miners.
You only have to drive up the coast to Port Nolloth or Kleinsee to see it. Alluvial-diamond digging has turned parts of the coastline into a kind of madhouse. Zimbabweans and other African migrants rush in, digging in the sand under the glare of security lights and the constant threat of police raids. The competition is fierce. The conditions are brutal.
They’re not part of the “heroic coastal community” in Greenpeace’s narrative. They’re usually treated as a side effect, a footnote, a problem.
But they’re part of the same reality. The same desperation. The same scramble for survival.
When an NGO comes with a very clear frame—“indigenous-linked coastal communities versus extractive capital”—it can unintentionally flatten that reality. The complex, overlapping, sometimes messy tapestry of marginalised people gets reduced to a single storyline. That’s not a lie, but it is a distortion.
“Alien entities” telling our stories
You can’t talk about this without talking about the NGO itself.
Greenpeace Africa is not a local church. It’s not a community trust. It’s an international organisation with global networks, donors, and a brand to protect. It walks into a place like Hondeklipbaai, listens to some people, and then packages their voices into a story that has to travel. It’s a powerful story. It can shift debate. It can put pressure on government and companies.
But that also means someone else is deciding whose marginality is legible.
When an “external alien entity” becomes the main narrator, it can also become the gatekeeper of whose pain counts. The voices of poor white Afrikaans fishers, black workers, or migrant miners may not fit the global environmental-justice template. They’re messy. They don’t fit the clean binary of “indigenous?linked vs extractive capital.” So they get left out. Or left in as background noise.
In an ideal world, the primary architect of social justice would be local government, local communities, and local institutions—not distant NGOs. But local government is often weak. National politics is distracted. The state is captured, fragmented, or just not there.
So NGOs rush in. They fill the vacuum. They become the main storytellers.
That’s not evil. It’s just that it comes with a cost. The more we let external NGOs define who is “truly marginalised,” the less space we leave for the complex, overlapping, uncomfortable truths of places like Hondeklipbaai.
A richer picture of marginality
If you walk around Hondeklip today, you’re not walking into a single category. You’re walking into a stack of layers:
- Race and heritage: Indigenous?linked families. Black workers. Poor white Afrikaans. Foreign migrants.
- Class and livelihood: Small-scale fishers. Petty traders. Seasonal labourers. Informal miners.
- Citizenship and mobility: South Africans of different histories. Foreign nationals carrying the same economic pressure.
A more honest account would ask not just who is threatened by mining and oil, but who else is competing with them for survival. How does race shape that competition? How does class? How does migration? How does history?
A pastor in the area recently said, “We live in an era of poverty.” It’s a simple line, but it cuts deep. When material scarcity is this intense, every kind of marginality gets sharpened. Every group feels under siege from someone else.
Reframing what we see in NGOs
None of this undoes the value of what Greenpeace does. The article is a good example of how an NGO can insert local voices into a national and global conversation. It can give airtime to people who are usually ignored.
But it also exposes the limits of one-sided storytelling, even when the story is true.
For me, walking into a shopping centre and seeing those NGO collectors asking for money, I want to be able to say: “I see your cause. I see your logic. But I also see all the people you’re accidentally leaving out.”
Places like Hondeklipbaai are too complex to be reduced to a single storyline. If an NGO wants to be a real ally, it has to learn to tell stories that are not just about coastal communities, but with all the different kinds of marginalised people who live there—poor white Afrikaans, indigenous?linked families, black workers, and foreign miners alike.
Only then will the “fields of gold” be framed not as a moral fable, but as a messy, contested, and deeply human coastline. One that looks very different when you’ve lived it than when you’ve just read about it.
