Durban activists honour Desmond D’Sa after Oct. 29 crash

Durban activists held memorial services last week for Desmond D’Sa, 70, a Goldman Environmental Prize winner who died in an Oct. 29 car crash, Daily Maverick reported on Nov. 8.

His death removes a central organiser from a 30-year campaign for cleaner air in South Durban, where homes sit near petrol refineries, chemical plants and a paper mill. D’Sa was among seven South Africans in a global prize cohort of 239 winners.

Hundreds of residents, colleagues and activists attended memorial events in Durban, including a Nov. 5 service at Austerville Hall. Daily Maverick reported that D’Sa had been driving to the offices of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, which he helped establish three decades ago.

Bobby Peek, a fellow Goldman Environmental Prize winner and founding director of environmental justice group groundWork, said D’Sa’s work connected Durban communities with polluted neighbourhoods elsewhere. “Desmond often drove many of us mad because he never said ‘no’ to any struggle,” Peek said at the memorial.

Verushka Memdutt, chair of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, called D’Sa the alliance’s “heartbeat”. Mqapheli Bonono of Abahlali baseMjondolo said D’Sa “taught us how to organise and how to stand up”.

D’Sa was born in Cato Manor, one of 13 children, and moved with his family in the mid-1960s to Wentworth, a Group Areas Act residential area near heavy industry. By the 1980s, he had become active over pollution, housing, crime, gangs and drug problems in the community, leading to the creation of the Wentworth Development Forum, Daily Maverick reported.

His activism later focused on the South Durban industrial belt. Daily Maverick reported that D’Sa and colleagues confronted Nelson Mandela during a 1995 visit to Wentworth for an Engen refinery expansion, raising concerns about leukaemia, cancer and asthma in Wentworth, Merebank and the Bluff.

The protests were followed by an intergovernmental multipoint plan on air-quality measurement and industrial emissions reductions in nearby residential areas, according to Daily Maverick. D’Sa won the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2014.

Pastor Gavin Samuels of the local Church Based Community Organisation described him as a “bulldozer with the gift the gab”. Bongani Mthembu, air quality and health officer at the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance, said D’Sa had mentored him for 18 years.