THE founder of the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance and 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize winner was killed in a road accident on Thursday.

Desmond D’Sa, the Durban campaigner who closed a toxic waste dump and built an alliance that outlasted it, was killed in a road accident on Thursday. He was 70. His son Rodney and a family member also died.

The South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), which he co-founded in 1996 and coordinated, announced his death on 29 October. It called him “a true hero of our community” and asked the media to give his family time and space to grieve.

D’Sa was a titan, a towering, fearless frontline leader who proved that defending human dignity and protecting the Earth are the exact same battle. Desmond stood alongside communities fighting for clean air, dignity and the right to live free from harmful pollution.

Calling him one of the nation’s absolute best honors the sheer courage it took to stand up against Multinational Corporations. His work deserves acknowledgment from the state (the customary lowering of our flag for a Goldman Prize winner, often called the Environmental Nobel Prize, would suffice).

For more than three decades, he championed the rights of residents living alongside refineries, chemical plants and heavy industry. He stood on the front-lines of South Durban, putting his body on the line against multinational oil majors, refinery toxic pollution, and industrial environmental racism. He proved every day that human rights, public health, and ecological survival are indivisible.

The 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize made him internationally known, but the award was the least of it. What mattered was what he did to earn it.

D’Sa was 15 when apartheid removals moved his family next to heavy industry in south Durban, a basin of refineries, paper mills and chemical plants that came to be called cancer valley. The basin holds about 70 percent of Durban’s industry and some 300,000 mostly working-class residents. He worked in chemical factories and saw what they did to the neighbourhoods around them.

In 1996 he helped found SDCEA, starting as an unpaid volunteer. His gift was bringing together communities that apartheid had divided by race and class, and giving them practical tools to fight with.

SDCEA began as a coalition of about a dozen community groups, working at first from a shipping container in a rugby club car park. D’Sa, an unpaid volunteer, co-founded it with Bobby Peek, who won a Goldman Prize himself in 1998. Its achievement was bringing together Indian, African and coloured neighbourhoods that apartheid had pulled apart, from Merebank and Clairwood to Wentworth, the Bluff and Umlazi. By 2021 it counted more than twenty members, among them civic and development forums, church groups, a hostel residents’ group and a conservancy.

Hazardous Waste

The test was the Bulbul Drive landfill, opened in 1990, where hazardous waste from shipyards, factories and hospitals was trucked through residential streets. When the operator, Wasteman, applied in 2009 to extend its lease to 2021, D’Sa helped residents scrutinise the plans and connected them with lawyers on their constitutional right to a healthy environment. He gave neighbours the means to gather their own evidence. A smell chart helped them match the odours drifting through their homes to the chemicals behind them. Households were trained to capture air in a bucket fitted with a sealed bag and a hand pump, and the samples went to a laboratory for testing. He kept reporters in touch with affected families and led highway demonstrations against the trucks.

Wasteman withdrew its application in August 2010. The landfill closed in November 2011. It was a rare victory for ordinary residents over a corporation.

It carried a price. His home was firebombed by unknown assailants, leaving him with burns and his family traumatised. Continuing threats forced him to live apart from them. He did not stop. D’Sa turned to the planned expansion of the Port of Durban, a $10-billion project that threatened to displace thousands of people, and the campaign helped delay it by at least a decade.

What D’Sa leaves is coalition building and a method anyone can learn: measure the air you breathe, record when and where, and put the evidence in front of the people who have to answer for it. Environmental health needs citizen scientists, and community health workers who see the symptoms first.

“Never give up, irrespective of how big a challenge may seem,” he said. By any measure, he did not.

SDCEA says details of funeral and memorial arrangements will be shared once they are finalised. The media are asked to respect the family’s privacy.