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On January 19, Amazon is facing a lawsuit over the construction of a new headquarters in Cape Town, South Africa. Indigenous people of Khoi and San, environmentalists and other activists are calling on the South African High Court to ban a project that is located on the lands of indigenous ancestors and will have a detrimental effect on the local environment.
If the plans for the new headquarters go ahead, the company will also consolidate its neocolonial dominance and economic model of exploitation on the African continent. Although the government has provided employment and income gains, the expansion of Amazon will not benefit the South African average and will lead to more labor exploitation and will likely enable more policing based on the care of poor and marginalized communities.
That is why it is essential that South Africans tackle this project.
Indigenous rights and environmental concerns
Amazon’s planned headquarters are part of a $ 350 million real estate project in a site known as the River Club at the confluence of the Black and Liesbeek rivers near Cape Town.
This area is a historic site of indigenous peoples’ struggle against colonial power. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the forces of the Portuguese invaders were repulsed by the Khoi and San communities. About 150 years later, the natives confronted the Dutch settlers who had launched a campaign to expropriate the land from that place. Indigenous communities consider it the sacred land of their ancestors and building on it would be a great violation of their rights.
The site is currently being assessed as a National Heritage Site and part of it is within the boundaries of a range that will be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List.
Environmentalists are also opposed to the project, warning that it would seriously damage its environment. If they let it go, the developers would raise most of the site above the natural ground and the Liesbe would fill the river, which puts the risk of recharging groundwater when it rains. This could weaken its ability to absorb water from storms and floods, especially as climate change intensifies, putting its inhabitants at risk.
Filling the river also puts biodiversity at risk. As the “green lung of the city”, this area is one of the most sensitive areas in the city full of threats to the flora and fauna to be protected. In addition, the project has been criticized for having a large carbon footprint against South Africa’s climate change policy.
It’s no surprise that Amazon is involved in a project that is destroying the environment. The company has promised to be carbon neutral by 2040, but the carbon footprint has increased every year since 2018. It has also maintained contracts with fossil fuel companies and is one of the top 10 pollutants in the sea thanks to foreign transportation.
The Cape Town Department of Environmental Management (EMD) has spoken out against the permit, saying the project violates the principles of climate change resilience and biodiversity strategy. Seeing the dollars and rents, local authorities have pushed the project forward, arguing that Amazon will create thousands of jobs and improve “global interconnectivity.” But does the project really benefit South Africans economically?
Amazon is not good for the economy
At the River Club site, Amazon plans to build a new Amazon Web Services (AWS) hub, further expanding its global cloud cloud to the African continent.
AWS currently accounts for 32 percent of the global market. Entering a relatively underdeveloped market, backed by massive investment, would likely make AWS a major service provider in South Africa and probably the rest of the continent. This would prevent the emergence of a local cloud computing industry that primarily cares about users’ privacy and digital rights and relies on open source software.
If Amazon also opens an e-commerce center at River Club, it can use its deep pockets to outperform home e-commerce players like Takealot and Superbalist. The company is known to be squeezing vendors using its market services, taking a significant reduction in profits and favoring its products on its platform, undermining fair competition.
Expanding Amazon’s cloud and retail services to South Africa would be an act of digital colonialism. If the company reduced its local competitors, its monopoly power would increase and wealth would be expelled from the country.
If Amazon were to set up e-commerce repositories in South Africa, it would be bad news for the country’s labor rights. It’s already spread how employees and contractors who work in Amazon warehouses and couriers suffer from low-wage over-control of human and automated surveillance.
Machines and AI cameras monitor them to make sure their quotas are being met. In warehouses, they have to retrieve and scan an item for processing every nine seconds, in 10-and-a-half-hour shifts. Amazon staff have matched their conditions with prisons.
It is very difficult for companies not to use the same tactics at their facilities in South Africa and not to take advantage of local economic hardships to pay their employees even less than their Western counterparts. And as he has done elsewhere, he would like to break any trade union efforts with savage work practices and surveillance.
In a country with a long history of police brutality and law enforcement, in a country that is being used to suppress workers and civil strife, Amazon would fit in well. The company is known for providing surveillance technology and collaborating with U.S. police departments and is there. There is no reason why he would not do the same in South Africa. In a July 2020 investigative interview, Cape Town City Police CCTV Metro Director Barry Schuller told me that Amazon had approached them to talk about the services it could offer.
Because of all this, South Africans and their allies must confront the construction of the Amazon headquarters. The legal action of indigenous groups and activists is an important step in this direction.
The Observatory’s Citizens Association and the Goringhaicona Khoi Khoin Indigenous Ordinary Council have filed a petition with the Supreme Court to review the decision-making process behind the development approval. As part of the process, they are seeking an urgent ban on stopping the development of the River Club, which will be heard in court from 19 to 21 January. , because they will lay enough concrete so that the courts do not deserve the cancellation of the project.
The verdict in favor of those opposed to the project is very possible, despite all the lobbying done by its supporters. In December, activists pressured a South African Supreme Court to prevent the Dutch oil giant Shell from conducting seismic tests off the South African coast. The campaign was compared to the colonization of South Africa by European countries.
The victory over Amazon in South Africa would resonate around the world. It would teach the corporation and its Big Tech members a big lesson: that it can close organized resistance. If activists were expelled from the Cape Town, it would be a great victory for indigenous rights, environmental sustainability, and the fight against digital colonialism.
The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial attitude of Al Jazeera.
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