The small town living alongside 50 million tons of asbestos waste
By Nokukhanya Musi and Tom Quinn
In the once-bustling town of Bulembu in Eswatini, a small landlocked country in southern Africa, the shadow of the asbestos mining industry looms large. The mine closed in 2001, yet tens of millions of tons of unrehabilitated asbestos waste, left mostly by British company Turner & Newall, still litter Bulembu – while people who fell ill say they are not receiving the support they need.
A global industry
Asbestos was widely mined across Southern Africa in the 20th century, and Havelock Mine in Piggs Peak near Bulembu was conceivably the largest asbestos mine in Africa. Owned and run by British company Turner & Newall, it employed more than 3,000 people at its peak and was a significant contributor to the Swazi economy. The white asbestos (chrysotile) mined here was exported to dozens of countries to be used in a range of products, including cement roofing, textiles, and brake pads.
From the day it started mining at Havelock in 1939, however, Turner & Newall knew that asbestos exposure could be deadly. The Kingdom of Eswatini, today Africa’s only absolute monarchy, was at that time still under British colonial rule. Regulations were in force to limit the amount of asbestos dust in Turner & Newall’s UK factories by 1931, as it had been established that exposure to the dust could cause asbestosis, a potentially fatal lung disease. There were no such regulations in Eswatini at that time. In the following decades, all types of asbestos were found to cause lung cancer and mesothelioma – a deadly cancer that affects the mesothelium, the tissue lining the lungs and other organs.
Many workers left the area when the mine closed, and a group of social developers and entrepreneurs aimed to revitalise the town, buying it up in 2006. Bulembu Ministries, as it is called, provides care for more than 350 orphaned and vulnerable children.
However, the towering grey asbestos dumps that surround Bulembu are a permanent reminder of its deadly past.
Risk of collapse
Throughout its more than 60 years of operation, Havelock Mine yielded approximately 1.8 million tonnes of white asbestos. This generated an estimated 50 million tonnes of waste containing asbestos, which was dumped in various sites around Bulembu. Much of this remains there today. Some dumps are more than 180m high, greater than the height of the London Eye.
Dumps filled with asbestos-containing waste in and around Bulembu, November 2024. Credit: Musi
A report produced for the Eswatini Environment Authority by Maphanga Mitchell Associates, on behalf of Kobolondo Magnesium in 2022, seen by Confront, states that this asbestos waste presents an ongoing “substantial potential environmental hazard”.
Kobolondo Magnesium explored the rehabilitation of the waste as part of a plan to recover rare minerals contained within it. The project’s 270-page Environmental and Social Impact Report found that the majority of the asbestos waste was open to the elements with little vegetation cover. This means that potentially toxic asbestos fibres contained within the waste are easily disturbed, at the mercy of the wind.
The reports also found that some dumps could collapse at any time, noting there is a real possibility of a “sudden collapse of the tailings [asbestos waste] if left unmanaged”. It added that climate change worsens this risk, warning that Eswatini is seeing increasing droughts followed by extreme rainfall, which could lead to a “catastrophic collapse of the tailings”.
The movement of the tailings not only poses a risk to the people in and around Bulembu, there is also a longer-term risk of asbestos spreading to other communities. Parts of the asbestos dumps are on the banks of waterways that are upstream from the Komati River and the Maguga Dam. With asbestos running off into the river, asbestos fibres could dry up on the banks downstream, where farming is common.
Dumps filled with asbestos-containing waste in and around Bulembu, November 2024. Credit: Musi
The asbestos mining has resulted in other environmental and ecological risks in the area. These include habitat degradation and loss of biodiversity, bioaccumulation of asbestos fibres in the food chain, and reduced soil fertility.
Air monitoring tests in 2022 identified that, based on World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines, the levels of asbestos in the air in Bulembu were up to 22 times higher than expected for a rural area. The highest reading was of 2,322 fibres per cubic metre. Although this did not exceed the occupational thresholds adopted by South Africa of 10,000 fibres per cubic metre, which Eswatini copies, the WHO says there is no safe level of exposure to any form of asbestos.
A spokesperson from Bulembu Ministries told Confront that the organisation did not see the health of hundreds of children as under threat, saying: “We conduct regular air and water quality testing, and results over the years have consistently remained well within recommended safety guidelines. Based on this ongoing monitoring, we believe the environment remains safe.”
The report argued that “the rehabilitation process cannot be postponed”. Yet the proposed rehabilitation project was cancelled in 2024 (after the mining license for Kobolondo was revoked).
Richard Bong’sipho Magagula, Senior Mining Engineer at Eswatini’s Ministry of Natural Resources and Energy, acknowledged that “the asbestos dumps pose significant environmental hazards” and are “a health risk in their current state”.
Dumps filled with asbestos-containing waste in and around Bulembu. Credit: Google Earth.
He said that access to a clean and healthy environment is a right guaranteed in Eswatini’s constitution, and that there are ongoing discussions on how to rehabilitate the waste. However, he cited limited resources as a major reason for delays, and no timeline was provided for when another plan would be identified to contain or rehabilitate the waste.
The landscape wasn’t the only thing scarred by the asbestos industry, so too were people’s lungs.
After the mine closed in 2001, many former workers left Bulembu and went in search of work elsewhere. Nonhlanhla Khumalo, a widowed mother of three, was among those who stayed. Khumalo, 48, had been a casual worker at the Havelock Mine, cleaning up excess asbestos and machinery. A few years after leaving the mine, she developed a persistent cough, chest tightness and gradually grew weaker – all symptoms associated with asbestosis.
Nonhlanhla Khumalo Credit: Musi
Doctors performed an X-ray and discovered scarring in her lungs. They initially diagnosed asthma, but later said they were unsure. Khumalo continues to struggle with her health, relying heavily on an inhaler and medication to ease her pain and help her breathe.
She had already lost her partner and the father of her three children, William Phiri, in 2006. Khumalo suspects asbestos played a role in his death. Officially, Phiri died from tuberculosis, which is not only extremely common in Eswatini but also, historically, a common misdiagnosis among people with asbestos-related diseases.
All asbestos-related diseases can take up to several decades after exposure for diseases to develop. There is still no known cure for asbestosis, nor for mesothelioma.
While other forms of asbestos – such as the blue asbestos mined in neighbouring South Africa – are more potent than white asbestos, Turner & Newall saw countless asbestosis deaths among its workers, dating back to the 1920s, from all types of asbestos in its global operations. Yet the company insisted there were no asbestos diseases at Havelock even into the 1970s, and failed to inspect the workforce for decades.
When the company finally conducted a survey among 271 Havelock workers in 1978, they found nearly one in four (23%) were already suffering from asbestosis. This went up to more than half (54%) for those who worked in the mill. In 1980, a further 6% to 12% of mineworkers’ wives, who did not work at Havelock but had lived there for more than 15 years, were also found to have asbestosis. This was at least in part due to the asbestos dust their partners unwittingly brought home.
Another resident, Cutter Dlamini, now 69 years old, vividly recalls his time at the Havelock Mine as a miner in the early 1980s. Without respirators to reduce their exposure, he and his co-workers were inundated with the nearly invisible asbestos fibres. “The dust was everywhere,” Dlamini says. “We didn’t know how to protect ourselves.”
Cutter Dlamini Credit: Musi
Today, Dlamini is a shadow of his former self. Once an able-bodied athlete, he is now frail and struggles with shortness of breath, pains and a persistent cough. Despite numerous trips to the hospital, doctors have been unable to properly diagnose him. His wife, who was born in Bulembu and never worked at the mine, is also sickly.
Then there is Charles Thulani Sikhondze, 57, a father of three who used to work at the mine. He echoes the sense of betrayal and despair relayed by Khumalo and Dlamini. Sikhondze suffers from shortness of breath and an unremitting cough. Loss of appetite has weakened his body and he finds himself tiring easily. At times, the pain is unbearable.
“Swazis have been used and left to die, and there is no one who is willing to hear our cries,” he says.
Eswatini is not a wealthy nation and its resources are stretched thin. The country’s 1.24 million people live with some of the highest rates for HIV and tuberculosis in the world. The average life expectancy is just 54 years according to the WHO’s latest data, nine years lower than the African average. Under these pressures, Eswatini’s medical system has struggled to identify and treat diseases caused by asbestos.
According to Nsindiso Tsabedze, Communications Officer for the Ministry of Health (MoH) in Eswatini, the country used to have functioning Occupational Health Service Centres (OHSCs) operating at full capacity. This provided annual asbestos-related disease screenings for miners, ex-miners and their families. Today, though, the centres are not functional.
“There are limitations to regularly screen the key populations with chest X-rays because the country doesn’t have the necessary equipment and tools,” Tsabedze told Confront.
In addition, the ministry has no data on the number of cases of asbestos-related diseases reported, let alone those in the past year, or how this compares to previous years. Tsabedze says the ministry has a detection programme in communities for some occupational lung diseases, such as silicosis, for example, but not for asbestosis or mesothelioma.
There are growing concerns about the long-term effects of asbestos exposure on individuals and communities. In response, the ministry has proposed a plan to revive the OHSCs, but no definitive time frame has been given.
Dr Sophia Kisting, former Executive Director of the National Institute for Occupational Health in South Africa, told Confront that residents in Bulembu – such as Khumalo – should be assessed by specialists or doctors familiar with asbestos-related diseases.
Extremely high levels of asbestos dust were noted at Havelock as far back as 1944, when Turner & Newall inspector DH Bowden wrote: “I told the manager that if this plant was in the Union of South Africa I should have no hesitation in stopping all work, until such time as the dust conditions were improved and there was no visible dust.”
Marginal changes were made, but when a Turner & Newall doctor visited in 1971 he saw “frightening” conditions. He wrote to the head office, “I was in two minds as to whether I should enter the grading mill without the protection of a positive pressure respirator. Going through the mill to the storage shed and then through the shed climbing over piles of fibre was frightening.”
It was not until the mid 1980s that marked improvements were made, by which time the first country in the world, Sweden, had banned white asbestos.
In 2002 and 2004, Professor Joch McCulloch, an occupational health historian from RMIT University in Australia, visited the area to speak to former workers. They described working in dusty conditions, being poorly paid, and badly treated. Swazi researcher Nhlanhla Dlamini also spoke to ex-workers around this time, and chronicled a vast difference in conditions between “native” and “European” workers. They also learnt that violence was used as a matter of course during the early years of the mine’s operations.
A constant feature at Havelock throughout its history was a high turnover of workers. This made it impossible for researchers wanting to document the full extent of asbestos diseases among the workforce. When a law firm provided McCulloch with a list of 20 former Havelock workers to speak to, he found that eight had already died in the preceding 18 months. Of those still alive, most developed asbestosis, yet they received no medical care and were left in a precarious financial position. One, Elphas Sabida, said that his pension had stopped after the mine closed. He said all that he was given was “a passport to the grave”.
Compensation
Turner & Newall was not the sole owner of the mine. The Eswatini government bought a 40% share in 1978, and Gencor/Gefco – which owned many asbestos mines in South Africa – were also part owners between 1985 and 1991. Turner & Newall sold its remaining share in 1991, and the mine was saved from closing by Consolidated Mining Corporation of South Africa.
A 2003 legal settlement between Gencor/Gefco and ex-miners in South Africa led to the creation of the Asbestos Relief Trust. It has diagnosed and compensated just over 150 former Havelock workers across Eswatini who were employed during the qualifying period covered in this settlement. However, this settlement only covers a small part of the mines’ history.
A lawsuit by more than 600 former miners and their families against Turner & Newall fell apart after the company filed for bankruptcy in 2001. After this, Turner & Newall were absolved of responsibility for cleaning up its asbestos waste or for fully compensating its victims in Eswatini.
To compensate victims of Turner & Newall in the UK, the USA, and around the world, two trusts were established. These are managed by T&N Asbestos Trustee Company, based in the UK. There are provisions for providing heavily reduced payments for those diagnosed with asbestos diseases, including for people in Eswatini, along with South Africa, India, Botswana, and Zimbabwe.
Diagnosis of an asbestos disease by an accredited respiratory specialist is required before an application, a facility that is not available to many in Eswatini. Unlike the Asbestos Relief Trust, the T&N Trust has not done outreach work in Eswatini or neighbouring countries. Confront contacted a director at the trust and asked how many people from Eswatini have been compensated since the trust was formed in 2006, but the trust told us that they did not have this data. They did not wish to provide a comment.
Calls for justice
Human rights lawyer Sibusiso Nhlabatsi told Confront that Eswatini’s Workmen’s Compensation Act needs reforming to better protect future generations from workplace abuse. He says it is not a robust tool for punishing employers who have allowed their workers, like those at Havelock, to be exposed to harmful conditions.
“The weak nature of the Act, combined with the absence of punitive measures for violators, underscores the urgent need for reform,” Nhlabatsi says. He also believes that the outdated Public Health Act of 1969, introduced one year after Eswatini obtained full independence from the UK, needs to adapt to modern-day public health crises.
The Southern African Miners Association (SAMA) also has weighed in on the issue. “Ex-miners need to stand up for their rights to demand medical examinations and access to compensation,” SAMA Regional Coordinator Vama Jele told Confront. “It is the responsibility of the Eswatini government to ensure that citizens are protected. The legacy of asbestos-related diseases is not something that should be ignored or forgotten.”
An abandoned building from the mine in Piggs Peak. Credit: Musi
In the words of Dr Kisting, the situation for residents and former workers “speaks of terrible neglect”.
“It highlights how international companies such as Turner & Newall can absolutely get away with it just by declaring bankruptcy,” says Dr Kisting. She adds that the priority now should be for “a measure of justice for those who’ve been disadvantaged and made ill”.
Asbestosis is a progressive disease. Further asbestos exposure exacerbates symptoms and brings a heightened risk of developing lung cancer. The worry preys on Khumalo, who has raised her three children alone. “I myself could die anytime. I thought I would have been dead by now.”
This story was originally published by Confront
