How African Women Are Fighting Climate Capitalism Today

African women are refusing to remain passive victims or data points in corporate climate monitoring. Instead, they are retooling their embodied knowledge of environmental destruction to build continental intelligence systems that challenge the very foundations of climate capitalism.

From the petrochemical refineries of Zamdela to the oilfields of the Niger Delta, Africa’s communities live in the shadow of ‘smoke giant’ energy conglomerates who are unveiling green branding without loosening their grip on resources, data or power. As climate finance trickles into the continent, a quiet battle is emerging over who designs and controls the systems that will define our energy future. 

In Zamdela, a small township north of the Free State in South Africa, mornings began with sirens. Not the kind that signals a school day or a factory shift, but a deep, ominous wail that pierced the stillness before dawn. It was our unspoken alarm clock, signalling that the Sasol plant was about to release another wave of chemicals into the air. You could smell it before it reached you, thick and metallic, slithering like death under doors and through window frames. It invaded our homes, claiming every breath, every corner, every hope of clean air as its own. This is how we learnt to measure time: not by clocks, but by chemicals. Not by sunrise, but by sirens.

For children like me, this was not a passing inconvenience, it was a life sentence written in inflammation and pain. I was chronically ill, my sinuses so swollen so much that my existence revolved around nasal sprays and antihistamines. I would sneeze until my head throbbed with sharp, splitting pain that seemed to come from inside my bones. My little sister’s body told its own story through painful skin flare-ups that left angry red welts across her arms and face.

We lived with our grandparents, and my mother who was a nurse in the city of Johannesburg, had to make back and forth monthly trips, not joyful visits, but desperate pilgrimages to doctors who became our secondary parents. They prescribed endless nasal sprays and pills, treating symptoms just for us to survive while the source of our suffering continued to belch poison. We were among the ‘privileged’ ones who could seek medical help, but privilege felt more like a curse when the very air we breathed was killing us slowly.

Even the water bore witness to our contamination. Poured into a glass, it would cloud into a milky white haze, as if the earth itself was trying to warn us. There was a bitter irony here: the same water pipes that fed the Sasol plant (Sasol Limited is an integrated energy and chemical company based in Sandton, South Africa) ran through our township. They were poisoning the very infrastructure they depended on, contaminating the arteries that connected us all. The skies above Zamdela were never truly clear, clouds shaped but stained by industrial flares, their edges were blurred by secondary pollutants that hung over us like a permanent shroud.

Sometimes it would rain only in Zamdela, a strange, persistent drizzle that would fall on our streets while a ten-minute drive revealed bright blue skies over the neighbouring town. You could not convince me this was a coincidence. The pollution seemed to hover deliberately over the township, sparing the cleaner streets just beyond our reach. This was environmental apartheid in action, the toxic legacy of a system that had always treated Black lives as expendable.

This daily poisoning was not accidental. In 1950, Sasol strategically chose Sasolburg, banking on the Vaal River’s cooling power and Zamdela township’s captive labour pool. 70 years later, this calculated geography of exploitation remains unchanged. The same families who breathe their poison also fuel their profits, trapped in cycles of short-term contracts that offer just enough hope to survive, never enough security to escape.

Most township residents work three- to six-month stints at the plant before returning to unemployment, creating a revolving door of disposable labour. The only supposed escape route was education but that became another trap, as even university graduates often found themselves back at Sasol. Overqualified and underpaid, they are recycled yearly for peanuts while their lungs fill with the same toxins that poisoned their childhoods. It was the calculated byproduct of corporate power that had shaped and shortened our lives for generations. Behind every siren, every contaminated breath, every childhood spent in doctor’s waiting rooms, stood a giant that had built its empire on our suffering and now dared to call itself a ‘champion of the climate’...