Fisherpeople Mount an Ongoing Fight for Their Right to Thrive in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Andre Cloete joined his father in the fishing trade as a fourteen-year-old in the early 1980s. For generations, his family had lived in one of the world’s most prolific food-producing regions: the delta where the Olifants River flows into the South Atlantic sea on South Africa’s Western Cape.

The ocean teemed with fish, including Cape bream, hake, anchovy, sardine, horse mackerel, tuna, snoek, West Coast rock lobster, and abalone, while the river offered mullet, eel, bream, kob, gurnard, and springer.

On land, the region’s Mediterranean climate made it ideal for growing wheat, barley, wine grapes, table grapes, and other fruits.

“Growing up, one didn’t consider one without the other,” Cloete says of the land and sea.

Like farming, fishing is by nature a seasonal occupation, adapted to the movements of various aquatic species. And so, the Cloete family worked as fisherpeople for six to nine months per year and as farm workers for the rest.

But as Black South Africans under apartheid, the Cloete family experienced this vast bounty mainly as labourers. They hoped that the 1994 collapse of this vestige of British and Dutch colonialism would free them to make an autonomous living from the sea.

However, the new government introduced fisheries laws that effectively enshrined the old social relations on the coast. In response, Cloete joined a grassroots fishers’ social movement that has been fighting ever since—with considerable but incomplete success—to establish the right for traditional communities to thrive in their coastal homeland.

Their struggle likely holds the key to maintaining the health and biodiversity of South Africa’s long shoreline and is emerging as a model for communities in similar circumstances across the globe.

During apartheid’s long reign, white people dominated the fish trade and dictated which species Cloete’s family and other Black fisherpeople could catch, turning what could have been a robust living into a marginal economic existence. In the tiny town of Papendorp, Cloete says, fishing—in the employ of a white-owned commercial enterprise, while catching enough on the side for subsistence—was the main occupation of Black residents because few other options existed.

Many Black communities had already been forced into particular spaces by the apartheid government and had their access to land-based resources severely constrained through privatization into white-owned farms and vineyards. To this day, this land-ownership regime blocks communities’ access to riverbanks and fresh waterways that would otherwise be available to them as national public resources. It also promotes industrial-style farming, which leads to toxic agrochemical runoff into coastal waters, degrading the ecosystems these communities rely on.

Cloete speaks fondly of his childhood on this sunny confluence of river and sea, “playing on the riverbanks, swimming, fishing,” but the humiliations of apartheid hung over daily life.

“There was only one shop [in town], and it belonged to a white guy,” he says. The shop owner’s son offered to pay him money if the young Cloete addressed him as boss. “That really pissed me off—it awakened something in me. … White people think they are superior—or, our superiors. That, because they have all the money, they are better than us.”

When apartheid fell in 1994, Cloete and his fellow fisherpeople in the Western Cape assumed their lives would be transformed. No longer legally condemned to second-class status in their ancestral homeland, they hoped to assert their right to make a good living from the sea. What they found, however, was that the fall of apartheid did not do much to transform economic conditions for rural Black people. While white South Africans no longer dominated formal politics, they still de facto dominated the economy—in effect, they still had all the money. They owned the great bulk of the existing fishing infrastructure, they controlled the processing and marketing channels, and they proved unwilling to provide openings for Black fisherpeople.

“We [still] didn’t have any rights,” Cloete says. “You worked for a boat owner and for those who have [resources]—and that was the white people.”

While the government has tried to address these entrenched inequalities through programs like the Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) policy, the federal government’s interventions tended to target well-connected urban entrepreneurs and weren’t easily adaptable to the needs and challenges of fishing communities.

It took until 1998 for the government to create a post-apartheid framework for managing the country’s highly lucrative fisheries. But the Marine Living Resources Act 18 (MLRA), as it was known, did little to change the traditional fisherpeople’s second-class status. The law “made no provision for small-scale fishers, even for artisanal fishers,” Cloete says.

The government regulated fisheries by offering three categories of licences: commercial, recreational, and subsistence. The first, which allowed a fishing enterprise to sell its catch into wholesale markets, was priced well beyond Black fisherpeoples’ ability to pay. The third, while affordable, essentially consigned them to the same marginal status they had endured in the long apartheid era: being unable to legally sell any of their catch.

“It was still the bigger [white-owned] companies that were first in line and could pay to get their licences” at that stage, Cloete says.

Disappointed by the MLRA, Cloete and his fellow fisherpeople “had to find another way to access the industry in order for us to provide, to make money, to put food on the table.” They used a tool that had been denied to Black South Africans during apartheid: They organized a non-violent social movement to pressure their democratically accountable government to give them space to operate in the fisheries economy.

They found a ready partner in Masifundise, a grassroots mutual-aid group that had launched in 1980 to counteract the dismal educational opportunities open to the Western Cape’s Black majority, offering literacy support and adult education. With the end of apartheid, the national government took on responsibility for education, and Masifundise’s leaders shifted their focus to organizing groups likely to be marginalized and left behind after the transition.

In 2000, working with Masifundise, Cloete and leaders from other fishing communities along the Western Cape gathered in the coastal town of Langebaan to compare notes and pull together strategies for moving forward. Ultimately, the effort drew in fisherpeople facing similar challenges along the Eastern Cape and the Indian Ocean coast. The result: Coastal Links, a grassroots group devoted to “convincing government to open access to artisanal fishers.” Thus began a “long fight,” Cloete says. “We had to hold marches, find ourselves at the gates of parliament, we had to write letters, we had to do everything we could to get the attention of the government.”

The fishers’ alliance with Masifundise and the launch of Coastal Links “formalized the movement,” says Cloete. It also created an opportunity to pool resources and incorporate legal challenges into the mix of tactics for grabbing the government’s attention.

In 2005, Coastal Links, Masifundise, and other groups launched a lawsuit against the government to challenge the initial effort at post-apartheid fisheries governance, the Marine Living Resources Act 18, for its failure to acknowledge the existence and rights of traditional fishers. In 2007, the nation’s Equality Court ruled in the artisanal fisherpeoples’ favour. The court gave the fisheries minister five years to come up with a policy that would open the fishing economy to the region’s still-excluded Black fishers. In the intervening years, the court obligated the fishing ministry to provide “interim relief” by allowing the fishers to catch and sell fish without having to pay for ruinously expensive licences.

The decision was historic. As a group of University of Cape Town researchers stated in a 2014 academic paper, the move represented a “shift in the governance of small-scale fisheries in South Africa—from a largely resource-centred approach to one that is more people-centred, and which recognizes fisher rights as human rights, as well as the important role that marine resources can play in poverty alleviation.” Nonetheless, the researchers found, implementation of the decision still left the artisanal fishers at a disadvantage, largely unable to economically thrive in waters still dominated by incumbent fishing interests.

A major problem was that the overall policy was designed to maintain the health of fisheries by strictly limiting the catch of various high-value species through an “output control” approach by fisheries managers—which can be an appropriate measure in waters dominated by large firms with industrial-scale gear that can very efficiently decimate the population of a given species. Yet, these traditional fishing communities practice a “very environmentally friendly way of harvesting fish, because of the kinds of gears that are used and the amounts that are harvested,” says Carmen Mannarino, a program manager at Masifundise. She cites the work of eminent fisheries scientist Daniel Pauly, who in a seminal 2018 paper found that small-scale fishers like Cloete and his peers likely “represent the future of sustainable fisheries.”

Andre Cloete with family members outside his home near the Olifants River delta, Western Cape, South Africa. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Andre Cloete with family members outside his home near the Olifants River delta, Western Cape, South Africa. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Two young men sit overlooking the wetlands near the Olifants River mouth, a landscape central to local small-scale fishing communities. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Two young men sit overlooking the wetlands near the Olifants River mouth, a landscape central to local small-scale fishing communities. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Fishers sort and prepare their catch in a small processing hut. Photo: Barry Christianson.

Fishers sort and prepare their catch in a small processing hut. Photo: Barry Christianson.

“People always forget that [small-scale fisherpeople] are the custodians of the species they [the quotas] are trying to protect,” Cloete adds.

In a 2021 commitment designed to open space for small-scale fishers in the quota system, the Department of Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment allocated 15 percent of the highly lucrative squid catch to 15 cooperatives representing 600 small-scale fisherpeople, with the stated goal of ultimately increasing their quota to 25 percent. Predictably, the industrial-scale operations that had long enjoyed 100 percent of the trade shrieked at the move to challenge their monopoly. Their industry group, the South African Squid Management Industrial Association, filed a lawsuit to force the fisheries department to zero out the small-scale fishers’ quota. The court ultimately rejected the motion, but the quota system in general remains a problem, Masifundise’s Mannarino says. The fishing giants’ reaction to losing just 15 percent of its quota for squid demonstrates their readiness to fight to maintain their dominance. And for Black fisherpeople, despite the squid opening, stable access to other high-value species like abalone and lobster remains elusive.

Beyond unfair quotas, another factor limiting fishing communities’ ability to thrive is toxic runoff from ever-intensifying industrial farms and ever-expanding off-shore oil operations in their waters, which reduces abundance. This ecological degradation operates as a chronic, background factor of life—and sometimes manifests in spectacular form.

In 2022, catastrophic flooding in the coastal Indian Ocean province of KwaZulu-Natal killed around 400 people, and also deluged pesticide stores for industrial farms, which washed into floodwaters and, ultimately, the ocean. For months, because of high concentrations of poisons, authorities prohibited fishers from going to the coastline to fish. Mussel harvesters, almost all of whom are women, bore the brunt of the disaster.

In 2024, Masifundise’s fisher tribunals held a session on the struggle of women in small-scale fisheries in South KwaZulu-Natal during times of climate emergency. They were able to share this knowledge with a separate tribunal on the impact of pesticides and agrotoxins. The struggle to curtail pollution from large-scale farms looms as yet another monumental task ahead for the movement.

So far, Coastal Links and Masifundise have “won the fight for recognition,” Mannarino says. The South African government now recognizes small-scale fishers as a legitimate player in the fisheries economy, with a right to a share of the catch. But that’s only half the battle. The challenge ahead, she says, is to establish “community-based, collective rights” for fisherpeople.

“Our focus is not on single species, as it is in the industry—we need to have access to everything around us,” Carmen Mannarino, Program Manager at Masifundise, says.

Communities’ abilities to harvest from a mixed basket of resources according to their abundance in time and space are a cornerstone of their sustainability and resilience to climate change and other future shocks. The quota system also enshrines gender inequality by disproportionately limiting the efforts of the fisherwomen who specialize in shoreline products like mussels and seaweed. The government currently categorizes them as consumption species and not commercial, meaning they can’t be sold when harvested from the wild.

Despite the gaping challenges that remain, Cloete and his peers have made significant strides toward developing a just and sustainable fishing economy along South Africa’s vast and abundant coasts.

And their progress reverberates around the globe: Coastal Link’s work on small-scale fisheries policy development in South Africa informed the creation of the UN’s Voluntary Guidelines for Securing Sustainable Small-Scale Fisheries in the Context of Food Security and Poverty Eradication (SSF Guidelines), which in turn has shaped global engagements to improve management and opportunities for small-scale fisheries.

Their example has also influenced national policies, enabling and inspiring other case studies in this series from Canada and Australia.

When apartheid fell in 1994, Cloete says, “we thought every opportunity would open up for us because we were now politically free.” But they quickly realized that the “more things change, the more they stay the same.” Until, that is, Cloete and his fellow fisherpeople began actively organizing—for both their own survival and for the viability of one of the globe’s most robust fishing regions.

And they’re not finished.

Key Takeaways

Despite their victory in the Equality Court, small-scale fishers have encountered much regulatory inertia as they await new rules meant to secure their rights, making continued organizing necessary. Masifundise has learned to keep its constituents engaged by addressing on-the-ground issues that fishers will mobilize around quickly, including plans to launch a sea accident insurance fund. Beyond “winning” rights on paper, “realizing” and achieving suitable implementation of those rights can be a more difficult task. This takes a lot of support to help communities articulate how they expect what’s endorsed on paper to be implemented in practice. Funders need to finance follow-up actions in the lag time between policy victory and implementation.

Rules that make sense for reigning in large industrial operations can inadvertently strangle small artisanal ones. Regulatory regimes need to recognize this.

Tenure regulations and boundaries are typically clearer and more respected on land than on water. In coastal South Africa, legal teams experienced in pursuing collective land-ownership options are bringing their knowledge across the nexus to help small-scale fishers navigate the bureaucratic minefield that is defending the rights of communities to access aquatic spaces and resources.

This success story is not just about communities having the regular support of effective partners, but also about those partners having the strategic vision to follow the lead of fishers, to strengthen their organization building and guide (rather than override) collective processes of the fishers as communities grow, to build internal alliances, and to defend themselves. The real magic happens when groups like Masifundise push to build communities and move on once communities have a robust and dynamic constituency of their own.

The list of issues now being addressed by Masifundise and its various partners includes: pushing for effective implementation of the new fisheries policy; challenging energy initiatives, including oil and gas extraction; promoting the tenure and other rights of both coastal and inshore fishing communities; promoting the right to food as a necessity for communities across the fishing–farming nexus; and exposing that coastal communities are most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis. Success naturally breeds success, and donors need to align their support accordingly, ideally in a longstanding and suitably growing partnership.

The court victory and ongoing pursuit of equity by fishing communities was built on more than 40 years of anti-apartheid struggle and 20 years of Masifundise’s work supporting small-scale fishing communities in mobilizing, lobbying, and advocating for legal recognition and sustainable livelihoods. Ongoing challenges against oil and gas explorations benefit from this infrastructure and legal framework, based on the rights to food and culture, which allow fishers to mobilize quickly and effectively. The years of collective processes provided momentum to pursue policy wins, with a huge historical cost and effort, and still required thousands of community members to firmly stand up together and be counted.

Fisheries management fixates on allocating harvest rights for particular high-value species, while many communities traditionally harvest what they need from a suite of resources according to seasonal ebbs and flows, often selling any excess more opportunistically than intentionally. This fishing pattern, though proven to be sustainable, can run communities afoul of fisheries management officials. The individualized capitalist rights aiming to extractively maximize profits from single species don’t suit community priorities or traditional practices. Better-aligned fisheries management structures will help make community livelihoods more secure, sustainable, and resilient to future changes. Community requests also reflect their pursuit of self-determination — a cardinal principle of modern law that should be respected as such.

Fisher Andre Cloete highlighted that Coastal Links’s most effective allies among NGOs were the smaller organizations that were more nimble and able to react quickly to issues, as demonstrated in the fights against oil and gas exploration. He also stated that conservation efforts driven by large international non-governmental organizations can be used as a tool against communities to curtail their access to traditional resources. In this case, actively seeking out and supporting smaller NGOs filling important niches as agile and like-minded community partners in these large fights can be the most efficient approach.

Conventional fisheries managers often propose managing fisheries by limiting the catch of specific high-value species through allocating quotas to licence holders. As noted earlier, that system fails small-scale fishing communities, which tend to use the least-destructive fishing gear and harvest at sustainable levels from a variety of species based on their fluctuating local abundance. When quotas can be traded, the industry tends to buy rights from smaller-scale actors in the system and monopolize the fleet. Quota-based regulatory frameworks managing fishery outputs (harvests) are harder to monitor while incentivizing the hiding or underreporting of catch. A growing body of research suggests a better way: managing inputs (e.g., the number of vessels) while giving priority access to the more sustainable traditional fishing gears and methods long embraced by small-scale fishers. To protect and promote abundance while also ensuring the livelihoods of small-scale fishers, fisheries should be regulated not via quotas but rather via practices — banning use of the fishing gears and methods known to deplete stocks and generate bycatch at industrial speed and scale.

Acknowledgements

Storytelling

Andre Cloete, Fisher, South Africa
Carmen Mannarino, Masifundise Development Trust, South Africa
Jordan Volmink, Masifundise Development Trust, South Africa
Carsten Pedersen, Transnational Institute, Denmark
Roy Bealey, Lead Researcher, Pelagic Fisheries Consulting Ltd. (PFC), Kenya
Tom Philpott, Journalist, John Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, USA
Barry Christianson, Documentary Photographer, South Africa
Meena Nallainathan, Global Alliance for the Future of Food, Canada

Beacons of Hope Advisory Committee

Pak Salman, Fisher, Indonesia
Ahmed Imere, Fisher, Kenya
Gaoussou Gueye, CAOPA, Senegal
Nadine Nembhard, World Forum of Fisher Peoples, Belize
Beatrice Gorez, Coalition for Fair Fisheries Arrangements, Belgium
Nireka Weeratunge, International Center for Ethnic Studies, Sri Lanka
Niaz Dorry, North American Marine Alliance, USA
Javiera Calisto, Oak Foundation, Chile/Switzerland
Josh To, A Growing Culture, Canada

We would like to give special thanks to Imani Fairweather-Morrison (Oak Foundation) and Beatrice Gorez (Coalition for Fair Fishers Arrangements) for the inspiration to keep fishers at the centre of this work and for their wise steering and steadfast support. And special thanks to Leslie Hatfield (GRACE Communications Foundation) for bringing us closer to fisher movements and their stories.

Global Alliance Aquatic-Terrestrial Foods Nexus Working Group

Oak Foundation
GRACE Communications Foundation
Walton Family Foundation
Erol Foundation
Rockefeller Foundation

We also want to thank the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation for supporting the evolution of Beacons of Hope.

Global Alliance Secretariat

We appreciate the support of Dharini Parthasarathy, Melanie Moran, Lauren Baker, Anna Lappé from the Global Alliance for the Future of Food for strengthening the production of the stories. We extend our thanks to the Global Alliance for the Future of Food secretariat for making this publication possible. We extend our thanks to Tracy Bordian for copy-editing, Cultivate Communications for creative direction and design, TINTA The Invisible Thread for interpretation, and Owlingua and Myriam Helou for translation. And appreciation to Katy Taylor for mentorship and anti-oppression coaching. The Global Alliance for the Future of Food is responsible for the content of this report and any errors or omissions.

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