Desmond D'Sa

Desmond D'Sa was born on 13 June 1956, the 11th of 13 children of Constance D'Sa and Mathew Hardy. He grew up in Cato Manor on the outskirts of Durban, which he remembered as clean, green and self-sufficient, with families growing fruit and vegetables in their yards. His parents, he said, were always about service: anyone who knocked on the door was given what they needed.

As a teenager he and his family were forcibly removed under the apartheid Group Areas Act. He recalled people being sorted by hair and skin colour, with relatives sent to different townships: two sisters to Chatsworth and seven to Wentworth. Sources give different years for the removal (1966, 1968 and 1971 all appear), but he consistently described himself as about 13 to 15 at the time. He lived with a sister in Montford, Chatsworth, and in 1974 moved to Hime Street in Wentworth, which he called a concrete jungle with no trees or green spaces, surrounded by refineries and chemical plants.

D'Sa attended Bechet Secondary School in Sydenham, Durban, but dropped out at about 13 after his family's forced removal. He had no university education; his expertise in chemicals, air quality and environmental law was self-taught, beginning with the safety data sheets he read while working at Sasol's fibre plant. In recognition of that work, the Durban University of Technology conferred an honorary doctorate in health sciences on him on 2 September 2015, after which he was widely known as Dr Desmond D'Sa.

After starting work at about 18 at a textile company in New Germany for R12 a week, D'Sa worked for an asbestos company and other employers before joining Sasol's acrylic fibre plant in Durban in 1993. He became alarmed at the illnesses among his colleagues and among neighbours in Wentworth, where he said ten out of twelve families in his housing project had a member with asthma. In 1994 a chemical spill near a Hime Street playground made about ten children seriously ill; he founded the Wentworth Development Forum to fight the company responsible, which closed in 1995. Sasol dismissed him in 1998 after he spoke out.

In the mid 1990s he co-founded the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), bringing together community organisations from Wentworth, Merebank, the Bluff, Isipingo and Umlazi across apartheid's racial lines. He served as its coordinator for decades. The alliance trained residents in bucket-brigade air sampling, ran mass meetings, conducted a 1998 environmental and health assessment, and helped researchers document high rates of childhood asthma near the refineries, evidence that fed into parliamentary hearings and the 2004 national air quality law.

The SDCEA's best-known victory was the closure of the Bulbul Drive hazardous waste landfill in Chatsworth. Wasteman withdrew its expansion application in August 2010 and the site closed in November 2011. The alliance went on to fight the expansion of the Port of Durban, the Shongweni landfill, a proposed nuclear deal and pollution from the Engen and Sapref refineries. By 2025 it had 14 staff, 22 alliance partners and an office in Richards Bay, and D'Sa sat on monitoring committees with Engen, Bayer, Sappi, UPL and Sapref. He also helped build Right2Know, KZN Subsistence Fisherfolk, the Poor Flatdwellers Movement, the KZN Environmental Alliance and the Coalition of the Poor.

D'Sa lived for most of his adult life in Wentworth, latterly in his mother's house in Hime Street, an area he acknowledged was notorious for crime and shootings but where he said the community protected him. He had four children and ten grandchildren. Because of repeated threats against him he lived apart from his family for long periods, which he described as one of the sacrifices his family accepted for his work. His wife and daughter were reported to have been taken to hospital after the petrol-bomb attack on his home. Beyond pollution, he worked with young people, schools, the elderly and people with disabilities, and chaired the Wentworth Development Forum.

D'Sa saw environmental justice and social justice as inseparable. He argued that the poor, mostly black and coloured communities moved to south Durban under apartheid as a cheap labour pool were made to carry the health costs of industry, and that climate change hit the poor hardest. He championed subsistence fisherfolk, opposed displacement for the port expansion, and campaigned against nuclear power in favour of renewable energy. He admired Nelson Mandela for listening to communities and putting people first, and criticised later governments for not following that example. He believed lasting change came from people standing together, and from hard evidence rather than protest alone.

D'Sa is remembered as the watchdog of the South Durban Basin, a former factory worker without formal schooling who turned community complaints into evidence and forced some of Africa's largest polluters to the table. The closure of Bulbul Drive and other hazardous landfills, the delay of the Durban port expansion, and the community monitoring methods his alliance pioneered are widely cited as models of grassroots environmental organising. He built the SDCEA from a one-man volunteer effort into a staffed organisation, and in his final years focused on succession so that, as he put it, the organisation would continue to fight injustice when he was gone.

2013: Diakonia Human Rights Award. 2014: Goldman Environmental Prize for Africa (175,000 dollars), presented in San Francisco in April 2014. 2015: Honorary Doctorate in Health Sciences, Durban University of Technology (conferred 2 September 2015). 2026: Lifetime Achievement Award, KwaZulu-Natal Premier's Excellence Awards, presented by Premier Thami Ntuli at the Durban ICC in July 2026. D'Sa said he was shocked, because government had not recognised him in all his years of activism.

D'Sa was a constant presence in South African media, commenting on SABC News, eNCA and in the Daily Maverick, IOL and local newspapers about refinery explosions, chemical fires, beach closures, sewage and water supply. Internationally, he appeared at the 2014 Goldman Prize ceremony in San Francisco, on Democracy Now! alongside Vandana Shiva and Winona LaDuke during the 2014 UN climate summit, at the COP17 climate talks in Durban in 2011 and at COP27 in 2022, and in a Climate Reality Project talk on climate change and health. He was profiled in Daily Maverick's The Actionists series in 2023 and in a long IOL interview in December 2025.

D'Sa faced repeated intimidation. He said a local company paid men to shoot and kill him in 2001, but the would-be attackers were intercepted by residents. His home was later petrol bombed at night while he was at a government meeting in Pretoria, destroying everything he owned; he dated the attack to 2008 in a 2025 interview, while 2014 coverage of his Goldman Prize put it in 2011 and said his wife and daughter were hospitalised. He insisted that people's health had to come before profit.

Desmond D'Sa died on 29 October 2026, aged 70. IOL reported that morning that he had died in an accident while travelling with two members of his family. The location and circumstances of the accident, and the condition of the relatives travelling with him, had not been made public at the time this profile was written. Funeral arrangements had not been announced.