In the quiet community of Daleside in Randvaal, Gauteng, South Africa, where rolling farmlands meet the hum of nearby industries, residents have long battled an invisible assailant: a persistent, pungent "rotten egg" smell wafting from an unidentified industrial firm. The problem is affecting the whole Vaal Triangle, made up of three South African municipalities, namely Midvaal, Sedibeng and Emfuleni. This noxious odour, suspected to be hydrogen sulphide or sulphur emissions, chokes the air, triggering health concerns like respiratory issues and headaches among locals. Despite repeated complaints, the local municipality has struggled to pinpoint the source, and efforts to locate and prosecute the culprit have yielded no results, leaving the community in limbo amid bureaucratic delays and finger-pointing.
Inspired by this story, Mondli Kunene developed a visual narrative that reflects on how local knowledge, shared infrastructures and collective care sustain ecosystems in contexts where communities are disproportionately affected by environmental harm and digital exclusion. This is the story of the Vaal Renewal Network, a grassroots initiative where residents turned to community-centred digital tools to reclaim their environment and spark rebirth from despair. Daleside's community, burdened by the unrelenting industrial pollution and unreliable official responses, took it upon itself to build a solar-powered mesh network, using affordable routers and open-source software, with air quality sensors monitoring the pungent emissions in real time, alerting the community via group chats to spikes in odour levels.
Read Rebirth here.
Mondli “The Artivist” Kunene is an independent visual artist based in Daleside, South Africa. He creates contemporary art to raise awareness about social issues within the African diaspora and how those issues resonate to the rest of the world. He completed a B. Ed at the University of Johannesburg and taught for a decade until he left the education sector to create and register his company Mondliart® in 2013. In the intersection between arts, culture, creativity and technology, Mondli empowers emerging creatives through programmes that enable them to be self-sustainable and business savvy and to have the business acumen needed to thrive. “Mondli” in English means “the sustainer”. “With art and creativity, I have been sustaining myself and others too.”
If you are enthused by this narrative, there are resources useful for communities to get more engaged with the issue. If territorial mapping is a need you would like to address, Comapeo is a platform that communities could use to monitor their environment. In relation to sensor technologies, several communities around the world are devoting efforts to develop devices to gather local data for environmental alerts, healthcare and advocacy. Learn more about communities using sensors to alert them on environmental issues in this piece.
About the Call for Narratives
The Call for Narratives on community-centred connectivity initiatives and environmental justice brings together proposals from different regions and countries around the world, featuring a variety of community environmental concerns to address the ways in which CCCIs are facing climate change, caring for the environmental issues affecting their territories and developing strategies to act in their different contexts. Find all the selected proposals here.
This call was launched in the framework of the COP30. In that context, the LocNet initiative framed a series of activities to highlight the intersection of community-centred connectivity and socio-environmental justice – recognising that communities are often at the frontline of both the territorial and environmental impacts of technology, as well as the consequences of climate change. Learn more about this initiative here.
The LocNet initiative is a collective effort led by APC and Rhizomatica in partnership with grassroots communities and support organisations in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean. This call is part of LocNet’s “meaningful community-centred connectivity” project implemented with financial support from the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida) and UK International Development from the UK Government through its Digital Access Programme. The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the supporters’ view, but that does not make them any less valuable.
All authors were consulted regarding the use of AI, following APC policy on AI-generated content guidelines, which prioritise transparency. The author of this work reported using AI for check spelling, grammar and review English as it is not his home language. He also turned into vectors original paintings.