Desmond D’Sa, the Durban activist who taught his neighbors to measure the air they breathed and then shut down a toxic landfill, died Thursday in a car crash. He was 70. His son and his sister-in-law died with him.
The crash happened about 6 a.m. on the R612 near Umzinto, on the KwaZulu-Natal south coast, where the family lived. Reports say the vehicle collided with a truck-tractor trailer and then struck a crash barrier. The circumstances are still being established, and police are investigating.
D’Sa was born in 1956 in Cato Manor, the 11th of 13 children. Under apartheid’s Group Areas Act the state moved his family, first to Chatsworth and then, in 1974, to Wentworth, in the industrial belt south of Durban. The refineries and chemical plants were already there. So were the people who had been sent to live beside them.
In 1994 a chemical spill near a Wentworth playground made young children sick. D’Sa, then working in the chemical industry, spoke up about hazards at work and was fired. In 1995 he founded the South Durban Community Environmental Alliance (SDCEA), which grew to bring together 21 community organizations in neighborhoods including Wentworth, Isipingo and Merebank.
The alliance trained residents to collect their own air samples and document pollution, so that complaints came with data. It took on companies including Engen and Sapref. Its best-known fight was over the Bulbul Drive hazardous-waste landfill in Chatsworth, which was closed. That campaign earned D’Sa the 2014 Goldman Environmental Prize, often called the Green Nobel.
The work was dangerous. His home was petrol-bombed in 2008. He also faced an attempted attack in 2001 and death threats, and he kept going. He received the Diakonia Human Rights Award in 2013, an honorary doctorate in health sciences from Durban University of Technology in 2015, and the KwaZulu-Natal premier’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2025.
The SDCEA called him “a fearless champion for environmental justice” whose “relentless passion and courage forced the powerful to look at the communities they impacted.” Deputy Environment Minister Narend Singh said: “His dedication to defending communities and environmental justice will live on.”
Bongani Mthembu, who worked with D’Sa at the alliance for more than 18 years, said: “Desmond was one of the leaders who received international recognition. He was a true and unbiased leader.” Percy Chetty, a Merebank resident who worked with him for a decade, said: “He really cared about the people’s lives and environment.”
Funeral arrangements have not been announced.
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