The Fossil Fuel hunting ship leased by Shell to do their seismic survey off the East Coast shore in South Africa has the ironic name of Amazon Warrior. Shell took a beating on the 28th December 2020 when the Makanda High Court in the Eastern Cape ruled in favour of local communities seeking an interdict against Shell to stop the survey.
Perhaps calling the ship the Amazon Warrior is not so ironic since big corporations have been appropriating symbols and names of the natural environment and the indigenous world for a long time. If Shell thinks associating natural gas extraction from the seabed with the largest river in the world, whose rain forests are regularly being destroyed in the name of “development,” thereby helping to accelerate climate change, it’s probably not so surprising.
Just as Jeff Bezos’ choice of Amazon as the name for his new company in 1994 was simply based on the idea that if he was going to create the biggest corporation in the world, he could choose the name of the largest river in the world. As Jorge Carrión argued in 2017, "symbolic appropriation is core to Amazon’s business". He noted that “As far as Amazon is concerned there is no difference between a cultural institution and an establishment that sells food and other goods.”
Indeed, one need look no further than Amazon Canada’s ill-fated and in incredibly poor taste attempt to sell doormats, bed sheets, sweatpants, rugs, bedspreads, bedcovers, picnic beach sheets, floor mats, sweat shorts and skateboards adorned with images of Hindu deities Ganesha, Shiva and Hanuman. The most jaw-dropping item, though, was a pair of panties that read “Women's Ganesh Ganesa Ganapati 4 White Hipsters" with an image of the Elephant god over a woman’s buttocks.
It’s therefore not surprising that the indigenous peoples of the Amazon region have insisted in no uncertain terms that they will decide how indigenous knowledge is deployed rather than being subjected to colonization and invasion where knowledge is appropriated by corporations for their own profits.
Indeed, it seems that “…the nations of the Amazon want the name back.” In 2012, the governments of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), all of whom are countries that contain parts of the Amazon rain forest, objected to Amazon’s application to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to use the domain name .amazon. Why? Not because they wanted to control use of the domain, but rather because they had “… concerns about its usage by a private company, given its cultural and natural heritage for the region.”
We, too, have concerns about Amazon and its endless ability to appropriate. It is placing 70 000 square metres of its concrete on a sacred floodplain that is being graded as a national heritage site when it could just as easily set up its campus at any one of the other entirely suitable sites elsewher in Cape Town. As has been argued, “… Jeff Bezos has a history of lengthy, symbolic expropriation.”
It’s time to end that record of Amazon’s disregard for the consequences of its corporate behaviour.
We are in court on the 19th, 20th and 21st of January to interdict the development that is building Amazon’s African Headquarters on a floodplain both sacred to the Khoi and important for our climate change resilience.
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