The Blue Blanket is an illustrated poem that resurfaces an often overlooked narrative around ocean justice in South Africa. In the rush for oil and gas in our oceans, arguments mainly focus on the scientific concerns around seismic testing. In this short piece, the team explores the intangible and spiritual impact of Oil and Gas exploration into our oceans. Considering that the ocean is sacred to so many cultures in South Africa, this film asks, is mining our sacred ocean for more fossil fuels in this time of climate catastrophe worth it? This short film stood along with affidavits of Small Scale Fishers and Customary rights holders as evidence in recent court cases against big business and government. So far, interdicts in favour of communities have been granted by two judges, keeping the seismic surveys at bay. This recognition of the oceans as sacred in the law, with specific reference to and sensitivity towards the significance of the Ocean as a place where the ancestors dwell, marks an unprecedented shift in South African law. Both judges in two separate cases, recognised the customary rights and spiritual dimensions of many citizen’s relationships to the ocean.

Beyond the legal contributions this film has made, being the first animated film to be included as evidence in a court of law in service of Indigenous intangible heritage, it was confirmed by Judge Lowe in Makhanda high court, that to his knowledge this was a new legal president. The film contributes significantly to turning the tides on Ocean literacy and what counts and knowledge in how Ocean Education looks in South Africa. In the current curriculum, ocean education is focused almost entirely on marine sciences, and almost no curricula or pedagogy contribute to ocean heritages, Indigenous ocean livelihoods and the entanglement, and complex relationality and political ecology of livelihoods, heritage and spirituality in which South Africans understand and make meaning with the ocean. Furthermore, due to the violent and haunted history of South Africa, with the racist policies like the Group Areas Act and the Bantu Education Act, as well as the Anti Witchcraft act, black and brown bodies, and their embodied and contextually situated knowledges of the ocean have been excluded, and thus are absented from ocean education. In the film, one of the biggest re-framings of narratives of the ocean comes form an Indigenous linguistic insight. In Nguni languages, the ocean, ‘uLwandle’ spoken in Xhosa for example, falls within the same noun class as ubuntu, and thus imbedded in the name ‘ulwandle’ is concepts of reciprocity, symbiosis, and cultural relationality. Therefore a film speaking about the ocean would not speak of it as a resource or an object, but rather as a relational extension of ourselves, a “we” – and so the film unpacks these aspects of the ocean and the ways it has been commodified by our Blue Economy policies, and our education systems, and asks questions of how this could shift.

The film has over 11k views on youtube, with 26 rich reviews from the public. It has also been shown at the UNFCCC at COP 27, the UN FAO headquarters in Rome and the UN Headquarters in New York. These images are stills from the film which are now sold as NFTs and prints to raise funding for further solidarity work around Ocean Justice.