 Much of South African history revolves around land dispossession and the impacts of mining. The different stories told about each of these elements, but seldom are they combined or situated within a wider historical, political and economic context, which anchors the present in the past. In our data story entitled, Double Dispossession, Land and Mining in South Africa's Form Homeland, we set out to try and visually represent the accelerating processes of land dispossession and the parallel growth of the mining economy. We seek to show how the colonial conquest led to the creation of reserves, which in turn laid the groundwork for the apartheid system and the creation of so-called independent homelands. For much of the 19th and 20th centuries, mining in South Africa was dominated first by diamonds and then by gold. The city of Johannesburg and the wider South African economy developed on the back of gold mining and migrant labour. The apartheid system enforced racial segregation and ethnic difference through a system of forced removals. The homelands became heavily overcrowded, environmentally degraded and deeply impoverished. Following the transition to democracy in 1994, the homeland system was disbanded and these areas were politically reintegrated within South Africa's nine provinces. But of course the homelands did not go away. They remained economically depressed, the poorest areas in the country with the least services and very high levels of unemployment. Then along came mining for the second time with the exploitation of platinum group minerals, coal and iron ore, now literally in rural people's backyards. And it is here that the second dispossession started to take place. Mining ignited many layered conflicts within communities as economic elites and traditional leaders sought to capture the benefits. It undermined already precarious livelihoods and created environmental hazards. We have tried to illustrate this through an illustrated chronology, interactive charts and maps together with three contemporary case studies. So we decided to frame our story as a series of episodes which form a chronology but which the reader can navigate in any order. The narrative was constructed drawing on extensive historical and photographic research while spatial data from different sources was used to generate a series of interactive maps and charts to effectively visualize the data and introduce other layers of meaning. Many of the challenges we faced stemmed from our decision to take on a big and deeply contested story. In this of course we run the risk of oversimplifying a wickedly complex and interconnected set of issues. Data stories as a medium also run the risk of reducing knowledge to information. The leading Southern social theorist Achille and Bembe recently observed that what frightens me is the act of confusion between knowledge and data, the reduction of knowledge to information. It's the idea that the world is a matter of numbers and the task of knowledge is to handle quantities. Bembe goes on to caution that if we are to decolonize, this must start from the assumption that knowledge cannot be reduced to datafication and computational information processing. Rather, Bembe argues that there is a massive need to recover the ability to think. Our objective in visualizing a historically rooted analysis of the political economy of land and mining in rural South Africa, which is reinforced by the explanatory power of spatial data and case studies, seeks to stimulate critical thinking about the inter-relationship between people, land and mining. This asks, among other things, how to ensure more equitable and sustainable approaches to mining, how this can minimize social environmental damage and climate change impacts, how mining affected communities can be assured of meaningful voice, the right to say no, and in cases where mining goes ahead, how to ensure informed consent and the insurance of meaningful compensation, where people's lives and livelihoods are affected.