Picture: Canva
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In 1994, I was in grade six and aged 11. This was an important year for me. Friendship groups shifted; some of us were more on the cusp of womanhood than others. As a whole, we were becoming increasingly aware of the world around us and how that world was changing. That year, we began to learn about the damage we were doing to our planet, being taught about greenhouse gases, CFCs in aerosols and fridges, the importance of recycling, and grim horrors like smog and the hole in the ozone layer. For the first time, we were being faced with the possibility of the planet’s extinction.
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In 1994, I was in grade six and aged 11. This was an important year for me. Friendship groups shifted; some of us were more on the cusp of womanhood than others. As a whole, we were becoming increasingly aware of the world around us and how that world was changing. That year, we began to learn about the damage we were doing to our planet, being taught about greenhouse gases, CFCs in aerosols and fridges, the importance of recycling, and grim horrors like smog and the hole in the ozone layer. For the first time, we were being faced with the possibility of the planet’s extinction.
At the same time, our school was preparing us for the upcoming elections, for the country’s great moment of freedom and democracy. We made T-shirts and wore them to assemblies, where our headmistress taught us all to sing (loudly) a song she had composed in the shower and then got the piano teacher to put to music. I don’t remember the lyrics now, but the word “peace” predominated.
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Of course, there were other aspects, too, in the run-up to the elections, such as how to hide under our desks should there be rioting in the streets, and how to march out in single file during a bomb scare and sit in neat lines on the school field. We performed these rehearsals lightly, without concern, because we all knew that such events were not worth worrying about.
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Of course, there were other aspects, too, in the run-up to the elections, such as how to hide under our desks should there be rioting in the streets, and how to march out in single file during a bomb scare and sit in neat lines on the school field. We performed these rehearsals lightly, without concern, because we all knew that such events were not worth worrying about. This thing that was coming – this beautiful, wonderful thing that we didn’t really understand – was too amazing for anyone to want to act against it. In fact, the energy at the time seemed so brilliant, so excitingly promising, that the big event – the election – seemed to be something that was happening at a distance, something too magical to be experienced by ordinary people in ordinary places. Driving home from school in my dad’s grey little VW Beetle, going past the Magistrate’s Court, I saw signs saying, “Vote here”, and I called out to my dad in amazement, “You mean, people are actually going to vote here?!” He laughed at me. “Why else would they put those signs there?” “I don’t know,” I replied, unable to articulate what I felt about this amazing thing, this thing that would be happening right here, close enough for me to touch.
A few days later, during a visit to the local library, I came upon a book about how to save our planet. I took it out and read about the dangers of cow farts, the necessity of recycling, the problem of polluted water. I thought to myself, “People obviously don’t know about this, otherwise they wouldn’t be harming our planet. If people only knew!” So, I made notes and then typed them up on our family computer, creating a newsletter, using a different font for each of the facts. When I was done, I printed it out. It was only one page. I had planned to ask my dad to make photocopies for me, and then I was going to go around the neighbourhood putting them in people’s postboxes. But suddenly I became afraid. The undercurrent of violence we had been living with throughout the eighties and nineties – violence I didn’t understand, but which was always a threat – made me worry that if I did this, someone would get angry and would come to my house and hurt not only me but my whole family. I left the newsletter beside the computer, and eventually it got thrown away.
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The drought which we have been experiencing to various degrees across southern Africa began somewhere around 2015. It wasn’t long before tourists and inhabitants of the Western Cape were being begged to save water in any way they could. With a heart-warming show of conscientiousness, citizens were able to cut back water usage and prevent the arrival of Day Zero – a day when the taps would have run dry.
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The drought which we have been experiencing to various degrees across southern Africa began somewhere around 2015. It wasn’t long before tourists and inhabitants of the Western Cape were being begged to save water in any way they could. With a heart-warming show of conscientiousness, citizens were able to cut back water usage and prevent the arrival of Day Zero – a day when the taps would have run dry. My most recent novel, Crooked seeds, imagines a South Africa where Day Zero was not prevented, and each morning the citizens have to queue at water trucks, being given their allocated daily allowance. I began writing the novel in 2017, not ever wanting to imagine that seven years later, as my book eventually came out, we would be faced with headlines like: “South Africans warned to brace for massive six-month shutdown of critical water supply”,1 “South Africa’s water crisis – experts warn about ‘futile fixes’”,2 “South Africa’s water availability on the edge”3 and “Dying crops, food and water shortages – drought affects millions in southern Africa”.4
While many of these headlines speak to the failure of government to reach that idyll we hoped for in 1994, much of the problem is also down to the effects of climate change across the globe. GroundUp5 reports that since the drought began, approximately 33 000 people have lost their jobs, while farmers are becoming depressed, many of them turning to suicide. It is no secret that crime has increased. People are desperate. In Citrusdal and Clanwilliam, seasonal workers will regularly come to blows over work – harvests are declining, and as a representative of AfriForum has said, “The pie is only so big; how many get to eat? And imagine, now the pie is getting smaller and smaller.”6
Parys, in the Free State, once a minor tourist destination, has been notorious since 2013 for its black, muddy water as a result of sewerage malfunction and mismanagement, not to mention companies like Sasol which (allegedly) fill the Vaal with effluent.7 In Heilbron, an hour or so south-east of Parys, raw sewage spills back up into toilet bowls.8
But let’s be realistic. Not all South Africans are fortunate enough to have toilets into which raw sewage can flow back. In fact, millions of South Africans today live without proper access to basic sanitation, three million without access to clean drinking water.9 How many people get up every day and have to share toilets with 50 or more families? How many children die each year from falling down pit latrines? How many women and children have to walk kilometres to collect water and are raped, kidnapped or robbed along the way?
I recently read Ezekiel Mphahlele’s Down Second Avenue, a classic autobiography from the apartheid era. It was published in 1959 while Mphahlele was in exile in Nigeria. At the start of the fourth chapter, he writes:
The water trickled down into tin containers. It seemed an age waiting for a four-gallon tin to fill up. More and more people came to wait, the queue got longer, stretching down in snaky fashion. A few of us small boys were also in the queue.
It trickled into a bucket, or a dish, and the queue grew longer, not able to hear itself any more. You could hear a click of the tongue from the many souls waiting there; a click of helpless disgust and impatience. A pilgrimage at a communal water tap. It was like this in Second Avenue, you knew it must be like that at every other communal tap in Marabastad.
The year about which he was writing was 1932. It is almost 100 years since then, and how many millions of South Africans still stand at communal taps for hours a day, waiting to collect their little bit of water? In 2020, that number was 7,5 million.10
Yet, there is some hope. Projects such as Asivikelane11 empower citizens by engaging them in the collection of data in their informal settlements. They record whether they have access to running water and toilets, and whether rubbish has been removed. This data is then collated by IBP South Africa12 and publicised, as well as being sent to local municipalities, letting them know where they are failing. This kind of empowerment, where citizens have an opportunity to voice their problems and to address those in power, is important and makes a very real difference in their lives. On their home page, Asivikelane records that since 2020, they have helped in getting 1 050 communal taps and 1 540 toilets installed, as well as helping with 37 500 cases of repairs and maintenance (to taps and toilets). In this way, the lives of more than six million people have been positively impacted. This is vital work, and it is clear that our country needs more programmes like this, along with the necessary funding and support.
But it isn’t enough to rely on citizens and NPOs. Municipalities and government must ensure that they have working infrastructure and an understanding of what that entails in both the long and short term. Promises are no good. What does it matter if there is a tap in every house by 2030, if there is no water to flow through that tap?
I don’t have the answers or pretend that any of this is easy. Nor will I accept that the ANC inherited an immaculate country in 1994. There was a lot to address – many vast inequalities and systems which were already corrupt and unjust. But it is now 30 years later and there is no denying the fact that we should be much further along, not teetering here on the edge of a dystopian nightmare, one which I found terrifyingly easy to imagine in Crooked seeds and which is already too real for too many.
1 The Citizen, 8 April 2024: South Africans warned to brace for 6-month water shutdown (citizen.co.za)
2 BusinessTech, 14 April 2024: South Africa’s water crisis – experts warn about “futile fixes” (BusinessTech)
3 Engineering News, 8 April 2024: South Africa’s water availability on the edge (engineeringnews.co.za)
4 Daily Maverick, 23 April 2024: Dying crops, food, water shortages – drought hit millions in southern Africa (dailymaverick.co.za)
5 Promised Land: Exploring South Africa’s land conflict by Karl Kemp, Penguin, 2020, page 80
6 Ibid, 92
7 Ibid, 154
8 Ibid, 154
9 ASSAf-Statement-on-water-security-in-South-Africa.pdf
10 A strategy to enhance management of free basic water via communal taps in South Africa – ScienceDirect
11 Asivikelane | Giving a voice to informal settlement residents in South Africa
12 South Africa – International budget partnership
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Can the private sector help solve South Africa’s water crisis?