In Cape Town, water is the new precious commodity.


Thirty-five years ago, I sat in a Johannesburg theatre watching a documentary about the 'desertification' of southern Africa. Essentially, the film warned that the Sahara was expanding. Short of a major reversal in the planet's climate, nothing would alter the southward march of sand. So what does the world do? We generate global warming to accelerate the pace of desertification. And Trump tramps away from the Paris Climate Accord, taking with him the world's biggest energy consuming country.

'Sad' (as the Orange Loon might tweet.)

But this is what happens when 'theory' becomes practice: within an hour of arriving in my home town, I realized that I could no longer think of water as an interruption to drinking wine.

On April 29th, unless significant rain falls, it's reported that all citizens in the western Cape will be lining up at standpipes to get their ration (and you can be sure that when apartheid's unlamented founder, PM Hendrik Verwoerd, declared years ago that 'non-Europeans will always be hewers of wood and carriers of water - as the Bible says' he could not have imagined his fellow Europeans/Whites would be carrying buckets, too.)

This is not the bucket list my South African contemporaries had planned.

All citizens are instructed to consume no more than 87 liters (22 gallons) per day. What does that mean? Well...you can drink 2 liters, cook with 4 liters, curate your hygiene with 4 liters, take a 2 minute shower  (20 liters), use 23 liters for dishes and laundry, flush the loo three times (27 liters), thereby saving 7 liters - phew! These practices are less onerous than they sound - water simply becomes front and center in your thinking. And boy, the bottled stuff - in recyclable containers, naturally -  tastes wonderful! I've found myself adopting these new habits with ease - although showering with a bucket between my feet can feel like aping a naked Fred Astaire. But let's not go there.

I knew what I was headed for last week, when I left JFK (-12C) and then Heathrow (6C). Yet not even a water crisis would have deterred me from escaping to warmer weather. The Uber driver who drove me into Cape Town from the airport - a gentleman of color who claimed to be a qualified electrician but said 'I'm not black enough to get employment in my own country!'  - blamed, illogically, the water problem on 'a country that's finished.' Joseph is joining his uncle in New Zealand where they will start their own business.



Joseph has some Khoisan genes in him. Me too, despite the fact that my most recent ancestors are from Britain and not South Africa.

But aren't we all from Africa?

In fact, the Khoisan - who I hope to encounter in Namibia next month - populate a country that may have been the birthplace of modern homo sapiens. James Suzman in his wonderful book 'Affluence without abundance - the disappearing world of the bushmen' tells us 'what is certain is that about one hundred and fifty thousand years ago, there was a branching of the human family tree...those who remained became the ancestors of the modern Khoisan...those who went northwards became the ancestors of everyone else.'

How about that? You may think you're white and live in a White House but not so fast...it doesn't take a genius to figure out that your way-back relatives were probably hut-dwellers; they, too, came from what you describe as a 'shit hole country.'

What goes around certainly comes around.



©  Brian Clewly Johnson
     Cape Town 🇿🇦
     January 2018

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