Warm welcome: travelling to the edge of the Anthropocene

Western Cape's largest dam, the Theewaterskloof Dam, taken on a visit to Cape Town in November 2024. Photo by Daniel Kemp.

Mardi Gras Day. February 2018. New Orleans.

On a sunny winter’s morning, I’m standing on Basin Street, waiting for the King of the Zulus to roll past. Did anyone standing in this massive crowd learn about the Battle of Blood River at school, I wonder? The battle in which a handful of brave Afrikaners withstood the might of the Zulu army, after pledging their everlasting allegiance to God if he were to grant them victory? This version of events, as it was taught to me at a young age, is part of the distorted mythos underlying the Afrikaner identity.     

Another way of describing these events would be as follows: the battle resulted in the ruthless slaughter of the Indigenous population by white settlers looking to encroach upon the ancestral lands of the locals. My thoughts, however, get lost in the cacophony of sounds and the throng of people that surround me on all sides.

*

February 2023. Regina.

Every morning, I phone my parents back in South Africa. Because of the time difference, it is late afternoon there when we have our conversations. We usually speak about the weather.

Cape Town receives winter rainfall, but in the last decade or so, the rains have become inconsistent. When summer comes, the heat has started to get unbearable. Rolling electricity blackouts have made matters worse. They first started in 2007, but became an almost-daily occurrence by 2023 and into 2024. This means my parents often cannot use their air conditioner during the warmest parts of the day.

*

January 2018. Cape Town.

I am about to embark on the month-long trip to the United States that I've been planning for close to three years. When I was a teenager, books such as Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, as well as the music of Bob Dylan and Hank Williams, showed me how it might be possible to break free from my conservative Afrikaans roots. These artists embodied an individualism I greatly admired. It fuelled my own rebellion against what I perceived to be the stifling nature of my Calvinist surroundings.

Now, in my mid-30s, having never really challenged the status quo in the ways I had imagined as a teenager, I will set out on a pilgrimage of sorts. My own American adventure.

New York City. New Orleans. Nashville. San Francisco. I will criss-cross the continental United States in search of the ethos of the individual espoused by the authors and musicians I discovered all those years ago growing up in the northern suburbs of Cape Town.

But the preparations for my travels are overshadowed by the very precarious position in which my home city, Cape Town, finds itself. Since December, most Capetonians’ conversations have been dominated by the topic of water. Specifically, the lack of it. The city is in the midst of a drought that has lasted three years and has nearly depleted the water supply. The reservoirs that Cape Town relies on for commercial and residential water use sit at a combined level of just above 25 per cent capacity. We are informed by visibly distraught city councillors that if the level drops to below 13.5 per cent, all the taps in the city will be turned off. This hypothetical event comes to be called “Day Zero.” A troubling scenario is laid out in which residents might have to queue at designated distribution sites around the Cape Peninsula to receive their daily ration of water. 

*

My parents are in their mid-70s and worry that they won’t be able to carry buckets filled with litres of water from the distribution site to their car, or from their car to the house. I assure them that I will go and stand in the queue for them. Would 25 litres be enough between my parents and myself? Would I have to go and queue every day after work? How long will the lines be? My anxiety starts to mount.

*

Just before I leave for America, my mother undergoes an emergency colon operation. Suddenly, any concerns around water are pushed to the side, as is the excitement that had been building for the trip. The operation is a success, fortunately, and as I get on the plane, I do so knowing that my mother is out of danger. 

*

February 2018. New Orleans.

With my concerns around my mother’s condition somewhat put at ease, a sense of euphoria starts building inside me as I head to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. My appreciation for New Orleans and its culture started a few years before, when I watched a television show called Treme. It dealt with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, presenting a hyper-realistic portrait of both the good and bad elements of this unique American city. I was fascinated by the vibrant traditions of New Orleans and promised myself I would experience them for myself one day.

*

Two days after Mardi Gras, I spend a few hours in the Lower Ninth Ward with a Black woman named Grace. Grace owns the AirBnB where I stayed for my first night in the city. When she learned I was a writer, she invited me to her house to tell me about her life, in the hope that I might help her write her memoir. Grace’s story is one of wrongful arrest at the hands of corrupt Louisiana police officers, spending years in jail as an innocent woman, eventually being released, then hawking goods on the side of the road to obtain money for food and shelter.

After years of struggle, she finally built up enough capital to open a fully-fledged second-hand goods store, which then morphed into a shelter for women who have recently been released from prison to help them transition back into society. Sitting next to Grace in her pickup truck, listening to her talk as she drives around the neighbourhood doing her errands, I am struck by the weight of her story and the hundreds of years of injustice it represents. Yet, as we move through this area on the periphery of New Orleans, I observe something else too: the large empty spaces between houses. Could these be the effects of Hurricane Katrina, I wondered, still visible after all these years?

*

When I return to Cape Town at the beginning of March, the water crisis is still ongoing. With my mother now back at home recuperating, my parents and I spend a few harrowing months anticipating the worst, and limiting our water use as much as possible. In May, the rain mercifully starts. Rainfall during the winter is steady and as we approach spring, the reservoirs are full enough that everyone in Cape Town can heave a collective sigh of relief. Though a crisis was narrowly averted, the trauma that was inflicted on the inhabitants of the city remains.

*

June 2021. Regina.

It has been a month since I arrived in Canada to pursue a master’s degree at the University of Regina. I have found part-time employment working in the garden centre of a big box store in the north end of Regina. Western Canada is in the grip of a heat wave. Temperatures in the city soar above 30 C for a couple of days in a row. I try my best to care for the plants in the sweltering heat, but many of them die, despite my best efforts.

On June 29th, the village of Lytton in British Columbia records the highest temperature ever measured in Canada: 49.6 C. The next day, most of the settlement burns to the ground. Two people are killed. While the extreme heat likely exacerbated the damage the fire caused, many residents have been pushing to investigate whether Canadian Pacific Railway and Canadian National Railway actions caused the fire to start. After four years of various attempts to have CP and CN investigated, a class-action lawsuit was greenlit in 2025, with a trial scheduled to start in 2027.

Overall, more than 600 people die in British Columbia because of the heat wave. Most of them are elderly. In Regina, the days are thick with  wildfire smoke from the west being blown across the Prairies and lingering in the Saskatchewan sky.

*

My fears that taps would run dry during the height of the water crisis exposed my privilege within South African society. The truth is that a large portion of Cape Town’s residents don’t have running water or household plumbing, that fetching water is already a daily reality for them, and that taps running dry in the suburbs would have little effect on their day-to-day lives.

To understand this state of affairs, it is necessary to revisit the Apartheid era. One of the many crimes the National Party government committed during its reign was the forced removal of those classified as “non-white” South Africans from established and vibrant communities to newly-created townships located at the periphery of the country’s cities and towns. This had devastating social and economic implications. People were removed from support structures like schools and churches. Workers had to travel further to job centres, spending a disproportionate amount of their income on travel costs. As the rate of urbanization increased and more “non-white” job seekers arrived in cities in search of a better future, informal areas within and around townships started to develop. In addition to historical under-investment in these so-called “non-white” areas during Apartheid, the post-Apartheid government has been unable to meet demand for housing and basic services in these areas. The fact that a majority of the country’s citizens live in such informal settlements, in absolutely squalid conditions, is the cause of many of South Africa’s ills. Apartheid policies didn’t just create the preconditions for South Africa to become one of the most unequal societies in the world; they also entrenched a spatial pattern of segregation between rich and poor that has persisted for decades after the country transitioned to a democracy.

This wealth and spatial inequality meant that Cape Town’s water crisis was experienced very differently depending on which side of the divide you found yourself. For most middle-class (and usually white) Capetonians, it was a nightmare scenario in which scenes of unimaginable disarray were moments away. But for the poor, Day Zero would be just another Tuesday.

*

June 2023. Regina.

I wake up to a pungent smell I can’t quite place, almost like burning paraffin. The house is filled with it. When I draw back the curtain and look through the solitary window in my room, I see that a thick smoke has enveloped the house. Smoke from wildfires in Alberta has traversed the Prairies and made its way to southern Saskatchewan. I check Environment Canada’s website and see the air quality is 10+, the worst it can possibly be. I stay indoors the entire day, not daring to go outside and expose my lungs to the smoke.

A few weeks later, intense wildfires are burning across Canada. Smoke from Canadian wildfires covers New York in a heavy blanket of smoke. The city takes on a reddish hue. I watch videos of it online and it’s as if I’m looking at scenes from the latest Blade Runner film. But I am not living in a fictional world. The harm that capitalist greed has inflicted, and continues to inflict, on the earth’s systems, climate, biodiversity, and environment is real. The glimpses I’ve had of it in different parts of the world terrify me. 

January 2026. Regina.

The effects of the Anthropocene are bound to cause major disruptions to our current way of life, to put it mildly. It has now been almost five years since I arrived on the Canadian Prairies to start a new life here. In another five years from now, will I still be able to get groceries from the store down the road from me? And if society does start to collapse, how will my fate be any better or worse than that of someone in Khayelitsha or the Lower Ninth Ward? I wonder these things while a fierce winter wind rattles the house where I live on Atkinson Street.

*This essay was the best hometown entry of our 14th annual Writing in the Margins contest. We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Regina Public Interest Research Group (RPIRG) for this contest.