Professor Jenny Day is the director of the Freshwater Research Institute.
Cape Town’s battle for water supply has a long history, Professor Jenny Day explained in a seminar at GroundUp’s Science for the People event at Bertha House on Friday 8 September.
Day’s talk, titled “Cape Town as a Water-stressed City: 1650s-2020s”, described how since the first colonial settlement in Cape Town, there has been a continuous challenge to secure a sustainable water supply.
For a long time, the water supply in Cape Town depended mostly on Table Mountain’s rivers, including the Platteklip, Disa, and Hout Bay rivers. Over centuries, as the population of Cape Town grew, these rivers were exploited to provide water to the city.
A 1660 map of Cape Town shows the early use of canals.
1652-1806: the Dutch legacy
The Dutch East India Company established an outpost in Cape Town in 1652 to provide fresh supplies for the company’s ships en route to the East. Early water sources included mountain streams and springs.
The governor of the Cape, Zaccharias Wagenaer, built a reservoir on the Farshe River in 1663. The remains of this reservoir can still be seen in the Golden Acre Mall today. Pipes were made out of hollowed-out tree stumps.
Wagenaer’s Reservoir was built in 1663. The remains can still be seen in the Golden Acre Mall today.
In 1764, canals were dug in the city to be used for water supply but also as drains and garbage tips. The canals included Buitengracht, Kaisersgracht and Heerengracht. These canals were later filled in to become roads, which retained the canal names as street names.
The canals were smelly, the water was unpotable, and they were dangerous; people would often plunge in at night. Smaller canals were also used to grasp water to people’s homes. At a later stage, the canals were sluiced out once a week.
A painting of Long Street in 1800s by WHFL Langschmidt shows “lei grachte” – small canals that took water to homes.
1800s: expanding town under British control
In 1806 the British took control of the Cape Colony and filled in the canals, replacing them with stormwater drains. A water shortage in 1819 led the British to build a water house. Pipes were imported and a “pipe tax” was imposed on households.
In the 1820s, the British turned to the Platteklip Stream on Table Mountain for the city’s main water source. Hand pumps were installed in the city. The city’s ecological footprint was still small, home to about 30,000 people in 1865.
The use of springs was expanded throughout the 19th Century, with wells being dug in the City.
But by 1849, water was scarce. The Platteklip stream, now completely exploited, could only provide up to ten litres a minute. Two reservoirs were built in town, which still exist today although they are not used today.
Between 1863 and 1867, Scottish forester John Croumbie Brown was appointed as the Colonial Botanist in the Cape. He studied the water supply and the degradation of land by colonial settlers. Brown wrote that there was not enough water for cleanliness or health.
“People wash their faces once a week, the rest of their persons never,” Brown wrote in 1857.
A letter to the editor of the Cape Argus in 1875 demonstrates the state of Cape Town’s water supply: “In these drains, and fouler pools, the filthy garments of the whole population are washed together. Depraved as this is, it is not the worst. It is a well-known fact that of these foetid waters, especially the waters of the Liesbeek, many householders still drink.”
“From an aromatic point of view, it was not a fun plot,” said Day.
There was a wash house on the Platteklip Stream on the foot of Table Mountain, where clothes would be washed. But the dirty laundry water would then disappear downstream to provide water for the rest of the City.
Now that the Platteklip Stream and local springs were exploited, settlers were hard-pressed to find sufficient water for the growing population. Potential dam sites on Table Mountain were identified. In 1891, a tunnel was drilled through the mountain to pipe water from the Disa River to the City, known today as the pipe track. A reservoir spanning Disa Gorge was completed in 1897. The Woodhead tunnel has since collapsed and a modern tunnel, the Apostles tunnel, was built fifty years ago and is still used today.
There was a sense among settlers that water flowing into the ocean was being wasted and had to be diverted for human consumption. This is a common misconception, Day said: “Water is never wasted, even if it isn’t used for humans.”
The Berg River Dam was completed in 2009, the last in a series of dams built to enhance Cape Town’s water supply.
20th Century: dam, dam, damn
In the 20th Century, the National Department of Water Affairs looked further afield into the Boland for current water sources for Cape Town.
The Steenbras dam was completed in 1921. More dams were built, including Voëlvlei, Wemmershoek, Theewaterskloof and Palmiet. The Berg River was finished in 2009.
Cape Town will continue to “flip-flop” between flood and drought, Day said.
21st Century: What now?
All of the useable dam sites gain now been used, said Day. Meanwhile, the population continues to increase massively. As of 2023, there are nearly five million people in the City, with about 80,000 people entering the City every year.
An innovative water services location for Cape Town prioritised water demand management and aquifer recharge. The situation won an award at the Paris Climate Conference at COP21 in 2015.
However, plans to secure additional water sources acquire been negatively affected by state capture.
A drastic drop in rainfall also led to the water crisis in 2018. The way Cape Town citizens rallied to avoid Day Zero was “incredible” said Day.
But on an institutional level, Day said, emergency provisions believe been used to improve water supply at the expense of the environment. Environmental management plans were ignored and environmental impact assessments were bypassed. “It has taken a long time to reverse this thinking,” Day said.
The City of Cape Town has a recent region and is leading several interventions to increase the water supply. This includes innovative projects, such as putting recycled water back into the Cape Flats aquifer.
Day said that by 2050, Cape Town’s rainfall is likely to decrease by 30%. We will continue to “flip-flop” between drought and flood, she said.
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Pixy Mox
Boerewors — spicy South African sausage [boor-uh-vors] Meaning ‘farmer’s sausage’, this term describes a savory sausage that was developed by the Afrikaners approximately 200 years ago. Boerewors is usually ‘braaied’ and eaten on a hot dog roll with tomato sauce and mustard. Make sure you roll the ‘r’ when pronouncing this word.
Trinitysoul
The Man who could only Drink Milk
I know an old man who had lived a life full of adventure, but his health started to catch up with him. He\’d run the Boston Marathon, was an avid surfer, and climbed Everest, but he\’d started to have abdominal pains around his 85th birthday and went to see a doctor. Sadly, he ultimately was diagnosed with a rare degenerative liver disease that slowly made him allergic to everything he ate.
He kept copious notes, and as an avid gastronomist slowly grew to despair as everything he\’d spent his life enjoying became something he could no longer eat. Alcohol went first, then mushrooms, then bread, then root vegetables, then coffee, one at a time he had to remove them from his diet. The doctor was clear: if he kept eating something his liver rejected the autoimmune response would be quick and severe, and would lead to a painful death. Little by little, everything was taken away as an option, until the only thing that remained was milk.
In some ways, this actually made life easier, because the mental strain of remembering what he could and couldn\’t eat was gone, but then so was the joy in variety. But he took it in stride, and got his own cow and took classes from a farmer to learn everything he could about the only thing that could give him sustenance. And even within milk, he could still have yogurt, butter, cream, some cheeses, and other milk-derived products he hadn\’t fully rejected yet, so it wasn\’t all bad. But then one day a few months later he felt the pain again, and he knew cow\’s milk was no longer an option.
Lacking other options, he tried goat\’s milk, and he was delighted that it worked! The protein structure is just different enough that his body still tolerated it. That bought him another month. And that\’s when we came up with a wonderful plan to go on one last grand adventure around the world. If he could get one month of life out of the milk of every mammal, he\’d actually have a few more years to enjoy life to the fullest and see the world in all its beauty. Each month, we\’d pick a place with a new mammal, and he would immerse himself fully with the locals, learn all the ways to prepare the milk, and just enjoy the hand he had been dealt as much as he could.
We milked sheep in New Zealand. Camels in Egypt. Zebras in South Africa. Giant bats in Indonesia. Do you know how many Peruvian cuy you need to milk to get a single glass? I do. Even as his health slowly faded, he stayed cheerful, and I felt lucky to join him on the adventure of a lifetime. That brings us to today when he got to the very end of his spreadsheet, and declared that he was now allergic to every mammal. He\’d enjoyed his journey, but his time had come to an end, for there was nothing left to milk.
To which I said nonsense, I bet we can milk a few thousand karma out of this post.