To trace the course of the Olifants River is to trace a history of appalling environmental degradation, writes Eddie Koch
Look at a map of South Africa and you will see sprinkled over it names that reveal how rivers were once venerated by the early inhabitants, black and white, of this country. Amanzimtoti, the Sweetness of Water; Bloemfontein, the Fountain of Flowers; and Witwatersrand, the Ridge of White Waters, are just some of the prominent ones.
Yet this respect for rivers has been ignored in the way natural water in South Africa has been managed over the last three decades — a time in which a small group of powerful landowners and industrialists have been able to gouge out a huge gap between these beautiful names on the map and the barren reality on the ground they describe.
Take the Olifants. There can be few rivers in the world that have been manipulated, twisted, polluted, dammed and denuded like this one has. It begins near the town of Trichard in Mpumalanga province, surrounded by coal dumps that seep sulphur and other industrial toxins into its cradle.
>From there the river flows northwards, through other collieries, to another misnamed place: the Witbank (White Banks) Dam.
A massive coal-fired power station called Duvha was built on the edge of this dam so it could draw water for cooling from it. By the time the Olifants River gets here, though, it is so polluted with sulphates and salts that its water creates a thick scale on Duvha’s cooling towers and threatens to corrode them. The power station now draws millions of litres a week from the Vaal for cooling.
>From Witbank, the Olifants pushes further north, through more coalfields scattered with ochre-coloured effluent dams that leach into the rivers’ supplies, until it reaches the Loskop Dam which Simon Forster, special adviser to Water Minister Kader Asmal, describes as “fast becoming the only acid dam in the country”.
Downstream of the dam, between Loskop and Marble Hall, lies some of the richest farming land in the country where landowners have used their riparian water rights to construct an amazing network of canals and mechanised systems that irrigate vast fields of wheat, maize and orange trees that supply Gauteng’s industrialised areas with food.
These are some of the most efficient farms in the country, but they use so much water from the river that, says Forster, “there is literally not a cupful left” to supply settlements of rural people who were removed from the valley and shunted into the KwaNdebele and Lebowa homelands. A few kilometres away from these well-watered estates lie parched villages that have water trucked in to them every day.
The Olifants then trickles into a section of the former Lebowa homeland, where it veers east towards the sea and picks up fresh water from a new catchment area. But these lands have been overgrazed and eroded lands (they were never supplied with proper irrigation), so that by the time it flows into the Arabi Dam, east of Lebowakgomo, it has picked up tons of silt and soil.
>From there the river flows through more degraded villages, and a couple of asbestos mines that leave their toxic fibres in its waters, until it is joined by the Steelpoort and Blyde Rivers near the Northern Transvaal Drakensberg escarpment. These rivers should refresh the Olifants with mountain water, but the Steelpoort has been heavily polluted by mines along its course and the Blyde River has been sucked dry by huge pine and bluegum forests.
Trees in these plantations can use more than 100 litres a day each and their roots reach into groundwater some 20m below the surface. So the Blyderivierspoort Dam, just under the escarpment, lies well below its proper level and its waters are laden with silt and pollution gathered upstream. The Olifants then winds across the Lowveld to Phalaborwa, where industries discharge more effluent into it.
The river’s load of silt, sulphates and other pollutants have devastated aquatic life in the Kruger National Park. By the time the river crosses into Mozambique it is, according to Forster, no more than “a little trickle of effluent”.