Easter rains expose Johannesburg’s rapid sink into decay

Continuous rain settled over Johannesburg during the Easter weekend, a week after devastating floods in KwaZulu-Natal. The wet weather brought fresh turmoil to many of the residents living in impoverished neighbourhoods to the south of the city.

People in Kliptown, built in the oldest part of Soweto along the banks of a tributary of the Klip River, hurried to stack television sets, radios, clothes and documents on top of their beds.

“You see what is happening in KwaZulu-Natal?” asked Florence Mcunu, 60, referring to the floods that have claimed more than 440 lives and destroyed at least 4,000 homes in that province. “We saw it and became very scared. We live by the river. That is going to happen to us too.”

Having lived in the low-lying areas of Kliptown — what residents refer to as Sdiki (lower part) — for more than 50 years, Mcunu and her husband, Humphrey, 75, are veterans of more floods than they care to recall.

They are close enough to the river that, during heavy rains, the water comes from all directions. It runs downhill, rises from the river banks and seeps up through the earth.

On more than one occasion they have been rescued from their home by boat.

Winters on the highveld are usually bone dry. However, early forecasts suggest the script might be flipped this year with a wetter than usual winter on the cards. The La Niña weather pattern has already delivered a rain-soaked first third of 2022.

A cut-off low pressure system, the same one since named Subtropical Depression Issa that caused the KwaZulu-Natal flooding thought to be the world’s deadliest natural disaster on record for the year so far, is adding to the wet conditions.

Relentless cycle 

If the floods in KwaZulu-Natal, which were precipitated by six months’ worth of rain falling in two days, were brutally sudden, Johannesburg’s Easter rains slowly and steadily revealed vulnerabilities to natural disasters that have become too familiar for many.

In the wake of the KwaZulu-Natal floods, the Durban-based shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo condemned the long-standing living conditions in shack settlements as “dangerous as well as undignified”.

One of the Kliptonians gathering his belongings in the face of Johannesburg’s rains was the Mcunus’ neighbour, Tebogo Nkadu, 39. For the recycler, one of three living in a building almost entirely destroyed by regular flooding, it is nothing new. At least twice a year, said Nkadu, flooding in the Sdiki area is bad enough that he loses most of his belongings and is forced to “start everything again”.

On another Klip River tributary a little to the south of Kliptown, parts of Slovo Park, a shack settlement of more than 10,000 people, were made impassable by the rain.

For Michael Veldman, 63, a blind man who has lived in Slovo Park for nearly two decades, the rains present unique challenges.

Veldman has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Johannesburg’s geography. He is able to recall in unerring detail endless street corners, bus stops and the first names of shop assistants. But when it rains, he is unable to make it two streets away from his home.

With Slovo Park’s unpaved streets and sidewalks turned to marshes and rivers, the settlement’s geography changes subtly during the rain. After each downpour, Veldman must learn it anew.

The slow violence of Johannesburg’s Easter rains was nothing new to the people living in impoverished neighbourhoods. Early signs are that this years they will have to contend with it more regularly than before.

This article was first published by New Frame.