Africa, land of floods and droughts. That was Knysna recently with floods sweeping through the dry Garden Route.
Made me remember the devastating three-year drought in KwaZulu-Natal in the 1980s when I was a young reporter in Durban, broken by massive floods when Cyclone Domoina hit. Crops were failing, livestock dying and many farmers faced bankruptcy. Cholera broke out in northern Zululand. This was during apartheid when hardly any black people in rural areas had piped water and relied on rivers – increasingly polluted as they began drying up. The health authorities were overwhelmed and called in the army’s help who set up hospital tents. Instead of beds they had hammocks with holes cut in them with buckets underneath to catch the diarrhoea. Most cholera deaths are caused by severe dehydration so the main treatment was to ensure the liquid patients expelled did not exceed the liquid they took in through drips. Horrible time. Two vivid memories: first, my photographer lying in the dry bed of the Mfolozi River, photographing cattle so thin you could hang hats on their hipbones. Hoof prints in the mud and high above, the pillars of the N2 bridge. Two years later: standing at the flooded Mfolozi looking at the remains of that huge N2 bridge, swept away as if it were plastic. Cyclone Domoina. It hit Mozambique, Swaziland and northern KZN. I was then working for the former Natal Parks Board, living in Maritzburg where it rained for four days. Salad bowls, leather belts and shoes turned green with mould. St Lucia had 542mm in one day and Richard’s Bay 950mm. Hundreds of thousands were cut off by floodwaters. The force of the flooded river not only took out the massive N2 bridge, but it avulsed – changed its course – creating a new, straighter channel. The following week I set off in the office bakkie to cover the damage to Natal Parks Board reserves. Many communications were gone (no cell phones then) and I didn’t know what I would find. First stop was Itala Game Reserve, but I found the access bridge washed away. I got into iMfolozi Game Reserve and was shocked to see the river had scoured out all the beautiful riverine forest. Trunks of huge ficus trees had snapped like matchsticks. The trails’ bush camp had gone, just one porcelain lavatory sticking out of the sand. At St Lucia, Parks Board staff were ferrying people across the river. I remember seeing a bed and a fridge floating downstream. It was the first time I had witnessed the force of water, and I’ll never forget it. On a lighter note: I stayed a night in a hotel where I got chatting to an engineer. We’d had a couple of drinks together when he remarked: “You know, you are a very independent young lady.” He was quite a bit older and I thought perhaps it was because women of his generation would not easily set off into a flooded region alone, but that wasn’t it. He told me why. “Because each time you’re served a G&T, you pour the tonic in yourself.”
