The Kuils River Blog Series

by Nikiwe Solomon

This blog series draws on a PhD thesis that covers three years (2017–2020) of ethnographic fieldwork in the Kuils River catchment area, located in Cape Town, South Africa, and its associated landscapes and bodies of water. I explored how lives, politics, technology and environment are impacted by river management practices in Cape Town, how these produce different versions of the river, and how they shape the everyday world of the Kuils.

This blog series offers a case study of how a tangle of meanings and actors is impacting river management practices in Cape Town. The (often contradictory) decisions they make shape the well-being of people and more-than-human communities living in and with the river. I will show readers how dominant environmental management and protection practices, although often understood as singular, unified, and objective, are enacted differently according to context. In addition, interpretations of their purpose play out differently across municipal interventions and service delivery.

The Kuils offers an exemplary case study of how deeply rooted in social development agendas the management of water, in pipes and rivers, and the development of water infrastructure are. These are embedded in discourses of empire, economic growth, state formation, sustainability and technological efficiency.

When river management is informed by different agendas, its practice may be differently approached across diverse levels of government. Researchers may disagree with how it is practiced, as may communities. This series will explore how these different stakeholders make meaning of human-water relationships along the Kuils.

Part 1: Introduction to the Kuils

The Kuils River rises, as a trickling stream, in the Kanonkop Hills of Durbanville in the north-east of Cape Town. Looking at where it originates, one might have difficulty imagining the multiple beings and things it affects, and the deep vast history this river has, not only in shaping Cape Town’s landscape, but also the politics, infrastructure, technologies and economics of the day.

About 30 km away from its source, the Kuils merges with another river, the Eerste River, forming a bigger catchment that drains an area of approximately 660 km2.1 The Eerste River’s source is in the Jonkershoek Mountains adjoining Stellenbosch in the Macassar area, meaning that the river is substantially within the boundaries of the Stellenbosch municipality, while the Kuils catchment mostly falls within the Cape Metropolitan Area. Once merged, the rivers flow south to the Kuils-Eerste River estuary, one of eleven estuaries in the Cape, before entering the sea at False Bay, where the Indian Ocean joins the Atlantic.

Image 1: Major and minor catchments in the Cape Town Metropolitan area. The Kuils River is located in the Eerste/Kuils catchment. (Source: CMA website in Chingombe et al. 2010)

The Kuils was once a seasonal river, drying up in the summer months to form small pools, known, in Afrikaans, as “kuils”, but flowing in torrents during the winter rains. Along its contemporary course, the flow and quality of its water and life is shaped by multiple features: wetlands, agricultural lands, canals, flows from small tributaries, effluent from several wastewater treatment works (WWTW) and storm water flowing into the river from formal and informal residential areas. With these influences, scientists observing the river since the late 1980s have noted that it now flows throughout the year due to the high volume of effluent processed by four Waste Water Treatment Works (WWTWs) and increasing stormwater drained from residential and industrial areas along its path.

The four WWTWs along the Kuils and Eerste

  1. Scottsdene, which pumps wastewater into the Bottelary River, a tributary that joins the Kuils at the middle section of its course;
  2. Bellville, which pumps wastewater into the middle section of the river in the Sarepta/Kuils River neighbourhoods, adjacent to where the Bottelary River meets the Kuils River;
  3. Zandvliet, which pumps into the lower section of the river a few metres upstream of the Sandvlei community;
  4. Macassar, which pumps wastewater into the Eerste River after its confluence with the Kuils and before it enters the sea at False Bay. The Macassar WWTW area is a popular bird-watching site, as there is a lagoon there before entering the sea that is teeming with life.

The river once featured multiple wetlands, but over 80% of these have been depleted due to rapid urban growth and the development of industrial parks and residential areas over the last 40 years.2 The Kuils once flowed through vast tracts of farming land. More recently, these have been earmarked as a space for rapid urban development for housing and industrial areas. This has resulted in a hardening of surfaces that prevent water from seeping into the ground, which has increased stormwater flow into the river while drying out the land. The river is forced to bear both urban and agricultural pollutants of unknown origin, known as nonpoint source pollutants (NPS).

Image 2: Land Use/Land Cover Map of the Kuils-Eerste River Catchment. The map shows, in yellow, how increased development in the area, and the hardening of surfaces using concrete and tar, has created impervious surfaces.3

Covering soils that were previously allocated for agriculture with concrete and tar, all while removing natural ground cover such as grass, shrubs and trees, hampers nature’s processes of regulating flow in this newly urban environment. The decrease in plant cover also results in less evapotranspiration, a process necessary both for creating rainfall and for heat regulation, particularly in spaces like cities, with dense concentrations of materials that absorb and retain heat. This concentration causes what is called an ‘urban heat island’ that affects natural cycles and the well-being of people and multi-species communities. It also impacts the economy, as more energy is required to regulate the heat (e.g. increased use of air conditioners) and combat the effects of accumulating greenhouse gases that trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere, which impact human and non-human health and increase the frequency of climate extremes such as drought and flooding.4

Source: DS Lemmen and FJ Warren, Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation. Paul Horn / Inside Climate News.

Rivers in cities have an important role to play in managing climate change. They need a considered approach of care to function as optimal ecosystems; but urban river management is often not part of the scientific approach to managing spaces such as the Kuils River Corridor and the Khayelitsha Wetlands. They are constantly under threat not only from poorly treated effluent, but also from the rapid development that is taking place in the city. In the next blog post, I’ll explore how technical knowledge often trumps over ecological thinking, with predictably damaging results for the wellbeing of urban rivers.

References

  1. Thomas, A., Chingombe, W., Ayuk, J., & Scheepers, T. (2010). A comprehensive investigation of the Kuils-eerste river catchments water pollution and development of a catchment sustainability plan. Water Research Commission (WRC) Report, (1692/1), 10.
  2. Brown, C., & Magoba, R. (Eds.). (2009). Rivers and wetlands of Cape Town: Caring for our rich aquatic heritage. Water Research Commission.
  3. Thomas, A., Chingombe, W., Ayuk, J., & Scheepers, T. (2010). A comprehensive investigation of the Kuils-eerste river catchments water pollution and development of a catchment sustainability plan. Water Research Commission (WRC) Report, (1692/1), 10.
  4. Hulley, M. E. (2012). The urban heat island effect: causes and potential solutions. In Metropolitan sustainability (pp. 79–98). Woodhead Publishing.