In 2019, the Eastern Cape Karoo was in the midst of a crippling drought — some said the worst they’d ever seen. The Nqwebo dam in Graaff Reinet had gone dry. More than 600 volunteers, young and old, had gathered to remove dead fish from its cracked floor. The clean-up had been organised by a local church, partly because the smell of rotting fish had become so bad, and partly because of a worry that if the dam filled up again, the rot would pollute the water. Residents came with masks, gloves and trash bags to remove the littered carcasses.
While drought is not new in this area, something less familiar has been rolling across the Karoo plains: rubbish. Among the mangled fish carcasses on the bed of the Nqwebo dam were also mounds of litter. All the remains, fish and litter, were collected together and thrown into trash bags.
By 2020, the water levels in the Nqwebo dam had temporarily recovered and the Graaff Reinet landfill, dumpsite and waste transfer station were spilling over, with the transfer station having been closed for 18-months because of poor municipal management. Waste transfer stations are sites where multiple waste collection vehicles can bring and consolidate their waste, before it is transported – often in larger, more-specialised vehicles – to the landfill. When it is working well, the transfer station allows for waste to be transported more economically, but can also lead to air pollution and increased traffic on the road to the site.
Many people think of the Karoo as a place of wide empty spaces. For centuries, it has been marketed as a place for visitors to escape the mess, stresses and noise of the city. In the Victorian era, Europeans suffering from tuberculosis were brought to the area to breath the Karoo’s fresh air. The idea of the Karoo as an ‘untouched’ landscape, and the idea of the Karoo as a place of healing, are connected.
Litter ruins this pretty picture. But its impact is not just aesthetic. The presence of rubbish is tied up with the spread of chronic diseases but not in the way one would expect: litter is not directly causing illness but is a signifier of disease. This is how residents themselves are making sense of the connection between rubbish and ill health, by drawing on their memory of the landscape — how things used to be versus what it looks like now. Childhood memories, place-based knowledge and people’s relationship with their physical environment have shaped how they come to understand and speak about waste, litter and illness, writes anthropologist Beth Vale who conducted fieldwork in the area between 2018 and 2020.
Like unremoved garbage, illness is not evenly spread. Often, disease piles up in the same places rubbish does. The most under-served are also most vulnerable to getting sick, and staying that way.
In Kroonvale, on the hillsides of Graaff Reinet, one elder was asked how he made sense of the rising tide of chronic illness in the Karoo:
“People talk so much nowadays about chemicals in food; how unsafe the water is. Last week I took a woman and child to the hospital because of the water. It was brown with a horrible smell […] I don’t understand why we’re being fed food that’s killing us […] When we grew up, we grew things at our houses. But now the land has dried up. You have to add fertiliser and put in so much work, and then there are the municipal water restrictions.”
