a small rant…

Tell me you grew up in Apartheid South Africa without telling me you grew up in Apartheid South Africa. For me, at least, it is people who restrict toilet access. Let’s just say, when I watched ‘The Help’ a few years back, it resonated. It’s a whole thing. Mid rant, about the injustice of locking bathrooms, and depriving 150 other woman who use the building daily of access to an additional 2 toilets for the sake of 5 who feel their needs are more important than the other 145. My Husband asked, ‘Why does this bother you so much?’ Which gave me pause, for reflection, clearly it bothers me a great deal. A great deal more than most people, whose response was rather, ” Is this a hill you want to die on? The answer is, well, actually YES! I do believe that access to water, and by extension, sanitation, proves to be the basis upon which one begins to build healthy societies. The right to water is enshrined in the South African constitution because access to water redresses historical racial and social inequalities, ensures human dignity, and combats the severe health, educational, and economic impacts caused by the lack of this life-sustaining resource. It is a foundational right that supports life, health, and dignity. The fact that water and sanitation access seems to be one of the areas where South Africa has failed most spectacularly says a lot about its real commitment to redressing the wrongs of the past and to building a sustainable future.

The post below contains some of my reflections on access to sanitation, water rights, and social justice. Which perhaps reflects my mind’s inability to separate in everyday action, the regional and global challenges. Why I became an architect, in the first place. And why my artistic practice contemplates questions of material geographies and climate.

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I grew up in a small Afrikaans town in South Africa, the kind of place where public bathrooms are locked and restricted to those who can pay, replacing “Net blankes” (whites only) in the 1990’s following the end of apartheid. A way of separating the haves from the have-nots, as my grandmother might have phrased it.

Access to sanitation has long been, in South Africa, a tool of control and division, as it has been elsewhere, and continues to this day. Here in Johannesburg, we have raised and moved entire communities due to matters of sanitation, many of which were forced removals that took place under apartheid, in the guise of sanitation. this pattern in the city began well before the advent of Apartheid, in 1904, Brickfields, a mixed race community was raised and it inhabitants, move to Klipspruit, what became the south western townships (SOWETO) under the guise of sanitation and bubonic plague outbreak, the 1934 slums act, became the mechanism by which, the native (urban areas) act 1923, could be actively enforced. An act emerged following the 1918 influenza outbreak and was premised on the spread of disease due to poor sanitation in the city’s mixed-race slum areas.

Colonialism had by the 1900’s long harnessed such things as caste divisions in India, and fueled cultural discrimination on ethnic lines in Africa and beyond, based on the question of cleanliness to its own advantage. Much of the ethnic violence on the continent today stems from this kind of sanitation, fueled by Western meddling. Many of the worst wars and genocides have been premised on sanitation and cleanliness. Today, in America and Europe, we see the same narrative being used to fuel a cultural war against immigrant populations.

Humans have long divided people into those with good access to sanitation and those without. Cleanliness is next to godliness in whatever society one lives in. Today in South Africa’s social landscape, one might call it more classy, the words I heard today were that the woman’s public bathroom was locked because we can’t deal with the ‘chaos’* there. In the past, the chaos was poor people, brown people, and today, largely it is just poor people, or people who may identify differently than someone’s bigoted Christian moral can stand, or the students for whom the building is the primary point of access to clean, running water. In a city that has failed to maintain and plan bulk infrastructure to keep up with population growth.

Something about bathroom control strikes me of the petty vindictiveness of apartheid. The cruelness that says, this bathroom is not for you, and your kind. We are better than you. Even our absolution’s are above yours. The whole endeavor was probably not meant to be that deep. But toilets and access to clean running water and sanitation have long been a tool of oppression, racism and classism. Water access matter, even if its only a small restriction.

Office politics, aside.

The underlying matter to hand is that Johannesburg is currently in a multi-week water outage, thousands of residents’ taps have run dry, once again, while the city remains mute on the cause, and fails to give any strategy as to how the challenges are being redressed. Or if they are being dealt with at all, many residents suspect they are not, that they are without water due to sabotage or neglect. Most likely a combination of both. For 30 years, the population of the Johannesburg metropolitan areahas ballooned, from 2,293,000 in 1994, to 3.225,309 million in 2001, when I arrived, to 5,878,544 in 2025. When we have data from. The water and sanitation infrastructure, which should have been more than double to meet that growing population, has not been maintained. New infrastructure construction lags far behind the pace of population growth in the region until about 10 years ago, when a new reservoir planning commenced, in a few older areas. The area where I live, the Brixton Reservoir, was commissioned in 1917. Although its completion date is sometimes given as the 1930s, the area has largely had the same infrastructure since then. Much like our building, the city now serves an additional 4 million people who were never taken into account, in bulk serves planning, over that time period, and the period from 1994-2025, which should have seen the largest bulk works, projects implemented and planning, largely saw stagnation outside of outlying areas of the city with the lowest population density. Johannesburg was planned as a mining city, with a boom-bust approach, bulk works, and infrastructure have around a 50-100 year life cycle, and require 5-10 year maintenance to reach such lengths. That maintenance cycle has been all but abandoned in recent years as the strain on resources makes downtime difficult. Alongside increasing hot summer seasons, in the region. Make the current water crisis predictable and foreseeable. Well before even 1994.

In Johannesburg, most of our potable water arrives via the Thukela-Vaal Transfer Scheme. Via the Katse, dam and the Lesotho Highlands Water Project. That project I remind my students when I lecture on water and sanitation is 600km away from us. My grandfather, in the early stages of the project, did some of the excavation and geological drilling work. This work was carried out by a donkey cart! The scheme was expanded extensively in the post-apartheid era and forms one of Lesotho’s major exports and its power source. But it highlights a critical issue, the water we use, even though, as many say, the dams are full, is insufficient to supply the city’s population. It relies on such massive schemes to sustain itself. Schemes premised on water enclosure, damming, and pumping that would disrupt river systems and ecosystems at this scale.

I recently reenacted a project called ‘Mapping Extractive Histories’, which maps the extractive moments of my grandfather, who worked as a driller, for both general drilling and general water. Across the South African landscape. The personal mapping is, in part, a reflection of personal narrative and implication; the mapping reveals the links between the extraction of minerals and the capture of water during the height of the apartheid project. It maps a water enclosure.

South Africa is a water-scarce country, with an annual average rainfall of about 450-460 mm, and vast regions falling well below that figure. Water and access to clean potable water are a matter of human rights, due to its use as a weapon of division in the past. Many areas of the county remain without access to running water and wastewater sewage systems. Creating further divisions of inequality, due to time off work due to illness, school closures, leading to poor education outcomes, and particularly for women, ultimately results in fewer days in the classroom for many. Water access for many, many South Africans is a daily struggle that has remained unaltered since the 1950’s when the idea for the Water Highlands scheme was first conceived. Access to water, and as a result, sanitation, remains a question of class and privilege. Even in areas where municipal infrastructure exists.

Today, many wealthier households, in the face of the deepening water shortages, have resorted to drilling boreholes and tapping the water table. Water in the earth, and the Witwatersrand in particular, is not, as some people imagine, contained in underground streams, or lakes, or cavernous holes. But rather in pockets between rocks. Johannesburg also has an extensive aquifer beneath it; however, given that we have placed a large industrial city on top of it, with extensive mining activity, both the aquifer and, to some extent, much of the groundwater are not potable. It is not a viable solution to the city’s water shortages, given the sheer number of households. Yet access to groundwater is seen as a right by the wealthy, a resource to be used without consequence. Its continued tapping by the wealthy takes paying users away from city suppliers, while dividing society into those who can afford to access and store water and those who cannot. Creating further social divisions.

Back to office politics: my place of work has water right now. Which the surrounding suburbs do not. I was heartened today to find out a complete stranger with a borehole had provided a tap on their sidewalk for anyone to use as needed. We used it today to get water for cleaning and ablutions. Often, the university represents a place where its resources create a level playing field, a great equaliser. Access to safe, clear water and sanitation for many students is a vital part of that, enabling them to study, cook, and clean, free from the crippling effects that poor water access can create.

The Access that I have to some water over recent week is because I have a car, can afford the time have fetch it and the containers to cart it and store it. Is not a privilege I take for granted. Not one I would deprive other of for a petty discomfort of sharing a public bathroom.

Notes :

*The Chaos, being that when there is no water, the toilet becomes blocked. This is neither the fault of the users nor of the building, which was built with an insufficient number of toilets because there were no female architects and women were not adequately accounted for in the original design of the building.