A month ago, my family and I drove down the N3 from Johannesburg to Howick for a long weekend in KwaZulu-Natal. We had decided to undertake a great adventure: cycling around Midmar Dam (or, rather, cycling along about 5% of the dam’s shoreline — still quite far for short legs).
On our first morning, we approached the dam with half-remembered directions from a local in mind. Was it a left or a right turn at the T-junction? We went left, and soon regretted it. After a short rise, a bleak picture lay before us: the water was largely hidden from view, and instead we drove for a kilometre along a potholed road lined on both sides by mounds of trash metres high and wide. We soon realised the error of our ways.
We should have turned right. That road, once chosen, took us past the dam wall and to the entrance of the reserve. Soon we were thrilling at views over the water, passing happy weekend scenes: young and old, fishers and picnickers, black, white and Indian South Africans enjoying the great outdoors.
Every now and then, however, there were reminders of that first impression of misery and neglect — reminders of the forgotten citizens of the Midlands. The views across the dam were impressive, but from high points you could see expansive informal settlements on the far side.
The two sides of Midmar Dam make for an all-too-obvious example of the two faces of KwaZulu-Natal: plenty and poverty, an inequality shaped by centuries of violence, displacement, racism, ethnic nationalism and criminality — in short, the tinderbox that was set aflame this week.
On the one hand, it seems hard to imagine that in June the most urgent problem facing the residents of KwaZulu-Natal was isolated flooding after snow and rainfall, a downpour that even caused Midmar Dam to overflow. On the other hand, there is a sense that this has been coming for a long time: a metaphorical dam wall that was always going to break at some point, though its collapse was precipitated by the wicked self-interest of the Zuma brigade and their affiliated cronies, spooks and thugs.
SA is not alone in the depravity of its wealth-poverty gap, and the exploitation of that divide by reckless but calculating populists. Brazil is probably the most directly comparable in terms of per capita GDP and Gini coefficient — and having passed from the deceptive idealism of the Lula years into the strongman politics of Jair Bolsonaro, it has followed a journey not unlike that of postapartheid SA, with our Mandela- and Mbeki-era shortsightedness leading us straight into the morass of Msholozi.
Audiences tuning into 2021’s Virtual National Arts Festival are thus well-placed to appreciate one of the international productions on the programme: Molhados&Secos/Wet&Dry, presented by Brazilian company ParaladosanjoS. This is physical theatre at its most imaginative, daring, teasing and indeed circus-like, both spectacular and intimate.
Billed as a “poignant, poetic and sometimes comically absurd reflection on human fragility in the face of nature”, Molhados&Secos is a response to various floods that have devastated large parts of Brazil over the past decade. In the Anthropocene, there is no longer such a thing as “an act of god” — human greed and exploitation are both cause and effect of natural disasters. It does not require too much contrivance to see similarities here to the “flood” of violence in KwaZulu-Natal this past week.
Who stays dry during a flood? The wealthy, for the most part. And for those who are wet, who are drowning, the members of ParaladosanjoS remind us that there is not just “the struggle against nature”: “there are also the struggles that humans visit upon each other”. The poor steal from one another, the catastrophe invites looting.
Here, it is tempting to point out a significant difference. Molhados&Secos warns that “we might not be able to count on all of our neighbours” — in the darkness and chaos, the worst of human nature prevails. And yet, in SA, we have seen chinks of light and restoration: individuals helping one another, communities rallying to clean up and provide food. Is this a naive hope? It’s all we’ve got for now.
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