Page 103 - Bulletin 18 2014

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THE CENTENARY OF THE MUNICIPAL AMALGAMATION, SEPTEMBER 1913

1. CAPE TOWN’S SQUABBLING MUNICIPALITIES AND

THE POLITICS OF WATER

Elizabeth van Heyningen

Introduction

The history of most of the world’s great cities is closely linked to the rivers on which they are

located. South Africa is relatively uncommon in having no large navigable waterways and
two of its largest cities have no river of any substance at all. Our harbours are equally pitiful.

Ironically, however, Cape Town owes its existence to its limited water supply for, although
the alternative site for settlement, Saldanha Bay, is a far finer natural harbour, it has even less

water. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that water and its absence are both so critical to the
development of the city. It is fundamental both to our existence and to the fragility of our

hold on this peninsula.

Part of the story, of course, is that of water engineering, as Cape Town’s authorities struggled
to supply the growing city. But it was Capetonians themselves who made the decisions about

how the city should get its water. By the end of the nineteenth century water became central

both to local and municipal identity. Two developments were critical and both arose from the
‘mineral revolution’, the discovery of diamonds in 1867-8 and the discovery of gold on the

Witwatersrand in 1886. Immigrants swarmed into the country. Although Kimberley and
Johannesburg sprang into being from nothing, many of the new arrivals got no further than

Cape Town. Between 1875 and 1906 Cape Town expanded enormously and the tiny
suburban municipalities grew even faster. More than this, capital also flowed into the

country, with investors now willing to put their money into this little African backwater. (One

only has to compare the growth of the Cape Colony with that of the Australian colonies,
especially Victoria, where gold was discovered in 1851, to see how small the South African

states were before the mineral revolution.)