Plunging into the depths and shallows of a world under threat
It has been a wet week in Johannesburg. Grateful though we are for the rain, we’d be happy to send it all southwest to the people who need it in Cape Town. This is a platitude, the kind of vague gesture of goodwill that means little but seems necessary after Premier Helen Zille (or the weird poltergeist that controls her Twitter account) decided in January to reinscribe those old coastversus-highveld binaries with her “karma is a bitch” taunts.
Admittedly, I’ve been guilty of pontificating as a Joburger about Capetonians’ curious ways. But the Western Cape water crisis is a national crisis — for reasons humanitarian, economic, political and otherwise — and it has, or should have, a chastening effect on all of us elsewhere across the country.
That doesn’t mean it can’t also be hilarious, as I discovered with some relief while watching Alan Committie’s latest show, Planet Mirth, which the irrepressible funnyman is performing throughout February at Pieter Toerien’s Montecasino theatre.
Committie is adept at shifting the subtle grammar of his comedy to suit audiences in Joburg and Cape Town; he spends much of the year moving between the two cities.
Discussing the reception of his new material with me, however, Committie emphasised continuity rather than disjunction. His jokes about water restrictions, delivered with just the right balance of pathos and humour, elicit sympathy and comic relief in equal measure, both upcountry and in the south. Zille could use a lesson in the nuances of “tone” from someone like Committie.
Connections and contrasts between the Western Cape and Gauteng are, after all, a largely insignificant aspect of the sociological and climatological features of the current predicament. Instead, these features can more productively be understood in acutely local terms (conflicts within greater Cape Town between different communities and class groups) and in broadly global terms.
Such a framing is made possible by the twin exhibitions on display at the Wits Art Museum in Braamfontein until the end of February.
Upstairs, Masixole Feni’s A Drain on Our Dignity documents the perennial plight of hundreds of thousands of people across the Cape Flats: poor sanitation, lack of access to clean water regardless of dam levels and, when there is rain, the threat of flooding.
One of the good things that may come out of the threat of Day Zero is an increased awareness on the part of middle-class and affluent citizens not only of our own wasteful habits but also of the ingrained water-saving behaviour that comes, by necessity rather than by choice, with severe poverty.
Perhaps this can only be properly internalised by firsthand experience.
But Feni’s photographs, which have been taken primarily for publication in community newspapers and online by rights-focused news organisation GroundUp, are almost as effective at driving the message home.
While conversations about Cape Town’s infrastructure have become dominated by talk of desalination plants and aquifer drilling, Feni’s work insists that the decades-old infrastructural neglect resulting in informal housing, communal toilets, water pollution and the threat of disease for so many poor citizens is not forgotten.
A Drain on Our Dignity is a powerful complement to Gideon Mendel’s Drowning World, which portrays a different kind of thirst to that experienced in the dry Cape: here, it is a case of “Water, water, everywhere, but not a drop to drink”.
Mendel, perhaps best known to his fellow South Africans for his black-andwhite images of the torrid final years of apartheid and of HIV/AIDS patients in the 1990s, has been travelling tirelessly since 2007 to capture the aftermath of floods in Haiti, Nigeria, US, Thailand, Pakistan, the UK and elsewhere.
In these haunting mirrorworlds, where water dominates the lower portion of each photograph and still, reflexive surfaces belie the great violence of the deluge that came before, the former occupants of homes destroyed by flooding stare at the camera: mournful, defiant, pitiful, resolute.
The Water Marks series reproduces flood-damaged photographs, giving a poignant glimpse into private lives that will never be fully recovered.
The spectre of climate change looms over the artist, the subjects and the viewers of these haunting images, no less than it does over Cape Town right now.