It’s swim or starve as Dikidikeni’s
People have been using barrels to cross the Mzintlava River for several generations
Zizipho Mdadase’s eyes are full of fear as she makes her way across the freezing, chest-deep Mzintlava River near Dikidikeni village on the border of the Ntabankulu and Flagstaff municipalities in Pondoland in the Eastern Cape.
Mdadase, 20, loses her footing in the fast-flowing water as she nears the bank on the Flagstaff side of the river and starts to go under. She is held upright by Mqalekiso Nkosiyoxolo, who has been shepherding her across the river, while she finds her feet and is assisted the last few metres to dry land and safety.
Mdadase is shaking with cold and fear as she dries off on the river bank and prepares herself for a four-hour walk up the hill to her destination, near emantlaneni school.
She and other residents of Dikidikeni and nearby Mukhombi have no choice but to risk their lives every time they want to go to Flagstaff or Lusikisiki to buy groceries, visit the clinic or attend school because there is no bridge.
It is quicker, cheaper and easier for residents to cross the river and travel to Flagstaff or Lusikisiki than it is to remain on their side of the river and go by road to Ntabankulu to collect their grants, see to their medical needs and buy food.
The area lies on the border of the Ntabankulu and Ingquza Hill municipalities, which incorporates Lusikisiki and Flagstaff, and is underdeveloped, with badly potholed roads that come to an end several hours’ walk up the mountain from the river.
The Ingquza Hill side is electrified but residents across the river have no power.
“I am very scared every time I have to do this. The water is cold and the river pushes hard. It is very difficult,” Mdadase told the Mail & Guardian when it visited the area in late May. “I couldn’t cross here by myself because it is too deep and too strong.
“It’s worse when you first get in the water. It’s hard to breathe because of the cold and you are scared, but you have to be brave and keep on going,” she said.
Residents said the water is knee-deep during the July dry season but it reached almost two metres in depth during the floods that ravaged Pondoland and the Kwazulu-natal coast in April.
It was then that the plight of residents of the area became known: footage emerged of a woman being transported across the raging river in a sealed barrel by two youngsters who had roped it to their bodies and swam it across the torrent.
When the M&G visited the area, the flood waters had subsided and residents were no longer crossing in a barrel, but the water was well above waist deep and they were wading across.
Sifiso Mfanekiso, 23, is one of a group of eight young men from the village who take turns in assisting residents to cross the river, or carry
their heavy parcels, when it becomes too deep for them to do so unaided.
Mfanekiso said they had learned the technique of swimming people across the river in a barrel “from our grandfathers” because there has never been a bridge.
“The barrel thing is very old here. We learned it from our grandfa
thers,” Mfanekiso said. “We only do it when the river is too full to walk across. We saw them doing it when we were small, so we knew what to do when there was flooding.”
“It is dangerous — the river is very strong and the rope cuts you where it’s wrapped around your body and if it breaks they will be swept away — but when the water is like that there is no other way for people to cross,” he said.
Mfanekiso and his colleagues are often woken at 1am by residents who need to cross the river to get to the taxi rank on the Flagstaff side — a four-hour walk — in time for the morning taxi to town.
“We take people across the river in the dark. If we don’t, they can’t cross, or somebody will drown. In February there was a pregnant lady who drowned in this river [when she] tried to cross by herself.”
Mfanekiso, who taught himself to swim, said people had given up on the government building them a bridge and had instead been working with the Umzimvubu Farmers Support Network to find a means of building a pedestrian bridge or a walkway over the river.
“Since I was born there has never been a bridge here. People have to cross. There is nothing else we can do,” Mfanekiso said. “We are very far from the municipality here and nobody knows when they will build a bridge here.
“People wake us up at 1am so we can take them across if they want to catch a taxi at 5am, because taxis can’t come down here. We have to get up — if they miss the taxi there is none until the next day.
“What we need here is a small bridge so that people can walk across. We don’t have cars, so we don’t need the government to build us something that will cost millions.”
For now, Mfanekiso and his colleagues are trying to find ways to make their lives a little easier — and safer — and have enlisted the assistance of a Port Saint Johns lifesaver and local activist, Nqobile Jojo, to try to raise funds for wetsuits and lifesaving equipment.
“We know that it is going to take a long time to build a bridge here. In the meantime, what we need to do is get wetsuits for the guys. Winter is here and the water is freezing cold, so that will help them,” Jojo said.
“We also need to get them training in basic lifesaving techniques and CPR so that they know what to do in an emergency. It will also be safer here if we can get those pink NSRI [National Sea Rescue Institute] buoys so that if somebody is swept away they can be rescued. This isn’t something that would cost a lot if the municipality or somebody else could help.”
Tijmen Grooten, a researcher who worked with the Umzimvubu Farmers Support Network, said the area had a history of underdevelopment dating back to the Pondoland Rebellion in the 1950s, which has been exacerbated more recently by
‘It’s worse when you get in the water. It’s hard to breathe because of the cold and you are scared, but you have to be brave and keep going’
government hostility towards the illegal growing of cannabis as the region’s main form of income.
The fact that it was located on the outer border of both municipalities also meant that the area had been partially forgotten when it came to the provision of roads, bridges, electricity and other services, because of the distance from the seat of the council.
“There is some confusion if Mkhumbi and Dikidikeni are actually part of the [Ntabankulu] municipality and because of this the farmers there feel left behind and forgotten by the municipality. It is not the only place in Pondoland where people are forced to cross rivers, but one of the better documented cases,” Grooten said.
The Ntabankulu municipality did have a long-term plan to build a vehicular bridge, but this would have cost R17-million, nearly three times the R6-million the municipality had available for infrastructure in the area, he said.
Residents in the Amadiba area had built a pedestrian bridge with assistance from development NGOS for R3-million, which would be more in line with the needs of people at Dikidikeni, he said.
Several attempts to secure comment from the Ntabankulu municipality had been unsuccessful at the time of writing.