The great divide in our country

My mum sent me a message the other day that broke my heart. She was just in from Gogos – her group of volunteers who go into schools in “townships” to practice reading with the children – and said she had spent the morning with “a class of teenagers, most of whom can hardly read.”

And once again, I was reminded of the issue looming large behind just about every problem in SA, from crime to homelessness to illiteracy, and even the Cape Town water crisis: inequality.

Because SA is one of the most – and by some measures the most – unequal societies in the world.

The kids my mother tries to help are largely from illiterate homes, often shacks, and likely never even had a story read to them before they started school. If life is a race, these youngsters started several hundred metres behind and are then systematically hobbled because the schools they attend are overcrowded, understocked, and understaffed. No wonder they get left behind. No wonder there’s so much anger.

Which brings me to Cape Town and Day Zero, the apparent great leveller, because everyone needs water, rich and poor alike.

Yet some will not be joining the queues. Behind high walls, some still wake to the sly phut-phutphut of sprinklers on green lawns; some still have sparkling pools.

They’ve drilled boreholes, and likely tell themselves they’re helping by not being a burden on the system, as if groundwater is a never-ending fountain; as if their personal depletion of the aquifer has no effect on the drought at all.

But where, oh where, do they think water will come from to quench the masses? This selfsame water table they use.

And what of the schools and hospitals that have boreholes and need this groundwater to keep operating?

The water table is not bottomless – just ask the farmers drilling deeper for water – and gets depleted quicker than you might think.

In my little village outside Cape Town, everyone’s putting in boreholes, but already the neighbours lower down are glaring at those on the hill, who have an emerald garden and use up all the water to keep it that way.

As with everything else in South Africa, there’s precious little trickle-down: it could almost be a metaphor …