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Wednesday. It’s the hottest day of the year so far in Zululand.
Zululand is the Zululand District Municipality, that huge slab of virtually unfarmable land that stretches from Vryheid to Ulundi to Pongola to eDumbe to Nongoma.
It’s a beautiful but harsh place – the stretch of land that the wit ous “resettled” the Zulus on because they didn’t want it. They’d already stolen all the nice productive bits around Eshowe, Melmoth, Paulpietersburg, Pongola and Vryheid.
Hard living at the best of times. Hell on earth in the middle of a drought.
Right now, Zululand is more Mars than KwaZulu-Natal. You could film a Mad Max movie here. It hasn’t rained since October. The earth is terribly scorched because there’s no ground cover. Only thorn trees are surviving. The soil has turned this weird ashy, reddish-brown colour. It’s so badly parched that you wonder if it will even recover when it eventually rains.
Outside the towns, where the taps are running dry, there’s some piped water, but only when there’s water in the reservoirs and when the pumps are running.
For the rest of the villages, water comes from the local river. With the drought, the rivers are dry.
We hit the Black Umfolozi River just next to Silver village, where a mix of old women and kids from Silver usually draw water from the river while their livestock drink beside them. There are communal taps at Silver, but they haven’t worked in the nearly five years we’ve been visiting the village.
The Umfolozi is totally dry. There’s grass growing where there was water a year ago. There are a couple of groups of humanity huddled around two holes dug in the river bed. At both, women and kids are busy scooping water into containers to carry up the hillside. A 60-year-old woman and her 15-year-old granddaughter are working together to get enough water to see them through to the next afternoon.
They tell us they haven’t seen a waterkan – a water tanker sent out by the municipality – in months. We hit the road, puzzled. We’ve been hearing about all these drought-relief measures in Zululand, but there’s not much to be seen.
We spend the next two days driving Zululand flat in search of a waterkan. We see only two. Both are hurtling along the road from the Zululand Anthracite Colliery on the road between Ulundi and Hluhluwe. Neither distribute any water.
Back at our lodge, about 25km from Silver, the water in the swimming pool is enticingly blue.
