Women and water access in the Eastern Cape: an anthropological investigation into supply and sustainability in water scarce districts: with specail reference to: Mbelu, Ntilini and Cwebe.
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Date
2017
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Abstract
This study looks at domestic water supply within the context of household dynamics in a rural area
with a particular focus on the acquisition of water. The study examines the implications for women
and gender through customary norms and practices, local institutions, ideologies and cosmologies,
household structures and people’s practices. In the rural areas of Amatole District Municipality,
women and men’s relationships to water and its acquisition are fundamentally different, and the
differences have deep consequences for women’s status, standard of living and their survival. It also
aims to explore the dynamic gender relations and women’s vulnerability and dangers they face while
trying to access water. Twenty-three years after the introduction of democracy, the provision of water
in rural South Africa remains elusive and prevails as a blot to the country’s legislature and their policy
makers and advisers Thus this study is intended as a critique of this lack of provision and aims to
provide an insight into some of the concealed realities in service delivery failures in post-apartheid
South Africa. Water is the foremost human basic need and is crucial for sustainable development
particularly in rural areas where there is limited access to clean and safe water. The internationally
based Gender and Water Alliance (GWA) (2006) states that limited access to clean and safe water is
associated with poor hygiene and sanitation at household level and that it widens the poverty gap,
creates gender inequalities and fails to annihilate water borne diseases.
The target area for this study was Amatole District Municipality, where piped water to each household
is non-existent. Situated in the wild coast of South Africa’s Eastern Cape province, scattered
households are a characteristic feature of the undulating terrain in the area. The villages under study
were Cwebe, Mbelu and Ntilini, where infrastructure development and employment opportunities
remain equally non-existent. The demographics of the areas consist of mainly women, young children
and older men. The younger and middle-aged men migrate to the mines in other provinces, especially
Gauteng Province, where most of the country’s richest mines are located. Almost all of the residents
in these three villages are unemployed and depend on remittances and social grants. Only a small
number of the villagers depend upon working their land on a subsistence basis. Another small
percentage is employed in the only tourist resort in the area, which can accommodate a maximum of
32 guests at a time, indicative of the rather limited employment opportunities in this soft industry.
The villages are sparsely scattered, and the terrain is hilly, which makes it difficult for the local
residents to access the distantly available water with the relative ease for which they constantly hope.
The nature of the terrain and the alleged high costs of a reticulation system is often blamed by the
local state for its absence. In Ntilini and Mbelu, for example, women and children source their water
from the dangerously deep gorge linked to the Mhashe River which is also difficult to access. The area
also has five dry boreholes, which are not maintained. The more distant Cwebe on the other hand get
its water from the Nlonyane River and its tributaries and springs. A water tank in the area also exists,
but for agricultural uses only.
Localised belief systems and customary norms continue to prevail upon their existence in each of
these villages, despite their relative hardships. At least three of repeated factors remain as
justifications for their continued association with the land that they occupy viz. spatial identity, social
identity and ancestral association. All of these factors remain interconnected by virtue of the
obeisance they have towards the local leadership, and the spatial and social identities are conditioned
by local marriage patterns, as well as their beliefs in the oversight of their ancestral spirits in their daily
lives. By virtue of having them buried on their homestead properties the belief is that ancestral spirits
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prevail as an omniscient and omnipresent force which requires permanent occupation by the living as
an appeasement to their continued sustainable inter-relationships. The consequences of such a belief
system is an unshakeable belief in an eternal association with the land, precluding any possibility of
relocation for the sake of improved service deliveries, including piped water to their homes
Women bear the brunt of this belief system in the area and therefore have to travel long distances to
collect clean drinkable water, often under challenging if not dangerous circumstances. Women in rural
areas such as Cwebe, Ntilini and Mbelu (notwithstanding other areas all over South Africa) do not feel
the impact these policies have made on the lives of women in urban areas. Rural women still feel
isolated in the development planning that is theoretically intended to benefit them, because their
views and experiences are not caucused. While post-Apartheid South Africa lays claim to a constitution
that matches the most progressive in the world, there remains startling inconsistencies in the ways in
which ground realities are given due conscience.
Description
Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.