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dam-l SA's Kat River Dam story/LS
Banished to a watery grave
Deep under the Eastern Cape's Kat River dam are 1 000 silent witnesses to
one of apartheid's greatest lies.
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PETER DICKSON reports
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ACROSS the length and breadth of South Africa, from District Six to Dimbaza,
nothing could stop prime minister BJ Vorster's bulldozers in 1967. Not even
in dusty little Seymour, off the beaten track near Queenstown in the Eastern
Cape, where apartheid's planners had built a major supply dam on the Kat
River.
But they had got their numbers wrong and the 1 500 graves that made up the
Seymour cemetery -- 300 "European" and 1 200 "non-European" -- disappeared
under the water when the dam reached its high flood level.
Seymour mayor Mike Kota says the remains of the "Europeans" were exhumed and
reburied. The authorities, however, left the black graves.
The Department of Water Affairs and Forestry contests this, providing Kota
with statistics on 222 bodies traced and reburied across the colour line on
one side of the dam. It is a figure curiously close to the 240 white graves
the department identified as having had headstones.
The department, which strangely built a memorial to the remains of graves
left undisturbed, also pointed out the flood risk was advertised at the time
in the provincial press and on government radio and that it had done its
best to identify the graves and trace relatives.
But Seymour's black community, knowing full well that more than 1 000 of its
ancestors had been interred in the cemetery, has never believed the
department.
The pain of the lie is made more acute by the realisation that the dam had
drowned tradition and culture. Relatives would no longer be able to respect
their ancestors with a proper reburial, let alone visit and maintain the
graves.
In the 1980s, under Ciskei rule, the Seymour council battled with the
bantustan's Department of Public Works for compensation for the black
community. That battle has continued into the post-apartheid era, with water
affairs and forestry stipulating compensation depends on next of kin
identifying the watery graves -- even though time and water have made
identification impossible.
"That's the question. What are we supposed to do, take up diving?" asks an
exasperated Kota. "The dam is very deep. How on earth are we going to afford
diving gear anyway?"
In October last year, Kota and a department official noted that only 20
graves in the old cemetery were above the waterline. The department's
statistics, he said, are "completely misleading".
But as the dam level dropped this year because of the area's biting drought,
more graves became visible. Since October, through painstaking detective
work, Kota and the community have traced the next of kin of almost all of
the 1 000 buried under the dam, even people who had long left Seymour for
the cities.
Giving up the idea of short-lived cash compensation for individuals in
favour of department-funded projects "that will benefit our children
instead", Kota's council and the department were finally set to sit down and
chip away at a settlement this Wednesday.
Kota and his community, well prepared, had waited for this historic moment
for 32 years. "But they called and said they were unable to attend," he
said. "They gave no reason."
The department's provincial officials were unavailable for comment this
week.
"Really, the department is taking its time and is not co-operating and the
transitional local council is now thinking of going to court. As a community
we were so prepared, but the department seems to have no interest," Kota
says.
"Seymour was never developed in the past. There is no sewage, the streams to
the dam go straight through the township and people are using buckets to get
their water, which is not of good quality because of the poor purification
plant."
Going to court will be costly to both parties, Kota concedes.
But tradition is paramount to his community and respect for the ancestors,
which has gone wanting for three decades, will be worth every cent in
subsequent benefits.
-- The Mail & Guardian, September 14, 1999.
Material on the Electronic Mail&Guardian site may not be republished without
permission
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Liane Greeff
Environmental Monitoring Group,
PO Box 18977 Wynberg, South Africa, 7824
E: liane@kingsley.co.za Tel: +27 +21 7610549/788 2473 Fax: 762 2238
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