Continued…

My maternal family is from the North West. It is a place where the weight of the sun clings to your back as you cross the street. It is also the sort of one-robot “no kak plek” that makes any other place look like an oasis. I suppose that’s what the idea of Cape Town had become to my extended family: a Mecca overlooked by a gigantic mountain we could not fathom.  

We came to the City by the Sea with its post-apartheid trophy-wife glow-up. We came with the hope that, in Cape Town, an endless spring of resources, opportunities and abundance would quench us all. Years later, we have learnt of an ugly but simple geographic hierarchy implemented during apartheid, governed by a mountain and determined by the biology of blood that pushes “us” to the very edges of the city. Coffee shops built on the backbones of our foremothers, the ebb and flow of a navel gazing “it” crowd, crooked tongues bending into “yes YT lady” contortions, non-priority queues, rented land, contested space, breath. 

For the majority, being parched is long-lived consequence of history. The distance between mokhukhu and a single tap used by a community, the amount of water a teenager is able to carry home on her back versus the woman who fills up her 4×4 with 5-litre bottles.

Water is fast becoming currency, and those who have always had less – who have been structurally excluded from the wells – are already accustomed to a vaskom and a one-litre bath. Such is the irony of history. 

But for those who are well-adjusted to water-scarcity crisis, as the water runs out on a provincial scale, the blood just thickens.

A teenage girl’s head is found in a long drop without water. A trans womxn is stabbed on her way to the toilet. A street is lined with the blood of a couple who dared to hold hands. These streets are a funeral procession for womxn. 

Such is the tragedy of irony. Such is a Blood Labyrinth.