The Killer Heatwaves at South Africa’s Doorstep

South Africa’s urban geography is one of the country’s most obvious and jarring incongruences. Any visitor to the country is sure to spot the massive urban sprawl of gated communities, where all the houses have beautiful blue swimming pools and well-manicured lawns, while just a few metres away, thousands of people are crammed into a few square metres in rusting tin-roofed shacks.

Apartheid geography is pervasive in the country. It is one of the most visible consequences of how separate development created immense wealth for the country’s white minority population and a legacy of poverty, inequality, and unemployment for Black people.

A clear example of this wealth disparity is visible on the M1 highway, with Sandton on the one side and the township of Alexandra on the other. Sandton is known as the richest square mile in Africa. It is the home of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, and hosts luxurious mansions and sprawling offices covered with lush greenery. On the other side of the road are the shacks of Alexandra, tiny metal boxes with a sprinkling of trees around.

Although much literature has demonstrated how Black South Africans were economically disadvantaged by apartheid, too little mention is made of the many insidious ways in which brutalist urbanization affected Black people. Yet this is starting to change. With the growing number of extreme weather events and climate shocks, it is becoming increasingly obvious that apartheid geography is a clear and present danger to the future health and well-being of Black people in particular.

The Legacy of Apartheid

South Africa is a fossil-dependent economy that was built on cheap labour and cheap coal. It has the highest greenhouse gas emissions on the African continent, emitting about 436 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually. The country has been addicted to coal since it was discovered over 200 years ago: 85 percent of South Africa’s energy comes from coal-fired power plants, placing the country eighth in the world in terms of the total quantity of coal used specifically for generating electricity.

Paradoxically, South Africa is an arid country, with rainfall below the global average, and it is heating at about twice the global rate of temperature increase. South Africa currently produces around 1.47 billion kilowatt-hours annually.

As early as the 1940s, the country started exploring nuclear research, especially after the testing of the atomic bomb in 1945 by the United States. This culminated in the establishment of the Atomic Energy Board (AEB) in 1948 under the apartheid regime of Daniel François Malan to lead nuclear research and development.

The pressing reason for nuclear research and development was not civilian energy production: the goal was to produce what became known as the “apartheid bomb” — nuclear weapons developed by the apartheid regime. The construction of the first civilian nuclear power plant, Koeberg, only took place in 1976, after the apartheid bomb was already at an advanced stage. In 2021, Koeberg produced 12.4 terawatt hours, or just 5 percent of South Africa’s energy needs.

Sanctions imposed on the apartheid regime meant that there was no possibility of expanding the Koeberg plant or the nuclear programme. The regime knew that it was losing its grip on South Africa and did not want to expand a nuclear programme if a future Black government appeared inevitable. Just like the country’s nuclear disarmament, this was racially motivated.

The mineral-energy complex imposed an economy that could not absorb jobs and created systemic labour precarity. It also imposed a dark anti-worker axis of evil between the state, the mining industry, and the capitalists that ran it.

The inability to expand South Africa’s nuclear programme was a good thing, it meant the country was not locked into a nuclear dependent energy system, which is dangerous, expensive to run and maintain, produces tons of radioactive waste, and poses a serious security risk. Not to mention that there is a finite supply of uranium, and it is not easily accessible. However, it meant that coal remained king in South Africa.

The discovery of coal was quickly followed by diamonds and gold. The dream of sudden wealth was intoxicating, and the English colonial powers did everything to make sure that the biggest share of these resources accrued to Britannia. They built export-oriented infrastructure with trains heading for the harbours to export essential raw materials to Europe. The significance of railways for the colonial project in the former province of Natal has been well documented. Likewise with Cape Colony, where, by 1910, the Cape Government Railways (CGR) had constructed 3,300 miles of railways.

After a series of bloody wars during which the Boers (descendants of Huguenot settler colonists from France and the Netherlands) and Black people were pacified, sometimes with the use of concentration camps, the English mining aristocracy set about building a mineral-energy complex with tentacles throughout southern Africa. It built metropolises that were the envy of the world and affluent suburbs where life was amazing for white people.

The mineral-energy complex did two key things that are relevant to how people live in South Africa today. The first was the engineering of the biggest annual labour migration that the African continent has ever witnessed. Train networks were developed to bring in able-bodied young men from Angola, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Eswatini, Namibia, and all across the African continent to work deep in the bowels of Gauteng and Mpumalanga, in places like Gold Reef City and Middleburg. They came and toiled for six or seven months at a time, doing backbreaking work. It was a subcontinental migration that very few communities did not partake in.

Cities quickly sprang up around the mines, along with other life comforts that people required. Coal was used to produce cheap electricity, some of the cheapest in the world. In Johannesburg, some of the world’s most affluent suburbs soon emerged. The English bourgeoisie favoured the centre of town. Big money moved to Houghton, Rosebank, Killarney, Parktown, and other areas with a strong English ring to their names.

The second invention of the mineral-energy complex was the creation of dormitory towns and informal settlements to house the labour needed for the mines and burgeoning cities. These neighbourhoods were characterized by all-male hostels and tiny family homes built with burned clay bricks. The labourers’ wives remained in the villages. There was no vegetation for miles and the idea was to cram as many units as possible into the tiny spaces.

Importantly, the apartheid regime made sure to pack people together based on their ethnic origin. The suburbs of the South West Township (Soweto) and Soshanguve (SOtho, SHAngaan, NGUni and Venda) for example are still heavily coloured by this engineering, with Zulus, Sothos, Xhosas and other communities all living in different spaces.

The mineral-energy complex imposed an economy that could not absorb jobs and created systemic labour precarity. It also imposed a dark anti-worker axis of evil between the state, the mining industry, and the capitalists that ran it. This intertwined complex is visible in the South African economy in several respects, including concentrated ownership among a few individuals and corporations.

Leafy-Green Brutalism in Post-Apartheid South Africa

The result of brutalist apartheid urbanism are still visible everywhere in Johannesburg. In terms of bricks and mortar architecture, there are still many massive buildings with a very austere and dark look to them. They were built to withstand attacks and to keep away people who did not belong. Fortunately, many of the big, dark buildings can be found only in university areas and business districts.

The suburbs where most white South Africans still live are completely different. They have lush green canopies of the most beautiful leaves. Johannesburg is very proud of its tree cover. In fact, it has arguably the biggest man-made urban forest in the world, with over 10 million trees spread across the city. This is a significant achievement, as South Africa is generally arid. It has a geography of grasslands (veld) and semi desert as it approaches Namibia to the north.

A lot of planning work went into making Johannesburg green. When viewed from high points around Parktown North, the city is breathtaking. It is sometimes difficult to see the houses because the trees are packed very closely together.

The history of trees in Johannesburg is deeply linked to the mineral-energy complex. In 1866, when gold was discovered in the Witwatersrand, a ridge in the province of Gauteng, the mining companies required a lot of timber for their operations: for support structures, shaft construction, transport, and other mining activities. By 1934, 67 tree-dominated parks had been established and the city council was planting 6,000 trees a year.

Care has been taken in these communities to cut off access to any spaces where people who do not belong might be tempted to linger.

These trees were imported from everywhere. There was no ecological awareness regarding their impacts on water as foreign species, or their impacts on the ecosystems more broadly. The only consideration was their use for capital accumulation and their aesthetic value in creating a kind of European homeland in Africa. The trees continue to decimate groundwater in Johannesburg, contributing to the water scarcity the city has faced.

As early as 1896, tree-planting businessmen like William Nelson, who planted over 30 million trees, were warned about the dangers that invasive trees posed to the environment, but the warnings largely fell on deaf ears. Nobody paid attention. The rich were by now too attached to their postcard suburbs to make any changes.

Luckily, trees, like other plants, tend to naturalize and acclimatize. The fact that they are exotic does not mean they have no environmental benefit. Below the canopy in the old suburbs like Dunkeld and Rosebank, the streets are very cool. The tree cover means that the sun hardly ever penetrates to the ground and so temperatures typically remain low.

The lawns are also watered all the time. With slow evapotranspiration, the microclimate is guaranteed to hold cool temperatures, which areas with fewer trees can never achieve. This means that people can go for a leisurely walk or jog without feeling any discomfort. People can also walk their dogs all day or just enjoy some quiet moments in a park, of which there are many in the older neighbourhoods.

Care has been taken in these communities to cut off access to any spaces where people who do not belong might be tempted to linger. There are walls topped with rolls of barbed wire everywhere. Where spaces have been created around the low walls to plant flowers, there are rows of spikes on top of the walls. Anti-climb walls, anti-seat areas, no footpaths — these are all subtle ways to tell you that if you do not live here, you should not be here.

But if you can live with the brutalism, care has also been taken to ensure that the neighbourhoods are aesthetically pleasing and spacious. There are lots of flowers to mask the symbols and metaphors of segregated development.

Studies show that neighbourhoods with good tree cover have some of the following advantages:

• Temperatures can be up to 8 degrees cooler than in other parts of the same city where there is only concrete or asphalt paving;
• Cool spaces help people to relax and release stress;
• There is often more creativity when people are surrounded by trees and birds and insects;
• The calm surroundings of leafy suburbs mean that people are healthier because they can exercise more;
• Leafy suburbs are also conducive to gardening, helping keep people connected to nature.

Where the Iron Shacks are Hot as Hell

When one goes to the former townships, the first thing one notices is how red everything is. There is red and yellow dust everywhere.

The absence of trees means the sun hits the ground very quickly, and the many hours of heat cause water to evaporate, loosen the soil, and kill living soil organisms. The dust is in people’s homes, in the air, and people constantly breathe it in. The areas that are not covered in dust are paved over, so that there is a constant harsh glare as the sun’s rays bounce off the surface of the brick paving.

It gets hot very quickly in the townships.

In contrast to the green spaces of the northern suburbs and their sponge-cum-hoover effect that constantly sucks away the heat and dust, areas with paved concrete and dry dust come with proven hazards, including:

• Heat and discomfort makes it difficult for people to study or concentrate for long periods of time;
• Heat is expensive because people need to use air conditioning powered by coal-based electricity to stay healthy and comfortable;
• The absence of a tree canopy reduces the occurrence of insect and animal life, making subsistence gardening difficult.
• When young people are robbed of the opportunity to play and socialize due to heat conditions, it leads to poorer performance at school and poorer socialization.

In the townships, roofs are made of corrugated iron. The average salary here is less than 300 US dollars per month. Even for people who have families, “backyarding” has become a popular way to earn extra money. Back rooms are packed into already crammed compounds so that the landlords can get an extra 100 dollars per room.

With the housing backlog, there is an ever-growing number of shacks built with corrugated zinc around all townships. In fact, today there are shacks as far as the eye can see. In such tight spaces, people are constantly sweating as they cook, iron, or do other chores.

The hot, overcrowded space comes with many problems. It seriously undermines people’s health, creating frequent wet bulb conditions where heat and humidity are too high for sweat to evaporate. These deadly conditions lead to heat stroke for people who, without medical insurance, have little hope of receiving adequate medical care in the dysfunctional government hospitals. The unfortunate truth is that South Africa’s healthcare system is not prepared to deal with climate-induced heat shocks, prolonged heat waves, and dry spells.

Townships like Soweto that were built very close to mines still exist in the vicinity of high yellow mine tailings dumps. South Africa has over 6,000 abandoned mines that were deserted without any form of land rehabilitation. Some townships like Orlando are close to radioactive dunes. It is estimated that there are 600,000 metric tonnes of radioactive uranium under these dunes across Johannesburg.

Extreme weather events are now too numerous to ignore.

The wind constantly carries the dust into homes, causing asthma and other respiratory conditions. The lack of foliage means that temperatures are always four to five degrees higher than in the affluent communities. People are constantly trapped between the heat of the scorching sun and that reflected from the pavement. Older people’s quality of life is seriously affected. Young children also find it hard to play outside. They are forced to stay in the shade or in front of TV screens.

The scorching heat that settles over the country from September to March means that people are constantly dehydrated and often disoriented. There is always that lingering feeling of being tired and on edge. To make conditions liveable, the poor have to spend money they do not have. In relative terms, they spend more than the rich on cooling equipment and liquids.

Climate Change Announces Its Arrival

For far too long, government agencies adopted a very relaxed attitude when it came to dealing with climate challenges. However, a triple whammy of drought, collapsing reticulation systems, and floods have caused the South African government to change. As Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana recently admitted to a journalist of the South African Broadcasting Corporation, “I always thought that climate change was far away. Now I believe that it is real, it is here.”

In 2018, the city of Cape Town almost ran out of water. It adopted a Day Zero target for when the city would run out and launched conservation efforts to help push it back. The entire world watched with bated breath, obviously realizing that although Cape Town was the first, it certainly was not going to be the only major city to run out of water. The rains eventually returned and everyone heaved a sigh of relief.

However, the water shortages have moved eastwards, to East London and other parts of the Eastern Cape Province. Several towns are persistently living on the verge of day zero conditions. Unfortunately, they are not getting the same attention as Cape Town. The media has unfortunately failed to develop a climate consciousness that can make the link between the droughts, heatwaves, and worsening climate change. In other words, the media has not understood that the climate crisis is a post-normal problem, it is not just another drought, heatwave, or flood, but a climate shock.

Four years after Cape Town’s Day Zero, the city of Durban suffered the second-deadliest series of flash floods in its history. Rains bucketed down for two weeks, hardly ever stopping to offer people respite. The rains tore down apartment blocks and shacks alike. It swept containers and brand new cars into the ocean. By the time the rains stopped, over 450 people had died. The rains also caused over 2 billion US dollars of infrastructure damage. Some of the bridges and roads swept away by the rain have yet to be rebuilt.

More recently, in 2023, scorching heatwaves caused many farms to shutter. The lack of water, which caused serious problems in the Karoo area, pushed vulnerable farmers into debt. Some of them could not take it. Farm suicides rose sharply. As some farms went out of business, workers were forced to move to urban areas in search of work.

The heatwaves ultimately killed more than a million animals in the southern African subregion. In South Africa alone, many animals perished as a result of extreme heatwaves. In the Phongolo Nature Reserve in KwaZulu-Natal, an extreme heatwave in 2021 killed over 120 birds with temperatures hovering around 45 degrees Celsius.

Extreme weather events are now too numerous to ignore. This calls for changing how we live and how we interact with nature.

Transforming the Built Environment

Some departments are trying to change certain specific aspects of Black people’s conditions. The Gauteng City Region Observatory (GCRO) has produced a lot of important data to map the changes in the quality of life for people in urban metropolitan areas. Some of the data includes the carbon footprint of the city of Johannesburg, differences in footprint per suburb, and what needs to be done to decarbonize the city.

The GCRO maps are an eye-opener. There is for example a comparative study of Sandton and Alexandra, which lie adjacent to each other along the M1 highway. In a recent quality of life survey, at least 40 percent of respondents said that heat was a major concern. Respondents who complained about unsustainable heat levels typically lived in suburbs where there was very little vegetation. Policymakers have to start paying the same attention to vegetation that they give to bricks and mortar projects.

The first obvious solution to South Africa’s heat problem is changing its apartheid geography.

According the several reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the number of heat days is going to increase. At least eight people died during a major heatwave in 2023, according to the South African government. The majority of those affected were farm workers. Due to the country’s history, Black people often view heat as a temporary discomfort that needs to be endured. Farm and construction sector employers are also often reluctant to give their workers breaks on hot days.

To resolve some of these challenges, the South African government has developed national heat health action guidelines. The document maps the direct impacts that heat can have on human beings (including illness, death, and hospitalizations) as well as the indirect impacts (higher numbers of ambulance call-outs, risk of drowning, the spread of vector-borne diseases), before outlining recommendations for individuals as well as employers.

While only a guide, the document highlights important measures that the country needs to take. The first one is displaying alert levels live on TV as per the recommendations of South African Weather Services (SAWS). This alert system has already been implemented. Whenever there is an elevated risk of heat stroke, the TV channels show the SAWS’s current level on the impact-based severe warning system. The heat health guidelines also make recommendations on how to change the built environment and institutional behaviour.

A Plural Approach to the Climate Crisis

People tend to believe climate change as something waiting to happen, or that will be a serious problem somewhere in the distant future when we are all dead. However, for too many people, climate change has already become a major problem. Nowhere is this more serious than in overcrowded communities where a lack of vegetation and a preponderance of poor construction materials like corrugated zinc sheets means that people constantly feel like they are trapped in an oven.

As the Climate Justice Charter Movement argues, the climate crisis must be addressed through a plural vision. That means addressing the legacies of the past and the poly-crisis of today, and building a liveable world for human and non-human life forms. This calls on individuals as well as institutions to change the way that they build as well as how people manage heat.

The first obvious solution to South Africa’s heat problem is changing its apartheid geography. Planting more vegetation is cost effective and can help people live longer, healthier lives. Even before heavy investments are made to develop policy frameworks and health guidelines, the rallying cry should be to get everybody planting trees, rewilding their garden, rebuilding estuaries, developing people’s biodiversity registers, and most importantly, ending the war on nature.