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CHAPTER 1

Water in Peril

Is the crisis looming, or has it already loomed?

The little mokoro, a boat roughly hewn from a mopane log, drifted slowly through the waters of the Okavango Delta. It was tiny — hardly larger than the crocodiles whose snorkel-eyes could sometimes be seen, mercilessly obsidian. The water was a startling blue with eddies of silt, drifts of ochre and dun, easy enough to examine, for the boat rode only a few centimeters above the surface. There were sudden splashings from a nearby papyrus island as hippos rolled in the muck.

You could spend days poling through the Okavango's twisty hippo-ways in a mokoro and never see anyone. You can clamber out of your mokoro onto an "island" of swamp grass a meter thick, but if you were accidentally to plunge through — an easy thing to do — there would be a couple of meters of water beneath you. Everywhere improbable vegetation grows prolifically. There are papyrus beds, swamp grasses sharp as razors, and exposed roots worn smooth by heavy bodies passing.

The Bayei people, swamp dwellers, find their way effortlessly through this maze of identical channels, but sometimes even they go into the swamp and never return. A legend says there are legions of screaming skulls in the muck beneath the islands; at the end of the world, when the waters dry up, they will be exposed to confirm the apocalypse so long forecast. At twilight, when the hip pos return to the channels, their heavy, lethal bodies cutting Vs into the water, it's an easy legend to believe. Now the Bayei are being told that the end of their world may come earlier — not through catastrophe as prophesied, but through the thirst of that most voracious and expansionist of species, humankind. The pipelines, dredgers, and cadres of water management engineers and the bureaucrats of the water commission draw ever closer, persistent as a virus with no cure, ready to suck the lifeblood from the delta. And in 1996, for the first time in many years, the annual Okavango flood never reached the delta. The rains had failed in Angola, the Bayei were told.

"How deep is it here?" I asked Kehemetswe, the Bayei who was poling the mokoro.

"Two meters," he said. "That's fifteen feet," he added helpfully, getting it wrong.

He wore baggy khaki shorts, a sun visor marked "All England Tennis Club," and 10-centimeter earrings made of chipped bone and braided twine. His pole was a skinny thing that bent perilously in the mud as he pushed us along. He said he would use it to thwack crocodiles if they became a nuisance. Thwack — it had a reassuring sound.

"Two meters? Is that normal?"

"Last year, three. Year before that, three. Year before that, three. Three. Always three."

"What does this mean?" I asked, but I already knew the answer. And the next year I saw him quoted in a Johannesburg newspaper: "Namibia wants to build a pipe to take water from the river through the desert," he said. "If the water dries up, it will be the end of our lives. All the things of our lives solely depend on it."

The Okavango, the third-largest river in southern Africa, rises in the moist tropical hills of Angola, where it is known as the Cubango, and flows for about 1,400 kilometers through Namibia and into Botswana; there it soaks into the flat plains of the Kalahari and spreads out in a dazzling array of channels that make up Africa's largest oasis and the world's most spectacular inland delta.

Once the Okavango Delta was a lake, but a geologic era ago some slight tectonic shift in the earth's crust drained the water into secret crevices. The Okavango River continued to pour down across what is now the Caprivi Strip from the moist hills of Angola's Benguela Plateau as it always had, but the lake had disappeared. The river became tangled in thickets of reeds, giant papyrus, and mud, and then just vanished. Riviersonderend, the Afrikaners called it, River Without End. There are many such rivers in the wild and desolate north, the Great Thirstland, but the Okavango was the grandest, most fertile, and most beautiful of all.

In good years the waters still overflow the marshes into the Boteti River and reach the parched, arid surface of the Makgadigadi Pans to the southeast. In the best years of all they seep northeastward into the even more remote and mysterious Linyanti lagoons. This marsh is one of the grandest places on earth. So many legends, so entangled with mundane and exotic fact! The munu, the black tree baboons that folklore says stalk Okavango women, longing for the day they might be men again. Lions hunting at night. Lagoons boiling with hippos. Endless forests of thorn acacia and mopane trees, home to leopards, cheetahs, wild dogs, Cape buffalo, giraffes, a shopping cart full of monkey species, the greatest migrations of zebras on earth, and huge herds of elephants. These 60,000 elephants are the subject of bitter controversy. The Botswanan government prohibited all elephant hunting in 1983, to universal acclaim, but since then the herds have proliferated, causing massive habitat destruction. And they are now being culled: some 15,000 elephants will have to be shot, here and in Zimbabwe and Angola, to end their own suicidal eating binge.

The Okavango Swamp has other enemies: drought, for one. In the 1990s the Kalahari region and Angola suffered from the worst drought of the century, and no one knows whether the marsh will recover. El Niño was blamed, but when the disturbance ended and the rains still did not come, human-induced climate change became the cause of choice. Mostly, the inhabitants were reduced to praying for rain, but the water levels continued to shrink. Now from the south, from Botswana's orderly and well-managed cities, comes an enemy even worse than drought: growing human populations and their demands for more, more, more. And from neighboring Namibia, too. Namibia is a desert country and always parched. But its population is growing, and in 1996, with the country's reservoirs standing at 9 percent of capacity, Namibian authorities turned their eyes eastward, to Botswana's Okavango Delta.

By 1997 there were already threats of a "water war" between Namibia, which wanted to take 20 million cubic meters a year from the Okavango system, and Botswana, whose own dams and reservoirs were critically low after ten years without rain. In all likelihood this talk of war was mere hyperbole. Still, there were threats of sabotage if a pipeline proposed by Namibia were ever to be built. Late in 1997 residents of Maun, in Botswana, walked out of a conciliatory meeting called by the Namibian government, and both countries Went to the International Court of Justice at The Hague to dispute a minor boundary issue, a sure sign of internation fractiousness.

In 1996, when the annual floods failed, Maun was put immediately at risk — not just tourism but the villagers, too, who need the river for washing, for fish, and for the water lily roots and reeds they use to build houses. The town's drinking water, drawn from boreholes, was also drying up. Botswana's hydrologists scrambled to find out just how rapidly the water table was dropping. Alarmist stories were heard everywhere. Namibia's pipeline would mean permanent drought, residents were told. Wells and boreholes would go dry.

Namibia, in turn, had its anxieties. Few places on earth are drier than Namibia. Of the meager rain that does fall, four-fifths evaporates immediately. Only 1 percent recharges groundwater tables. Worse, Namibia has no perennial rivers, only seasonally flowing ones that are reduced to a trickle for several months and dry up completely in others.

To augment the water supply, Namibia has been tinkering with other options, including desalination and pumping groundwater from its fossil aquifers. But desalination, expensive enough anywhere, is prohibitive in Namibia, where most of the population centers are inland. Overpumping groundwater has also caused dangerous increases in water and soil salinity, as well as the rapid depletion of the aquifers themselves.

This chronic water shortage prodded Namibia to launch a planning process to extend its already massive network of supply pipelines and aqueducts, the Eastern National Water Carrier, to the Okavango River, which runs throughout the year along its northeastern border with Angola. The first phases of the plan would divert an estimated 20 million cubic meters of water annually (700 liters a second) from a point on the Okavango River near Rundu in northern Namibia — well before the river gets to Botswana — and pump it uphill through a 250-kilometer pipeline to Windhoek, the capital. Namibia sees the pipeline as the only feasible solution to keep pace with the water demands of its growing urban centers. Clearly, the need for both governments to negotiate a long-term solution is urgent.

Not surprisingly, the Namibians have defended their plans and maintain that the amount they will be taking is negligible, even though they intend to quadruple or quintuple it to somewhere around 100 million cubic meters a year. Even that, they maintain, would draw off only 1 percent of the water flowing through the Okavango system. Richard Fry, Namibia's deputy secretary of water affairs, was blunt. "The severity of Namibia's water crisis leaves us with little option," he said after the Okavango floods failed in 1996. The dams supplying Windhoek and the central areas of Namibia were at an all-time low, and were expected to run completely dry in a year or two. Namibia's senior water engineer, a bluff Afrikaner called Piet Heyns, was blunter still: "If we don't build the pipeline and the rains fail again ... we'll be in the shit," he told the press. The corpses of 60,000 head of cattle, dead of thirst, littered the landscape.

What, indeed, are the alternatives? It's not that Namibia isn't trying. If desalination is too expensive, and pumping water from disused mines is only a temporary solution, what is left? Namibians are not profligate users of water. In the last few years, Windhoek's residents have been cutting back water use, achieving a 30 percent saving. The city's annual consumption of 17 million cubic meters has not increased significantly since independence in 1990, despite a growth in population from 130,000 to 220,000, and is now only one-third of the water consumed per capita in another desert city, Las Vegas. Significant increases in the efficiency of use — what Sandra Postel has called poetically the "last oasis"— are therefore unlikely, and, despite conservation, the country's water needs are expected to double by 2020. Where is this water to come from? Namibia has agreed to an extensive environmental impact study before spending more than half a billion dollars to dip its pipeline into the Okavango. But what happens if the study says the delta would be irreparably harmed? What happens if Botswana furiously objects? Richard Fry believes that Botswana will see Namibia's water crisis in the light of "humanitarian need" and will ultimately respond sympathetically to the pipeline project. But if it doesn't, what are the Namibians to do? And if the Namibians go ahead despite objections, what are the Botswanans to do?

The nagging questions remain: Is it safe to interfere with the delta's only supply of water? The Okavango is robust enough to survive anything except the water being turned off. If that happens, a Garden of Eden would return to Kalahari dust, the wildlife would migrate or die, and 100,000 humans would be reduced to slum dwellers in cities already unable to cope. If it isn't safe to divert the water, is it necessary? Where, in the balance of competing interests, does natural justice lie? At what point does man's stewardship of the planet and its resources collide with man's own needs? What is the ethical position? Has it come to this: a stark choice between human misery and the destruction of one of the planet's most magnificent jewels?

And perhaps the most difficult question of all: In any ecology, beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of the Okavango elephants or of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive.

Why should the world care what happens in this obscure debate between two minor-league African nations? Both countries are interesting enough, but hardly worth the world's concentrated attention. Namibia is, after all, the most arid country in the southern end of an arid continent. And Botswana? It is also a curiosity: a democratically run, sensibly governed, economically sound country that has eschewed grandiose development projects in favor of small-scale enterprise, schooling, and decent housing. But this is a country that has only one and a half rivers. It too is mostly desert. Of course these two places will squabble over water. What has that to do with the water-rich North?

As we shall see, the Okavango is the world in miniature. All the great themes that are being played out on the global scale with water — diminishing aquifers, dropping water tables, alarm about sustainability — all the issues that are facing more populous places much more critical to global peace, are here being traced in sinewy outline. Here is a rapidly growing population placing a strain on a fragile and finite resource — just as it is in North Africa, China, many parts of Asia, sections of Europe, and the southwestern United States. Here are humankind's competing imperatives, for food and for "development." Here is a simple example of the transboundary, supranational nature of water basin and water resource debates — just as is happening along the Nile, the Mekong, the Ganges, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Jordan, the Rhine and the Danube, the Colorado, Rio Grande, and Columbia. Here is a small-scale example of growing interstate tensions over an increasingly anxious need for life's most critical resource. Here, poignantly, is the imminent and probably unpreventable destruction of a superb and precious ecosystem, with all its intended and unintended consequences — much like the Three Gorges on China's Yangtze River. Here are human politics brutally undisguised, and a sign that necessity will always trump ethics — as the Americans have done to the Mexicans over the Colorado. Here engineers are trying to solve problems not of their own causing, with predictably dismal results — as in China, Libya, or the planet's most expensive welfare system, California's waterworks. Yet here also, by way of contrast, is the possibility for international cooperation: water wars are not inevitable. Namibia, Botswana, and Angola have set up a commission to discuss water rights, just as the Indians and Bangladeshis have done in their squabble over the Ganges.

I was in the Kenyan town of Narok the night a group of Maasai morans, warriors going through their rites of passage to tribal elder, clashed with the thuggish national police of Daniel Arap Moi. The cause of the ferocious riot that followed is of no consequence — warrior exuberance had gotten out of hand, and the police had overreacted — but, to be safe, I left them to rattle their sticks and truncheons at one another and took refuge in a nearby village. There I was invited in by a family of Gabbra, who lived in a tiny four-hut complex 3 kilometers from the nearest well.

The senior woman of the household, Manya, invited me to stay and pressed on me unwanted gifts of food she couldn't afford. It was, I knew, a typical African welcome.

In return, I picked up one of the four yellow plastic drums piled in front of the hut — it had started its life as a bulk container for vegetable oil in some far-off industrial city — and offered to help her fetch water. The family laughed, politely, but it was obvious what they were really thinking: white people, mzungu, are so inept. Fetching water was woman's work. So I stayed behind with the men, who were smoking on a wooden bench outside one of the huts.

Later that evening Manya and her daughters returned, each with a 15-liter pail balanced on her head. They swayed down the trail, singing one of their working songs to pass the hours, as they had done that morning, and as they would do on the days that followed, and as they expected to do, if they thought about it at all, forever.

A little later we ate corn mash and fried banana and sucked on mangoes. I declined the water, partly out of politeness and partly out of fear. The well was an old one and had originally been used by fifty families. Now, four times as many drew water from it, and they had to go down farther every year. A few months earlier, Manya said, two men had descended into the well and had passed up the muck in buckets, deepening the well by the height of a man. The water was muddy and smelled unclean.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Water"
by .
Copyright © 2000 Jacobus Communications Corporation.
Excerpted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.
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