Watered Down - A Kokosi Water Saga

The Merafong ( A Place Of Mine shafts) is the epicentre of South Africa’s gold mining activities which have taken place since the times of the Voortrekkers, who arrived in 1910 led by Danie Theron and Ferdinand Foch, Afrikaner commanders who battled the English and displaced the native people for a period spanning from the 1860’s to 1990’s.

It boast having the deepest mineshaft in the world, and has in the past being referred to as the Vaal Reef, a place where prospectors such as the Jones brothers discovered gold prior to the emergence of the other settler communities that settled on its plains.

The native home of the Barolong and Bakgatlha tribes, this region also experienced vast battles and is site for one of the most blatant dispossessions of livestock in the history of colonial usurpation of native property.

In colonial times, Deelkraal (where Kokosi is based) was a vast meadow where white settlers brought stolen native livestock to deal among themselves, while exercising their protracted land invasions in the form of farm allocations.

In recent years, the main mining towns of Carletonville and Fochville have seen the growing mining industry move towards technological automation, which has further displaced the black work force, which was exploitatively extracted from the homelands a century prior.

This thriving mining industry has never provided environmental accountability for the black communities of Kokosi and Khutsong townships, communities that have been adversely affected by its enterprises and sub-surface activities.

And recalling the recent water shortages within Merafong, a number of questions have arisen regarding the management of the municipality; which has seen debts soaring and ordinary communities living without clean water and adequate electricity.

One might as wow is it possible that in townships surrounded by eleven profiteering mining companies, mothers are running with buckets behind speeding trucks with filthy water for sale, in the face of the worst water crisis the Merafong region has experienced?

These communities from which much of the labour is drawn, has now a growing generation of young people who are disillusioned by prospects of entering the labour force, feeling despondent and fallen into trappings of social decay, while they languish feeling betrayed by those they voted into power.

Townships in these receding mining towns are becoming havens for illegal mining and cartels that lure youth into criminality and self destruction through narcotics; and this is exacerbated by the scourge of rising unemployment in regions such as Merafong.

This chapter in a series of documentary films aims to start a conversation around the pressing issues confronting the municipality.

Guided by these voices of the people who are confronting a devastating water crisis and electricity shortages, this documentary aims to deal extensively with how the current water crisis is part of a national crisis, in light of a global crisis of climate change.

This documentary is the record of a time of social crisis that will turn turbulent and violent in the coming months if there is no resolution or compromises that are reached.