African Wildlife & Environment Issue 78

CONSERVATION

Thomas Bain and the origin of our NATIONAL HYDRAULICMISSION

South Africa is a fundamentally water-constrained country. We often hear that we are the thirtieth driest country in the world, as the media regurgitates memes that have little intrinsic value as elements of truth. The way we have chosen to manage this reality, is to embark on an aggressive national hydraulic mission.

The 'Hydraulic Mission of Society' was defined by commentators writing about the Spanish, as they mobilized national policy to create an engineering corps capable of damming rivers and diverting the water to distant places, where localised scarcity were inhibitors of economic growth. This has been referred to as the co-creation of nature as a 'hybrid' (Swyngedouw, 1999), as aquatic ecosystems have been fundamentally altered in the quest for modernization and economic development. The most famous hydraulic mission, is probably that of the Egyptians, referred to in literature as the 'High Dam Covenant' (Waterbury, 1979).

Prof Anthony Turton

As a road engineer, he was accustomed to long journeys into the arid interior of the Cape Colony, where he did a lot of mapping work. He was an inquisitive man, so when Brown published his seminal work on the aridity of the Cape Colony (Brown, 1875), Bain became interested in water. Two years later, Brown (1877) published his second book in which he proposed the damming of rivers, citing the success of the Chinese, but also referring to the need to tame and domesticate the wild rivers, if the Colony were to prosper (Turton et al ., 2004). This fired the imagination of Bain, and while he was travelling in the most arid of areas in the Karoo, he began pondering the notion of damming and diverting the Orange River. Bain was deeply impressed by a small mission station near present day Upington, where the desert had been made to bloom by diverting water from the Orange River. This fired his imagination as he applied the ideas mooted by Brown, drawing maps to show where dams could be built, and water diverted for economic activities. Being a surveyor, a foundation skill of road building, he began drawing maps of greater sophistication and accuracy over time. Great was his surprise when he discovered that it was theoretically possible to divert water from the Orange, through the coastal mountain range, and deliver fresh water to Port Elizabeth. This so excited him that he decided to write his book, published a decade after Brown’s first work on aridity. This book so captured the imagination of government, that it influenced the promulgation of the Irrigation Act in 1887. Bain was appointed head of the newly created Department of Irrigation and the Carnarvon River was diverted in 1888, triggering the idea of VanWyksvlei Dam.

Hand drawing signed by Thomas Bain in 1885 showing how a dam can divert water out of the river channel.

The South African Hydraulic Mission is like that of the Spanish, and can be traced back to when Thomas Bain published the first book on dam- building (Bain, 1886). Bain was a road engineer born in the frontier region of what we now call the Eastern Cape, in the aftermath of the War of the Axe. This was the culmination of a century of brutal warfare between the Xhosa and British.

11 | African Wildlife & Environment | Issue 78 (2021)