Karoo Dust Bowl (Part III) — drought-battered Richtersveld farmers fear destructive creep of mining

Martha Farmer came to Eksteenfontein as a teacher, and married into the “Bosluis Baster” community. She now runs a guest house. Her husband, Nicodemus Swartbooi, worked with a mining company and is now retired. (Photo: Leonie Joubert)

By Leonie Joubert

29 Jan 2025

The recent years-long drought may have tipped parts of the Northern Cape towards an irreversible dust bowl, following decades of heavy grazing and mining. Farming remains the most viable livelihood. But as the region’s climate tips towards hotter, drier conditions, Karoo researchers fear this sparsely populated region will become a sacrifice zone for the rest of the country’s development, and that only a powerful few will benefit.

This is the third of a three-part Karoo Dust Bowl series that investigates the recent desertification trends in the Northern Cape, the causes, and the likely consequences to conservation and livelihoods.

Read part one and part two.

It was the butter trees that did it.

Sumptuous as these plump dwarf succulents must have looked to Henley Strauss’s sheep, they were as potentially lethal as their pink blooms were pretty and their boles stout. Strauss’s hired shepherd was driving the flock from their winter grazing on the hills above Eksteenfontein in the far Northern Cape, to the lower-lying summer grazing which has more watering holes. That’s when the krimpsiekte – the “shrinking sickness” – hit.

“One moment the sheep is okay, the next moment it’s just laying,” says Strauss.

The plant is notorious across the Karoo, since its neurotoxic sap causes potentially lethal paralysis.

“You get different types of krimpsiekte. Kop krimpsiekte is in the head and the sheep will act like a mad person.”

If they get maag krimpsiekte, where they bloat and fluid runs from their nose and mouth, it’s tickets.

It was an odd season. A mis reën – a misty rain – came through in early December, causing a flush of growth in this single species when there was little else to eat.

“We had 26 sick sheep in the kraal and more than 10 died,” he says a few weeks after the event which, at the time, left him too emotional to speak about it. His back-of-envelope tally puts his losses at about R30,000: R2,000 a head for the ewes, and another R10,000 when one of his prize rams got tangled in a fence and died. It’s hard for a subsistence farmer to recover from this kind of financial shock.

Farming is an agterdeur for families like his: if you need money quickly, you sell a sheep, like drawing cash from the ATM.

The veld was beginning to recover after the devastation of the drought that gripped the region from 2015 to 2021, but Strauss is pragmatic. His flock was bouncing back after a good lambing season, and it will do so again, god willing.

“This is part of life. You accept that there will be losses, but that you will be blessed again.”

Rising temperatures and drought have tipped parts of Namaqualand towards dust bowl conditions, which some dryland ecologists believe may be irreversible in places. These environmental shocks have accelerated the pressures of decades of mining and heavy grazing, leaving the ground bare and vulnerable to wind erosion. The increased severity of dust storms further spreads the desert, as plants downwind get fatally sandblasted, releasing more sand to become mobile dunes.

Read more: Karoo Dust Bowl (Part I) — here come the dunes, a death knell for plant species and farmers’ livelihoods

As Earth’s average temperature slips above the 1.5°C safe threshold of warming, Namaqualand is set to get even hotter and drier. This raises questions about how to best support livelihoods in a remote and sparsely populated area that some fear will be treated as a sacrifice zone by a powerful elite who want to capitalise on its mineral wealth while leaving little behind for the locals.

Karoo Richtersveld Henley Strauss is a proud member of the ‘Bosluis Basters’ in Eksteenfontein, a community whose mixed race fell foul of the apartheid government’s ideology of racial purity. Just more than 100 families were evicted from a farm ‘Bo-Sluis’ (‘above the sluice’) outside Pofadder in 1948 and relocated to the Richtersveld. (Photo: Leonie Joubert)

‘Sacrifice zone’ for the rich and powerful

Out here in the communal grazing lands of the Richtersveld, a windmill is a kingmaker.

But there are fewer working watering holes these days, natural or drilled. Some dried in the recent drought, others have fallen into disrepair, some are drowning in the newly mobile sand, others have been cannibalised for spare parts.

The ground around those that remain working is threadbare and packed as hard as concrete by the milling hooves of the many animals that congregate around them.

Read more: Karoo Dust Bowl (Part II)

“Close to these water points, there is no vegetation,” says Dr Igshaan Samuels, a rangelands and arid ecosystem specialist scientist with the Agriculture Research Council (ARC). The same applies to the stock posts, small permanent kraals where shepherds keep their animals at night.

Agriculturalists first coined the term “sacrifice zone” to refer to those small but high-impact areas on a farm that are allowed to degrade in the interests of the common good. A healthy herd must drink.

“The size of these sacrifice zones might have increased (with the drought), with more animals using fewer water points.”

In spite of it being such an arid ecosystem, Namaqualand’s ample dwarf succulent shrubs have long drawn wild antelope and herders with domesticated flocks. But the ability to move livestock is what’s made it possible for indigenous nomadic herders and settled commercial farmers to run animals here. Moving herds is essential for veld recovery, explains Samuels.

Windmills and fencing are the two technologies that have allowed forms of farming to thrive, but are in some ways at odds with appropriate veld management.

In a warming and drying Namaqualand, the main threats to sustaining communal farming like that practised by the Eksteenfontein herders, according to Samuels, are land degradation, elite capture and threat of land conversion such as the proposed Boegoebaai mega-project, with a port, green hydrogen plant and a huge supporting town planned for a natural cove just north of Port Nolloth.

Johannes Farmer is what locals call a ‘bakkie boer’. He recently retired from a job in mining and now runs a small cattle herd, more as a hobby than for the income. (Photo: Leonie Joubert)

Addressing these challenges comes down to local governance, whether it’s how communal farmers share the grazing commons, who maintains water infrastructure, or the policing of transgressions such as cases where people put up illegal fences that cut off others’ access to the commons.

“In some of the communal areas you may have stronger people (who) try to privatise areas. They put up fences, even though you’re not supposed to, and then they start slowly encroaching onto other places where other families historically used to stand,” he explains.

“When they put up fences, they restrict animal movement, and that’s when you start overgrazing. People must know their rights.”

Ultimately, it’s the Richtersveld that decides how you will farm, says Strauss from experience. If you “farm for the eye” – if you try to impress with a big herd – a drought will cut you down to size.

‘Kaalgat millionaires’

They call themselves the kaalgat millionaires – the “naked” millionaires – although a better translation is the more fruity “butt-naked” millionaires.

They’re the Nama people who had the mineral rights held in their ancestral lands in the Richtersveld restored to them in a historic 2007 land claim against the state-owned Alexkor Diamond Mine. But they say they have yet to see the profits from these riches trickle down to the people.

Strauss wouldn’t count himself among the kaalgat millionaires. He isn’t Nama, and Eksteenfontein isn’t part of the land claim in question. But his people’s story is one of the same dispossession of land, wealth and citizenship that kept indigenous, mixed-race and Black people as second-class under British colonial and apartheid rule.

Today, both communities live in another kind of sacrifice zone: like the trampled ground around a farm’s watering trough, modern industrial developments have high-impact areas that are allowed to be harmed or neglected. These are justified as a necessary trade-off for the greater good: for profit, development or national interest.

Sociologists like Dr Mzingaye Xaba use this term to refer to areas that suffer serious environmental degradation, toxic pollution or health fallout from sites that are typically industrial facilities, such as refineries or waste disposal sites, or near extractive industries like mining.

The people living in these areas are also those most likely to suffer the environmental and health fallout, and are usually low-income communities, marginalised groups or communities of colour.

Xaba is with the University of Lesotho’s Department of Sociology and Social Work and since 2019 has visited the central Karoo area to canvas people on their position regarding fracking. The take-home sentiment is that while most locals want development that brings jobs, they’re not sure that fracking will deliver everything that the politicians and mining businesses are promising, and that the environmental fallout will leave the local economy worse off in the long run.

“(The) definition of sacrifice zones perfectly describes the dominant conception of the Karoo in the state and among the supporters of fracking, who see this sparsely populated, semi-arid area as a national asset that can be utilised for the national good, understood primarily in terms of driving economic growth,” Xaba writes in the book Contested Karoo.

“(T)he Karoo is being redefined by externally driven investments aimed at exploiting its natural resources. In a context in which the Karoo is economically and politically marginalised, the state presents such externally initiated non-agricultural development projects as an answer to the developmental challenges facing the Karoo, even though local populations are divided over the costs and benefits of such projects.”

The sentiments he found in and around Beaufort West echo what researchers like Von Holdt, Hoffman and Samuels have found after speaking with people in Namaqualand, communal and commercial farmers, and townsfolk: they’re sceptical of the development gains and jobs promised by a new surge in mining interests. They live here. They have seen first-hand the damage left in the wake of a mine, leaving few jobs and plenty of desolation.

They don’t want to inherit dust.

Martha Farmer came to Eksteenfontein as a teacher, and married into the ‘Bosluis Baster’ community. She now runs a guesthouse. Her husband, Nicodemus Swartbooi, worked with a mining company and is now retired. (Photo: Leonie Joubert)

At the same time, these communities have less political clout or chance to voice their needs or desires in the processes of deciding how the region will be developed.

Researchers working here have seen for themselves how overlooked communities are in the development agenda.

“If you have a low population density, you don’t have a lot of voting power,” says Samuels. “You don’t have a lot of mass voices.”

This matters now, as the Karoo emerges as a new resource frontier, write Hoffman and retired Stellenbosch University sociologist Cherryl Walker — also an emeritus professor – in Contested Karoo.

“(M)ost people for whom the Karoo is home are being subsumed within economic and political agendas that are being set outside the region.”

Henley Strauss is very much a local. He’s also a proud member of the “Bosluis Basters” of Eksteenfontein, a community whose mixed race fell foul of the apartheid government’s ideology of racial purity. Just more than 100 families were evicted from the farm Bo-Sluis (“above the sluice”) outside Pofadder in 1948 and relocated to the Richtersveld.

As much as he holds true to his herder culture, he also frets that it is dying out. The younger generation want secure jobs – maybe in the municipality or at a mine, rather than the gruelling outdoor life of shepherding. But he’s also strident in his determination to fight against any mining in this part of the Richtersveld, which is a World Heritage Site.

“They say mining is forever, but so are the damages,” he says. “I have seen with my own eyes what mining has done to the environment, and it is not good.” DM

This article was produced with the support of the Henry Nxumalo Foundation, and is part of a research collaboration with the Stellenbosch University School for Climate Studies: Story Ark - tales from southern Africa’s climate tipping points.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REeWvTRUpMk

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‘Sacrifice zone’ for the rich and powerful

‘Kaalgat millionaires’