Surviving Floods: Eroding bodies through injury and healing in Durban, South Africa.

Abstract

Quarry Road West (QRW), an informal settlement in Durban South Africa, has precariously grown along the low-lying banks of the Palmiet river. This urban environment is enmeshed with planetary changes that are exacerbated by spatial inequalities. Over the last four years, QRW has been subjected to repeated ecological, social and political catastrophes that have pushed the settlement to the limit, forcing the approximately 4000 residents of QRW into a state of continuous survival without adequate government intervention. This ethnography observed the power that agency has within the constraints of necropolitical inaction, to negotiate urban survival during an environmental disaster. It is this agency that extends past the injuries of the physical, social and environmental body to encourage healing in the aftermath of these overlapping catastrophes.

Durban has faced two major flooding events in recent years, the first in 2019 and a second in 2022 that resulted in 480 deaths. During each flood, large sections of the Palmiet river bank, which runs through the heart of QRW, was washed away, killing whole families and destroying homes and infrastructure in its wake. Each environmental disaster has resulted in individuals scrambling to access the last available sections of the eroding river bank, where they try to re-build their homes.

These flooding events have been coupled with the large-scale, citywide violence. The most recent civil unrest that occurred in 2021, took the form of large numbers of people across Durban looting and burning businesses, eventually causing Africa’s largest port to come to a temporary halt. The civil unrest re-opened old race wounds manufactured under apartheid, amplifying inequalities that cut across race and economic status, with upwards of 400 people being killed from neighborhood vigilantism. The stark reality of economic inequalities evident in QRW becomes obvious with a lack of available toilets, inadequate sanitation removal from municipality failures, regular sewage being leaked into the river from nationwide electricity power cuts, through to the gendered nature of accessing water.

People living in QRW describe the civil unrest as ‘famine to feast’, with people taking to the streets to temporarily escape the state’s necropolitical inaction that has come to control every aspect of their daily lives. The layering of multiple catastrophes has forced people into a state of urban survival. Hoping to heal as individuals and as a community, residents struggle to adapt in the face of unfolding planetary violence and widespread social fracturing that combine to create injuries across physical, social and environmental bodies.