The Museum of Watery Relations, an interactive project by anthropologist Amber Abrams, is challenging people to rethink the water-access crisis in one of the world’s most unequal countries.
Water was on everyone’s minds in Cape Town in spring 2018. In an acute emergency, three years of drought and severe mismanagement had left the city with just 18 days of water before ‘Day Zero’ – the day the taps run dry. Although access to water is a South African constitutional right, it seemed as if there was no solution other than to work together to reduce usage. Facing this bleak prospect, Amber Abrams, an anthropologist, and back then a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town’s (UCT) Future Water Institute, saw a need for more collaborative engagement around water scarcity.
Her work led to the launch of the online Museum of Watery Relations in 2018. Based in Cape Town but working throughout South Africa, its aim is to make space for citizens “to become more aware of their place in the water cycle and that what they do influences it”. In other words, to think about their relationship with water, “beyond turning on a tap”.
In the end, Cape Town’s taps did not run dry, thanks in part to public engagement. As Brookings, a US-based public policy non-profit puts it, “what ultimately saved the day was a combination of sustained public communications and innovative engineering solutions”.
To date, the museum offers resources such as an interactive map of various water sources and stories about water, as well as free workshops held in pubic spaces. An important aspect of the project, she says, is to “build connections with the right people and equip citizens with the language for constructive dialogue on water use with officials, researchers, scientists and property developers”.
Although currently online, Abrams’ hope is that funding will materialise for a physical space too.
Water scarcity: the implications
Last year, a Greenpeace report found that water scarcity is most acute in South Africa’s rural areas, where 19% of people lack reliable access to water and 33% do not have basic sanitation services. Across South Africa, more than 26% of schools and 45% of health care clinics have no water access, the report states. During her PhD research, Abrams witnessed the struggle first hand. In one hospital, “families had to bring patients water – alcohol disinfectants were used to clean, but there was no water in the taps,” she says.
Factors that contribute to South Africa’s water insecurity include the fact that “water hungry” coal-fired power stations supply 90% of the country’s electricity needs. Eskom, the state-owned power company, schedules regular blackouts in an effort to ease the strain, which negatively impacts homes and businesses. Meanwhile, extreme weather variations have caused floods in some areas, while others face worsening supply shortages of water due to widespread droughts, some lasting for a decade or more.
In a country where an estimated four million people engage in smallholder agriculture, with maize being the major crop and staple food, water scarcity hits hard. This is particularly true in South Africa’s northernmost Limpopo Province, where 37.9% of households are engaged in agricultural activities (compared to 17.2% nationally). During her PhD research in the northernmost Limpopo Province, a statement she heard time and again was, “We just don’t know when to plant anymore,” as rain patterns changed.
Global inspiration, local insight
Abrams, a social scientist at UCT’s trans-disciplinary Future Water research institute, explained that it all came together one afternoon in 2018, when a friend pointed out that there are water museums all over the world.
Represented by two international networks – the World Water Museum and Global Network of Water Museums – these physical museums aim to strengthen public awareness of the global water crisis, and some even facilitate the collection of samples and test the quality of local water supplies. On closer look, however, Abrams realised that there were no water museums in Africa, although since 2021 that has changed with Burkina Faso and Morocco joining the network.
South Africa is not yet part of the global network of museums, which carry actual water. As Abrams explains, given the drought concerns in Cape Town when her project launched in 2018 this would have been “blind to local realities”. Instead, she decided to engage with people around their relationship with water, water bodies and watery spaces online, in schools, universities and in public spaces.
Through the online Museum of Watery Relations, Abrams seeks to empower, educate and open forums for discussion that mobilise citizens of Cape Town to build a new culture around water use. Key goals are good health and wellbeing, clean water and sanitation. Art, as well as science, is being deployed in the workshops to deliver the message. Students build water-source collages, for example. A giant mural that illustrates the water cycle is displayed at festivals and beach clean-ups. Water and You, an interactive exhibition involving artists, musicians and scientists, engages people to think more about their personal relationship to water.
Amber’s creed, which she teaches at UCT to engineers who are working on technical solutions to Cape Town’s water insecurity, is to tread with humility. “If it’s not locally salient, and if it’s not being embraced by the people you are hoping to solve the problem for, you are not going to get anywhere,” she says.
This means communicating science in ways that people can actually engage with. ”Anything,” she says, “that helps to create dialogue.”
The importance of her work was recognised in 2022, when the Museum of Watery Relations was shortlisted in the Falling Walls Engage (a Berlin-based global platform for science engagement) competition as one of 20 winners.
Knowledge is power but funding is short
What is clear to Abrams is that water awareness in Cape Town, and South Africa as a whole, needs a radical rethink, and not just by domestic, industrial and agricultural groundwater users, but in development planning. That means new policies and legislation, new technologies and partnerships. In order for the public to lobby effectively for their water rights, they need to be informed and educated on the problems and potential solutions.
Fortunately, South Africa has a history of effective lobbying on issues such as HIV/AIDs. Spurred on by this says Abrams, “we wanted [the public] to be thinking about water and coming up with their own solutions”.
It has been heartening to see that in rural communities where municipalities have failed in water management, “citizens came up their own ways of delivering water to themselves”, says Abrams. She saw this happening in Limpopo, where local people established “their own system of tariffs and water delivery systems and their own shared pumps”.
In urban areas, citizen control of water management is a pipe dream, even if there is a need, says Abrams. But her project is showing people “that they can push back…that they can engage in conversations with the city”. It’s not just about reaching citizens – the aim is “to get the politicians and policymakers to understand that people value water very differently than they do”, says Abrams. “To get that into the thinking around how policy is made is important, too.”
Water awareness is growing in South Africa, and cities like Johannesburg and Cape Town are leading the way, with a focus on water-sensitive design. For example, this means finding ways to absorb its storm water to recharge aquifers, rather than letting water rush from concreted surfaces to be piped to the oceans.
Looking to the future, Abrams would love to gather water samples and information on water quality, and for the Museum of Watery Relations website and interactive map to become a useful tool for public epidemiology. “It was one of my dreams for the website to be an early warning space around potential contaminants.” Although funding for quality analysis is not yet available, she intends to keep trying.
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Story by Pamela Whitby