UC Santa Barbara

As the Day Zero Drought and the Cape Town Water Crisis came to an end in 2018, the City celebrated its demand management and consumption reduction efforts and no longer becoming “the first major city to run out of water”. But, the women of informal settlements wondered when their Day Zero would come to an end. Neoliberal water governance, built on physically embedded and uneven Apartheid infrastructure, continues to prioritize white capital interest and tourism initiatives, rather than redressing historical inequalities that are cemented in the pipes beneath the City. The lack of pipes, or overall water and sanitation infrastructure, necessitates Black and Coloured female labor to maintain household normalcy and stability, despite state-constructed environmental scarcity. These women work as community caretakers to reproduce the lives of themselves and their families, and enable the capitalist the market to extend to informal settlements. The City limits the scope of its municipal mandate by selecting which informal settlements it will and will not service, but simultaneously projects itself as a “water sensitive city”, “world city”, and “the entry point to Africa”. This rhetoric reflects the City’s goals of being the top tourist destination in Africa, and it demonstrates this priority by establishing City Improvement Districts, excluding informal settlements from the visual purview of tourists, and using Western modes of governance. The lack of physical infrastructure comes at a severe cost to the Black and Coloured women of informal settlements, who face gender-based violence and social judgment when they go to the bathroom, menstruate or transport water. Community caretakers overcome these barriers through social capital, continue to struggle for secure water access and recognition, and continuously find ways for public participation.