Writing the Ancestral River. Jacklyn Cock
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and 103 species are partially or completely dependent on estuaries.
There are only some 250 functioning estuaries in South Africa, and the Kowie estuary is classified as a medium-to-large, permanently open estuary. Nevertheless, the Kowie, as with estuaries in general, has ‘been subject to increasing pressure, especially as a result of reductions in river water inflow and increasing development along river banks’.17
Human impact since the 1830s has involved the extensive canalisation of the lower reaches of the river: the main channel was straightened and confined within stone walls, and the mouth moved westwards. Today the mouth is an estuary, a narrow, 21 km long stretch of tidal river. The river itself is significantly larger, some 70 km in length. The lower part of the Kowie estuary now consists of an artificial channel, approximately 80 m wide, with loose stone-packed berms.
Two piers have been built at the river mouth, with the west pier much longer than the east. At times at the mouth the river loses itself in the vast space of the ocean, but at high tide with a west wind blowing there is a dramatic meeting. A large sandbar dominates the mouth region, which varies seasonally depending on prevailing winds and swell direction. Locals report that a legendary local fisherman, Ronnie Samuel – who reputedly saved forty people from drowning over the years – once walked across the bar at a spring low tide. Crossing it was, and still is, dangerous and a number of fishermen have experienced ‘crossing the bar’ as death, rather than metaphor, when their boats overturned.
At times a flooding tide creates a white line of foam in the middle of the river near the mouth. This is often marked by terns diving to feed off the plankton caught up in the circulation. According to the marine biologist Dr Nadine Strydom, ‘the white line is caused by a convergence zone created by the meeting of water of different densities in a confined channel. The confined channel is the result of the artificial walling by William Cock when the two piers were constructed. In two other Eastern Cape rivers, the Sundays and the Gamtoos, this occurs naturally whereas in the Kowie it is the result of this artificial walling.’18
The Kowie catchment area
Rivers derive much of their character from the catchments through which they flow. The Kowie catchment is the area of land between 576 and 769 km2 drained by the river, and the major part of it is made up of privately owned farms. The main agricultural activities of the region involve the production of pineapples, chicory, citrus, fodder crops, beef cattle and goats. The Kowie River is perennial, rising in a patch of dense indigenous forest on the sloping hills surrounding Grahamstown, and flowing steadily through the centre of what used to be called the Zuurveld towards the sea. The 70 km length the river travels from source to sea occurs along a gently sloping coastal plain, a diverse landscape of undulating hills, dense indigenous forest and cultivated farmland. The landscape is best appreciated from the toposcope situated at one of the highest points in Featherstone Kloof outside Grahamstown. From here one has a view of the landscape framed by the Indian Ocean in the south with Port Alfred 43 km away as the crow flies, and the mountains of the Winterberg and the Amatolas in the north. The catchment area contains many small streams which feed into the river and its main tributary, the Blaauwkrantz.
The helpful geographer who directed me to the river’s source was somewhat dismissive of my obsession with finding the starting point of the Kowie River. ‘It can be a bit difficult to say exactly where the source is, because the source is actually the hill slopes, then the water seeps out somewhere into the channel.’ She stressed that one ‘should think in terms of the watershed rather than a single source’.19 These hills contain a capillary of streams and water points including the famous spring (umthombo in isiXhosa) which gushes from the hillside next to the main road from Grahamstown to Port Alfred. It flows constantly with wonderfully sweet water. Along with the streams that flow off the north slopes of Signal Hill, it supplied the British soldiers stationed at Fort England with water from as early as 1816. What is now Grahamstown was chosen as the site for a military base because of these hillside streams which drained the north-facing flanks of the Rietberge (later known as Mountain Drive). The earliest water sources of the garrison town were the courses that run into the town from the hills to the south. Small dams diverted the water into furrows. Those that now empty into Grey Dam poured into a wooden trough crossing the Waterkloof 2 (Douglas Dam) stream. From the Drostdy Arch, stone canals led the water down High Street, and each household drew its share from the canals according to a timetable. The storage tank next to the Drostdy Arch, installed in 1818 and restored in 1979, permitted an extension to the system.20
The stream, known as the Kowie Ditch, which flows through Grahamstown, is cemented, canalised and heavily polluted in places as it dribbles through the little town. This is the Blaauwkrantz, which rises near the old golf course, close to the road to the army base, and flows past Fort England. The Blaauwkrantz is the largest of the Kowie River’s tributaries. Others are the Lushington (also known as the Torrens) and the Mansfield and Bathurst streams.
There are also a number of smaller, unnamed streams entering the river along its course. There are several deep pools, such as Cambray’s pool at the foot of the Blaauwkrantz Pass, and that marking the confluence of the Lushington and Kowie rivers at the place I call ‘the green cathedral’. In places the Lushington is densely lined with palm trees (Phoenix reclinata), close relatives of the North African date palm. These plants are the southernmost naturally occurring palms in the world. Where the Kowie River passes through the Tyson pineapple farm halfway to Grahamstown, it is locally known by Xhosa people as ‘the deep place’.
The Kowie is no longer a working river, though a century ago it was a harbour for ocean-going boats and served to drive the mills on its banks grinding wheat into flour and, in the case of Bradshaw’s Mill, built in 1823 on the small tributary of the Bathurst stream, weaving wool into rough cloth. Today the Kowie supplies local farmers with water for irrigation and the domestic water needs of the little town of Port Alfred from the Sarel Hayward Dam. For a long time, the river was crossed by ferry until a pontoon was erected in 1876 and the present bridge in 2007.
The river is tidal as far as Ebb and Flow, which is the place where salt and fresh waters meet 21 km upstream from the mouth. The river is navigable by small boats almost up to this point. Paddling a canoe down the last 2 km, one can see kingfishers diving or perched at the openings of their lengthy tunnel nests in the earth banks. The banks are thickly forested and there are bushbuck or waterbuck grazing on the grassy meadows adjoining the river, and one may perhaps encounter a leguaan or caracal (lynx) or even (in the early morning or evening) an otter.
This area is part of the Waters Meeting Nature Reserve, originally established as a forest reserve in 1897 to protect it from exploitation by farmers and boat builders. Various sections were later proclaimed as nature reserves in 1952 and 1985, and it now covers 4,247 hectares. But the best way to experience the river is by following the Kowie Canoe Trail, passing the Old Wreck, Windy Reach, Rabbit Rocks, Kob Hole, Black Rock, the Old Mill, the Reef, Fairy Glen and White Rock on the way to the four-room wooden chalet at Horseshoe Bend. This is a lovely spot, deeply shaded with white milkwood trees and containing a 12 km circular hiking route through the nature reserve, where one can encounter the creatures of the riverine forest. This is the best place to hear some of the sounds and glimpse a few of these wild creatures or their signs. Camping at the overnight shelter in the forest huts built for hikers and canoeists may be a frightening but also an exhilarating experience. Monkeys frequent the area and leopard tracks have been seen. There are still shy and secretive creatures around, like waterbuck, caracals, several mongoose species, bushpigs and porcupines, and one may hear the warning shouts of the chacma baboon, the cough-like bark of the bushbuck and the weird grunting, followed by a long-drawn-out creaking scream, of the tree hyrax (dassie), probably the most memorable of the bush night sounds.
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The intermediate climatic position of the Kowie catchment area between the areas of western winter and eastern summer rainfall has created a rich floral region. The predominant vegetation of the area is what botanists call Albany Thicket, relatively impenetrable, woody, semi-succulent, thorny vegetation. It hosts a remarkable diversity of plants, especially succulents, bulbs and climbers, many endemic to the region, and has the widest range of plant forms found in any of South Africa’s vegetation types.21