The hills and valleys of Inanda are carpeted in subtropical shrubs and trees and clusters of sunflowers. On a clear day, looking down to the Umgeni River below, the earth seems to have healed from the April 2022 floods that ripped through this part of eThekwini. The roads are passable, and bridges have been reassembled.
However, look closer and you’ll see the signs.
The abandoned, broken home. The remains of a shelter that once was. A steep gorge where the water had its way with the land.
If you could scratch the surface, you’d see more. You’d find pots and pans and bedside tables and TVs and pillows and blankets. There’d be chairs, silverware, stuffed toys and family photos, birth certificates, cellphones, teacups, soccer boots and school uniforms. Those things are gone now, buried deep in the soil.
But there is something less tangible that still hangs about.
Like how the children cry when it rains. Or when the scenes of that night flash through your mind in segments. Or how you lost yourself when the house and everything in it washed away. Are there words for this? What words are needed? What is there to talk about?
Inanda, a township 24km northwest of Durban, was one of the worst hit places when the floods were unleashed on KwaZulu-Natal, where government reports say 456 bodies were found, with 82 people still missing. Just in eThekwini, the municipal district in which Inanda is situated, an estimated 3,000 homes were destroyed and another 7,200 were partially damaged.
It was not the first time catastrophic flooding and storms – which are by far SA’s most common type of extreme weather – had hit the area. And it will not be the last. In fact, eThekwini has reported more major flooding events than anywhere else in the country over the past 40 years.
As the world’s leading climate scientists have been telling us for decades, climate change is driving these extreme weather events.
Research on the mental health effects of climate change in Africa, despite being among the most vulnerable places on the planet, remains scant, which is not altogether unsurprising.
“In some African settings, people don’t even talk about mental illness,” says Collins Iwuji, a senior researcher with the Africa Health Research Institute (Ahri), who is leading a large study on mental health and extreme weather events in SA, Kenya, Mozambique and Burkina Faso.
“It’s a stigmatising issue, so no one wants to admit it, even though we know it is there,” Iwuji says. “Some languages don’t have words for certain mental health diagnoses. Like, how do you say post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] in Zulu?”
It’s a good question. But I’m pretty certain the induna of Magelekedeni, a small settlement in Inanda’s eMachobeni area, is not interested in discussing the US-based Mayo Clinic’s PTSD definition with me.
Ziphathe Shabane, induna of Magelekedeni, a small settlement in Inanda’s eMachobeni area, hands me a notebook. He has matter-of-factly pencilled, in neat capital letters, the number of dead next to each family name. Doncabe x 2. Simelane x 2. Dlanzi x 1. Gumede x 2. Magwaza x 2 + 1. Mhlongo x 1.
If you ask anyone in Magelekedeni about the flooding in 2022, it will be Doncabe’s name that you hear first. The x 2 counts for her 14-year-old daughter, whose body was found, and her three-month-old child, whose body was not.
But the induna has other documentation. He hands over his cellphone to show images of bodies covered in blankets and others uncovered and in various states of decomposition. I ask if it is difficult to keep these images on his phone.
Without it, he says, what documentation would exist?
In Zulu, Magelekedeni means landslide.
Researchers say landslides have been documented in the area as far back as the 19th century. But urbanisation, rapid population growth, inadequate drainage and development in flood-prone areas have made things worse.
“We know which areas are at risk,” says Hope Magidimisha-Chipungu, an urban planner at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. “The question is, what do we do with the risk areas? If I go and fix the bridge that is broken, it’s well and good, the community will reconnect, and they will rebuild. But did I go back and study the situation to make sure that we build it back better?”
She’s worried about low-cost fixes that are eventually going to come at a much higher price when the next major flood happens.
“When there is a disaster, you are not just losing infrastructure, you are losing people’s lives. People are losing their livelihoods. People are getting traumatised, and some just don’t recover. There’s loss of income, business losses, and lost schooling days. The whole supply chain – the whole system – is disturbed.”
Over a Zoom call, Lindiwe Mabhida tells me: “I asked my father, why did you build a house in such a bad place? Because that place is not safe. That house can just collapse any time. He said he didn’t know that we could be victims of those floods. But the rain can come back any time. It can come back next month. It can come back tomorrow.”
I spoke to Lindiwe two weeks after I met her mother, Ntombifuthi, in her garden in Magelekedeni, where we talked under a mango tree and she showed me the damage.
First, the main family home, where the rocks and mud crashed through the bedroom wall and damaged the roof, which is still bandaged in corrugated iron strips. She also showed me where her daughter’s roughly built shelter once was – swept away, seconds before Lindiwe pulled her teenage son out of the window to rescue him. Her new house, the brick one just a few metres away, was nearly finished when the floods came. Now all that’s left is the concrete floor and bits of wall that are busy being reclaimed by the land.
Lindiwe worked hard to save money to build the new place. So, when her boyfriend in Ireland, whom she met online in 2018, said she must go there, that’s what she did a few months after the flood. The relationship didn’t last. But Lindiwe couldn’t face going back to SA.
She tells me how she was robbed at least six times in Magelekedeni. One of those times, she was five months pregnant – they took her perfume, her shoes, everything from her fridge. She miscarried her child the next day. Losing her home was the breaking point.
Things in Ireland were going really well for her. She applied for asylum and got a job. She gets medication for her depression and anxiety. She sees a counsellor for free. She feels safe.
But now she’s not coping, because she is facing a deportation hearing.
“I don’t want to go back to SA. If I’m living there, I will never be OK. I will never heal,” she says.
“In SA, our populations experience a lot of continuous trauma,” says Xanthe Hunt, an associate professor of global health at Stellenbosch University and the lead researcher on adolescent mental health at Ahri.
“So the temporality of PTSD, or the saying that these symptoms occur after an acute stressor, may not be fitting. Because by the time someone has lost their house in a flood, they may very well have experienced 27 other things that would have led to the onset of PTSD.
“So what does that continuous or compounded trauma look like? Rather than trying to see it as a discrete reaction to a specific event, it’s much more complicated to understand when people have dealt with so much that’s difficult already.”
In a study from 2022, about a quarter of South Africans showed signs of probable depression, and 23.6% had signs of possible anxiety. But researchers found just 5% of the total public national healthcare budget for the 2016/17 financial year was spent on mental healthcare. Nearly half went to treating conditions at the psychiatric hospital level, leaving precious little for those in outpatient treatment.
Additional research and translation by Ras Nkululeke
The research of the Africa Health Research Institute (Ahri) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on the effect of climate change on mental health is mentioned in this article. Bhekisisa is a collaborator on a Wellcome Trust-funded project, which Ahri leads. Bhekisisa, however, operates editorially independent of the project. Bhekisisa’s role in the project is to report on the effect of mental health on climate change in SA, Kenya, Burkina Faso and Mozambique.
This story was produced by the Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism.
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