The scars left by the April 2022 flash floods aren’t obvious to visitors to this part of Inanda, the township just northwest of Durban. The earth seems to have healed itself, roads are passable and some new bridges have been reassembled. But the collective and individual trauma, often left unspoken, continues to linger.
The hills and valleys of Inanda are carpeted in tropical 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, bridges have been reassembled. But look closer and you’ll see the signs.
The abandoned, broken home. The footprints 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, cell phones, teacups, soccer boots and school uniforms. Those things are gone now, buried deep in the soil.
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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?
How to say PTSD in Zulu
We know the numbers. 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 completely totally destroyed and another 7 200 were partially damaged.
It was not the first time catastrophic flooding and storms — which are by far South Africa’s most common type of extreme weather — have 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. They promise flooding and storms will happen more often, and become ever more fierce in the coming years.
While we can count the bodies, buildings, bridges and businesses that have been lost, what is less clear is how these types of events are affecting our mental health. After all, it was only in 2022 that mental health was given more than a cursory mention in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change assessment, where the world’s top experts report on the state of the climate.
Research on the mental health impacts 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,” explains 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 South Africa, Kenya, Mozambique and Burkina Faso. “It’s a stigmatising issue, so no one wants to admit it, even though we know it is there. Some languages don’t have certain mental health diagnoses. Like, how do you say post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in Zulu?”
Digging, digging, digging
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 United States-based Mayo Clinic’s PTSD definition with me: “A mental health condition that’s caused by an extremely stressful or terrifying event — either being part of it or witnessing it. Symptoms may include flashbacks, nightmares, severe anxiety and uncontrollable thoughts about the event.”
So Ziphathe Shabane and I talk about things that are more quantifiable. He 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.
I already had heard about Thanda Doncabe. In fact, if you ask anyone here in Magelekedeni about the flooding in 2022 it will be Mrs Doncabe’s name that you hear first. The x 2 counts for her 14-year-old daughter, whose body was found, and her 3-month-old child, whose body was not. I went to visit her at the nursery school with the fading butterflies on the walls where she works. But she did not want to talk — not to journalists, not to government officials, not to anyone. Talking, she told me, has done her no good.
But the induna has other documentation, if you have the stomach for it. 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?
The induna recounts the night things changed here. At 10pm on April 11 he was woken by a neighbour. The house next door had collapsed. Someone shouted. A mother and child were buried under rubble and mud. He and other neighbours took up their spades and began digging. Those were the first two bodies.
But the messages, like the rain, didn’t stop. Another house washed away, a family was buried in mud, another body was found that side. Digging, digging, digging, he says, all night. And after each body was retrieved, the induna went back to his house for another drink. To steady the nerves, you understand.
Sometimes the whole night comes back to him on replay. Sometimes drinking is the only thing that helps the sleep come.
I ask what will happen here when those hard rains come again.
The induna is a man of few words. His bearded, angular jaw clenches. And? It’s obvious, he says to me without saying so.
In Zulu, Magelekedeni means landslide.
Everything is disturbed
The rain fell first that night. Then came the waterfalls that shot like cannons out of every crevice. But it was the massive mudflows and landslides of soil and rocks and trees that swept people and homes away, suffocating or crushing whatever was in its path.
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 based 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, lost schooling days. The whole supply chain — the whole system — is disturbed.”
Take, take, take
“I even 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 anytime. He said he didn’t know that we could be victims of those floods. But the rain can come back anytime. It can come back next month. It can come back tomorrow.”
Lindiwe Mabhida tells me this over a Zoom call. It was two weeks after I met her mother, Ntombifuthi, in her garden in Magelekedeni, where we talked under the 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. 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 is busy being reclaimed by the land.
Lindiwe worked so 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 South Africa.
“Every day before I left the house, I had to pray and say, God, I’m leaving the house now. Protect me. And when I finished work, before I went to the bus stop, I had to pray again, God, I’m going home now. Protect me. Because anything can happen in my country. They kill people easily. People don’t want to work. They just want to take, take, take. And if you are unlucky, they can just shoot you. So my life there, it was always in fear.”
She tells me how she has been robbed at least six times. 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.
So things in Ireland were going really well. She applied for asylum, 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. Now she is facing a deportation hearing.
“I don’t want to go back to South Africa. If I’m living there, I will never be okay. I will never heal.”
.
The pleasant place
Inanda means a “pleasant place” in Zulu. It has a rich history as the home of John Dube , the ANC’s first president, and the place where Nelson Mandela cast his first vote. Mahatma Gandhi established his Phoenix settlement here in 1904 and, in 1911, Isaiah Shembe founded the Nazareth Baptist Church.
But laid on top of the beauty and royalty of this place are soaring rates of poverty and unemployment and some of the highest rates of violent crime in the country. It’s the kind of environment that breeds mental health problems like depression and anxiety which, along with PTSD, are believed to be the common mental health problems associated with climate impacts in Africa.
But it makes diagnosing and treating something like PTSD in the traditional, Western framework — where there is before the traumatic event, the event itself and then after — more complex.
“In South Africa, our populations experience a lot of continuous trauma,” explains 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 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.”
But what happens when there is no one there to diagnose, much less treat it?
About a quarter of South Africans showed signs of probable depression and 23.6% had signs of possible anxiety in a study from 2022. 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.
Born this way
Nomusa Gabayi doesn’t need much. A house would be helpful — like the one she built with 11 rooms for her and her husband, and whichever of their nine children and 16 grandchildren needed a roof over their heads — but that will come in time.
“I believe that everything happens for a reason,” she tells me. “So now my Bible says we must be ready and wait. You see, sometimes I tell myself, there’s a lot of people, they lost their life and they lost their family. I didn’t lose those things, besides only the house and the furniture and my other goods, but thanks to God, I’m still alive.”
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Which in itself is a miracle. Because when she and her husband were in bed watching the news the night of the floods, a tree hit the roof and the house collapsed on top of them. Her husband managed to pull himself out, but she was left completely buried in mud. She remembers it like a dream, the voices muted, somewhere far away, as the family searched for her body. Finally, the neighbour boy saw a toe. And they all started digging.
She says that was the second time she died and came back to life. The first time was in 2009, when she miscarried at eight months, and the doctors say she died there on the table in the hospital and somehow they brought her back. The doctor told her then: “Don’t ever stop going to church. You must pray more and more because you nearly didn’t wake up.”
Some researchers might say it is her spirituality that saved her. Nomusa gives God plenty of credit. But there’s something else.
She tells me a bit more about her life. About how she got married at 19, had her first child and then how her husband lost his job. And then, after that, how “every second” she was getting pregnant, and so she had to make a plan to take care of her kids. So she started collecting everything, anything, to sell, shoes, panties, tomatoes, you name it. Then she went onto scrap metal. And then she convinced a guy to sell her his old bakkie and convinced her husband to hire himself and the bakkie out as a driver for people buying things at the building supply store. Then she borrowed some money here and there and built her first house. Then she got a job at an orphanage and another job at Kites View, a bed and breakfast in the posh suburbs of La Lucia, and got her daughter a job there as well. And then she sold the first house and built the 11-room place on the side of a slippery slope in Magelekedeni. And then the flood came and destroyed it.
So she made some loans — like all the other people I spoke with, none had any help from the government — and now she and her husband are rebuilding the house, brick by brick. In the same location. They live in one of the rooms which survived, where they cook, bathe and sleep.
I ask her how she copes but after hearing her story, I think I already know the answer.
“You know what?” she tells me. “I was born like this, to accept everything that comes this way. I’m a strong woman. You’ll never find a woman like me in this world. I’m very, very strong. I can stand anything.”
Additional research and translation by Ras Nkululeke
The research of the Africa Health Research Institute (Ahri) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal on the impact 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 impact of mental health on climate change in South Africa, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique.
This story was produced by theBhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism. Sign up for thenewsletter.
