Geostories of False Bay
I see the invisible
I see the invisible
I hear the inaudible
And I feel the intangible
I’m everywhere in no time
Floating on memories of strained futures
Aloft on lofty hopes
Sliding on rugged dreams in truncated nights
I see the invisible
I hear the inaudible
And I feel the intangible
Ears on the ground we tremble1
—Nnimmo Bassey
South of Cape Town, the Cape Town Flats slope towards the Cape of Good Hope and open onto the large crescent-shaped False Bay, so called because it was mistaken by early traders for Table Bay. False Bay is shaped by the violent colonial histories and material legacies of colonial extraction and its afterlives that were amplified under the spatial segregation of the Apartheid state. False Bay became the site of material transformation in the extractive colonial complex in 1898, when Edward Ridge Syfret, director of Rhodes Fruit Farms, sent a letter to his friend and patron, the British colonialist and mining magnate Cecil Rhodes:
Dear Mr. Rhodes, I have written Pentz today asking him—in terms of your instructions—to purchase the two adjoining farms for £10,000 and failing these, the two separated for £7,500. A point to which I omitted to refer on Saturday is whether you are prepared to take the risk of obtaining the Government's consent under the Explosives Act-2-87. I hardly think they can raise any objection … Yours faithfully, E. R. Syfret.2
The conversation Syfret alludes to appears to have covered the purchase of said farms for the purpose of gaining permission, under the 1875 Explosives Act, to manufacture and store explosives—nitroglycerine and dynamite for use in the mines. More than any other sites he has seen, Syfret is confident that False Bay is “suitable for the purpose” of explosives production, and in the following weeks goes ahead with the purchase of the sites “as cheaply as possible.”3 And so, at the close of the nineteenth century, after the soils sloping towards False Bay were freed from the hands of farmers (who had sprayed the dune landscape with pig shit and piss to enhance their crop-yield), industrialists came to lay ground to altogether different experiments with nitrogen compounds.
This shifting land use tied settler colonial agro-farming into the mining and extractive industries. The African Explosives and Industries (AE & I) company was officially launched on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1924 from a merger between De Beers Consolidated Mines and Nobel Industries.4 The company was renamed African Explosives and Chemical Industries (AECI) in 1944, with a diversified manufacturing base that continued to produce explosives and detonators for extraction industries but extended its interests to weapons manufacturing and testing for the South African military. As mining went into decline in the postwar decades, AECI secured government defense contracts and accelerated its production in essential chemicals such as chlorine and caustic soda used in water purification and plastics and paper industries.5
The history of False Bay as a heavily industrialized landscape is marked by poor waste and environmental management. Even today, the area houses chemical manufacturing, agro-industries, and water treatment plants that repeat the legacy of environmental contamination that impacts surrounding areas and communities.6 And during Apartheid, the area was designated for people of color, and a wastewater treatment works called Zandvliet was set up in the area. The contamination of the river downstream is so bad that a city-sponsored study recently found that “At some coastal sites in Cape Town the concentrations of numerous PhACs [Pharmaceutically Active Compounds] were higher, or amongst the highest when compared to concentrations reported in estuarine, coastal, and marine waters in other parts of the world.”7
The communities impacted by pollution are more often poor and Black, still suffering from the segregationist policies of the Apartheid regime, making environmental racism and injustice starkly evident. When around 60,000 people were forcibly displaced from District Six in downtown Cape Town in the 1960s, many relocated to informal settlements on the Cape Flats—the sandy landscape hugging the False Bay industrial site.8 The chemical run-off from intensive chemical production, water treatment, agro-business, and explosives testing has sedimented into the ground, polluting the Cape Flats aquifer system and poisoning the people, flora, fauna, and agriculture that it serves.
The colonial history of False Bay is intimately tied to the Earth stories that can be told through the geo-chemical transformation of contemporary toxic environments. The environmental legacy of colonialism exerts a legacy through geophysics, as the Earth remembers and continues to work with the material disturbances of the colonial era that have had no reparational address as yet. The Earth stories of False Bay reveal a colonial continuum that persists long after Rhodes’ death (in 1902) and long after his legacy in the local nomenclature of roads, buildings, and statues has fallen.
Kayaking along this ocean coast, one regularly encounters dolphins, penguins, seals, and sometimes even an octopus, like those made famous in the film My Octopus Teacher (2020).9 The Cape Fold Mountain range, headed by Table Mountain in the west and the name-unchanged “Hottentots-Holland Mountains” in the east, form a spectacular backdrop to the famously diverse natural environment of False Bay. On many days, the waters around that coast are crystal clear. Paddlers glide above visible kelp forests where shafts of light shimmer down through the reeds, close to the beaches at Muizenberg, Simonstown, and Kalk Bay. On other days, when the water is less clear, algal blooms respond enthusiastically to a combination of peri-urban nutrients and warming waters.
Illness is frequently reported by surfers, swimmers, and kayakers in both oceans along Cape Town’s peninsula: the Indian Ocean in False Bay, and the Atlantic in Table Bay. From around 2014 onwards, ratepayer associations and recreational ocean users began taking samples to the city. Without response, several turned to private laboratories. Thus began a decade-long battle over what constitutes scientific knowledge of contamination.
On the Atlantic side of Cape Town’s coast, kayakers observed that dirty-beige foam was associated with the change of seasons. Simple thermodynamics suggest that the warmer sewage from the marine sewer outfall would rise to the surface as the sea water got cooler and seasonal shifts saw the wind changing from southeast to northwest, blowing the sewage to shore. However, officials associated with the city and its governing party have repeatedly denied that marine sewer outfalls were responsible. For example, a recent article from the deputy mayor avers that:
At the heart of the activism behind Project Blue is a suspicion that sewage from these three outfalls—at Camps Bay, Hout Bay, and Green Point—does not disperse into a limited zone in deep waters at a safe distance from the shore as designed, without deleterious impact on the environment or human health, but instead that the pollution is carried by tides back to the beaches.
Thankfully, to debunk this fear, the city has published 10 years of extensive monitoring, reporting and analyses from independent experts, all available online, including data from hundreds of water samples from around 18 stations at each of these outfalls, which also perform salinity tests at the bottom, mid-water, and surface.
Detailed numerical dispersion modelling shows that South African Water Quality Guidelines are not exceeded anywhere along the shoreline due to the effluent from the marine outfalls.10
Yet during Cape Town’s water crisis in 2017–18, the desalination plant set up near to this outfall failed to deliver clean water. The operator found water contaminated up to 400 percent higher than the official figures supplied by the city.11 And a city-commissioned study in 2022, marked with a strict non-disclosure agreement, provides the data that evidences what the kayakers had observed: the laws of thermodynamics apply.12
In response to repeated denials that sewage was reaching the shore, a group of leading chemists and epidemiologists based at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) carried out water testing in 2017 and found fifteen different compounds that could only come from the human gut, providing conclusive evidence of the water contamination from the wastewater treatment facility.13 In the water near Cape Town, they found high concentrations of the antiretroviral medication known as lamivudine. In the waters at False Bay, extraordinarily high levels of diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory, reflect the presence of inflammatory conditions associated with air pollution, poor diet, and social stress in the Cape Flats. Water testing documented high enterococci levels— a fecal microbe tested for in the oceans—in the waters in False Bay. In all cases of documented pollution, city authorities contested their findings and insisted that the bacteria could not be linked to sewage spillage. Instead, they claimed, it came from surface runoff water. The city’s official report for 2019 argues that the contaminants in the ocean came from people washing their dumpsters—wheelie bins—near the coast, effectively denying the presence of up to forty million liters of macerated raw sewage pumped into the ocean every day.14
Rivers, too, are subject to sewage contamination. Investigating the impacts of pollution on people’s health in the False Bay area, anthropologist Nikiwe Solomon found that people living downstream of a major sewage treatment works complained of being unable to grow vegetables in their own gardens, as, they said, they got sick from locally grown produce. One man, who raised horses along one of the river estuaries of False Bay reported losing almost sixty or seventy horses who were drinking from the side of the river after contracting multiple infections resulting in death. He too had suffered multiple staphylococcal infections, their scars reaching from his elbows to his wrists and from his knees to his ankles. Household studies found widespread occurrence of severe sinus, respiratory, and gastrointestinal complaints. Local people linked the reason to the dosing of the river with chlorine, which is regularly used by treatment works managers to remove E.coli, the indicator organism for sewage pollutants. Once dosed with chlorine, foul water could pass an E.coli test. Yet as a highly volatile compound, chlorine can combine with anything and everything as it seeps through the landscape, metabolizing in unknown ways and mobilizing its own insurgent geologies.15
The researchers’ effort to draw official and public attention to the catastrophic levels of contaminants in the river resulted in a walk-out by officials, and a litany of false allegations in response to a subsequent article published a fortnight later.16 An investigative television show that followed up on the story was hauled before the Broadcasting Complaints Commission.17 Even though the city lost that case, reputational harm to the team of independent researchers and researchers served as a shot across the bows for any others who may have been considering the publication of contaminant findings. Two years later, however, a change of leadership saw the publication of official contaminant data for that river, releasing data that confirmed the findings of the team.18
States of Non-knowledge
In The Neganthropocene (2018), Bernard Stiegler observes that the apparatus of calculation in late (racial) capitalism serves to produce what he calls “absolute non-knowledge.”19 “Non-knowledge,” a term first used by George Bataille, refers not simply to ignorance or a lack of knowledge, but rather to forms of knowledge that sit outside the established ways of knowing and thus point towards the limits of knowledge. For a resident whose clean washing is unwearable after being hung out to dry on a windy day, being told by officials that you are not living in a contaminated environment is to encounter the political force of non-knowledge that appropriates science in the service of unknowing.
The limits of knowledge are apparent in the paradigm of environmental governance that overwhelmingly operates within the legacy of colonial categories of containment. Where the materiality of the environment is separated into solid, liquid, or gaseous states, matters of the political state and politics of matter converge: air pollution is kept completely separated from water bodies; it is governed completely separately from agricultural, commercial, or littoral zones. Yet a river knows none of these categories. Horses stand in the mud at the river’s edge. Birds swoop to drink; when they dry, the dust from their feathers shakes out at the next place they land. If that’s the chicken coop, the health of the chickens may be in trouble. Chlorine metabolizes other molecules and evaporates into the air breathed by all, irritating sinuses and aggravating asthmas. If these bodies of evidence—literally, sick and injured bodies—are ignored and denied in the larger schema of global environmental (non-)knowledge production, they generate epistemes of injurious states.
Environmental science becomes globally transferable across knowledge domains and policy networks via comparative and calculable data. Environmental risk is thus evidenced by its calculability and not according to the levels of harm inflicted by pollutants and degraded ecologies.20 Where bureaucratic practices of audit and accountability fold around environmental governance that reduces volumetric space to a flat cartography, the production of non-knowledge becomes an end in itself with governing bodies producing evidentiaries whose protocols render them immune to the observational and experiential knowledge of those living in and suffering in damaged landscapes.
The refusal to see the harms of contamination reveals a refusal to consider Earth processes—geophysics—as evidentiary. The reduced representations of Earth processes in flat cartographic space fails to capture and imagine ecological processes that move through both the bios and geos. Water flows through bodies all the time. Where forms of environmental governance create silos between objects, separating human societies, bodies, and landscapes in distinguishing the status of matter as life and non-life, these fictitious categories make it impossible to see processes that connect and form across boundaries. To contest the power of this imagination is both insurgent against the dominant hegemonic approach to pollution, but also in the ways in which it is partnering with an insurgent Earth that goes on despite the fictions of how environments work as presented in official reports. This raises the question of how to develop different descriptive states that function as social and epistemic markers under conditions of erasure enacted by government officials.
The concatenation of science, bureaucracy, and brand marketing in the denial of contaminants is experienced globally and produced through institutional structures whose political culture-shaping histories are themselves erased from memory. Institutions strive for a veneer of objectivity and disinterestedness in attaining “public” trust and consent, where the public has been reconfigured as a space of capture, and science a marketable commodity to be procured.
Many similar examples of environmental injustice and racism illustrate how institutions and corporations use strategic ignorance and non-knowledge to suppress evidence and obstruct communities in their fight for justice. Yet, strategies are limited that empower scientists, activists and citizens to push back against the structural ignorance of claims about the harmful effects of toxic environments and the calculated dismissal of appeals to extend justice to affected communities. In order to address the harms present in newly arriving landscapes of contamination, it is urgent to develop robust frameworks that address the historic legacy of harms present in environmental science itself.
The geostories of colonial inheritance of environments and institutions have a historicity of both amnesia and self-same reproduction. But insurgent formations and alliances might bridge the separability of the “times” of harm and the legacy effects of organized and on-going damage. The work of doing a “people’s science of insurgent contaminants” requires a different paradigm and an aesthetics of description. We need to shift the paradigm of environmental governance from the structures and norms of global knowledge production that cast doubt on that which is blindingly obvious: the dirty stinking river; the people getting sick. There are different kinds of living bodies of harm, in the landscape and in lived experiences, but also in the epistemic histories of institutions, companies, and forms of bureaucratic corruption that refuse recognition and reparation of what people experience.
The Surreal
To do people’s science today for health, wellbeing, and habitability, insurgency is to work with the surreal, that is, what sits above the conventional definitions of the real, and above the conventionally accepted version of what is real. This work involves reclaiming the right to simple observations of material flows, which is insurgent because it defies the logics and rationalities that are being conveyed in the public domains. The denial of a people’s science of the observable, where people are allowed to look and say, “that's real,” “that is really happening to our bodies and our environments,” is sutured into histories of violence that require material and epistemic reparation.
The ubiquity of computing today in processing basically everything, everywhere, all the time, conjures a surreality in which environments are subject to programmable and probabilistic calculations. The modern cartographies of space that become encrypted in organizing and settling a world picture creates a form of planetarity through which some are invited, and many are not, to imagine. To close down the imagination through the construction house of language is an exercise in political power that runs through settler colonialism to present-day computing.
Denialism today is normalized through the language of computing. The first critical task, then, is to move beyond the surface realities of efficiency, productivity, and prediction promised by AI as proof of human improvement. Racial capitalist discourse, projected globally by governments and dominant corporations, actively disguises the environmental and labor costs involved in making and doing AI. In addition to countering the socio-technical inequities of AI, we can also challenge the linguistic modeling of computing that is rooted in socio-behavioral science that models how we, humans, process information.
The feedback loop of speaking back to a computer through coded interfaces informs the probabilistic logics that anticipate user engagements in that the response is already known, or at least calculated, and there is no need to think otherwise. Computing saturates our everyday activities, lived environments, and ways we communicate, from scrolling social media to environmental modeling and data sensing. It is based on linguistic models in the theory of information, which are also shaping experiences, networks, activities and so on (as well as drawing heavily on the mine and aquifer).21 Computing developed a universal language with which to instruct machines everywhere, and with advancements in AI, emerged as a dominant language celebrated for instructing realities—how to not-think about what is happening in the world. Is the river dirty? Well, the data and the algorithm say that it is not.
The surreal intensifies by hardwiring “reality” into code. We are situated in feedback loops with the computer, in which the computer is always-already impacting and decimating forms of life and environments that are inevident in conventional ways of knowing. The politics of non-knowledge, exercised in computational language games, is a form of violence that continues to sever the environment from lived experiences. Repair, then, is not simply about changing the subject: repair attends to the relationship between forms of life and Earth. There is a willful blindness that manifests through bureaucratic systems and aesthetics to convince people that they do not see what’s before their eyes. Epistemes and scientific disciplines cohere blindness in structural ways that normalize non-seeing. Artistic practices can push beyond obvious definitions to question how we engage with language.22
How the language of science communication is fed into algorithms, instructing how the machine learns about and how it imagines the environment, reveals instances of erasure and blindness. We cannot see what is in front of us because it is not in the imagination of the algorithm. The machine does not compute. This opens space to perform insurgencies that challenge how the world is readied for knowledge, computation, and imagining, and how we can change that by portaling through geostories that forge new connections across epistemes, imaginations, histories, and injuries.
Part of the work to be done is to put these big pictures together. But it’s also not just about working in the present. That’s another process of empiricist denialism, of the erasure of history. Geologic materials are always rising up on their own terms. They have a force that means that they don’t become past in the ways that certain powers might like them to (and record them as such). Those histories do not stay in their place materially, nor remain stratified. The power of these geostories is in both a kind of layering and activating that allows these things to bubble up. Chlorine, which acts as a facade to the violence of sewage pollutants, has a geochemical promiscuity and is a very effective metaphor of recombination. It reminds us how the narrative needs to follow the geology in its agency and constant resurfacing. If the struggle of history is the struggle of memory against forgetting, we must recover geostories as lived geophysics within a legacy of colonialist thought that continues to sever life from geology. Reconnecting life and geology takes us to a kind of dissident ontology that will help navigate the time we’re in, in the maelstrom of a cooking continent.23
Nnimmo Bassey, I See the Invisible (Quebec: Daraja Press, 2023), 45.
BC1555 Rhodes Fruit Farms Collection October 24th 1898., A3.1 Syfret, 443/4, University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections.
BC1555 Rhodes Fruit Farms Collection, A3.1 Syfret, 445, University of Cape Town Libraries Special Collections.
Jas. Gray FIC “Some chemical discoveries which have influenced the development of South Africa,” South African Journal of Science 30 (1933): 28–45, available online at ➝.
BC Sewell “Progress of an African chemical giant,” South African Journal of Science 81 (1985): 52–54, available online at ➝.
Rachel Savage, “Kicking up a stink: row over sewage pollution blighting Cape Town’s beaches,” The Guardian, April 17, 2025, ➝.
Brent Kenneth Newman, Anisha Velayudan, and Mira Petrović et al., “Occurrence and potential hazard posed by pharmaceutically active compounds in coastal waters in Cape Town, South Africa,” Science of The Total Environment 949 (November 2024): 174800.
The forced removals were justified by the Apartheid regime to make Cape Town a white city by segregating Black communities in enclaves that would keep them out of the centers of commerce with limited access to jobs and key services.
Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed, My Octopus Teacher, 2020. Sea Change Project, Off The Fence, and ZDF Enterprises.
Eddie Andrews, “Cape Town’s coastal water quality – the facts versus the hype,” Daily Maverick January 23, 2025, ➝.
Melanie Gosling, “Cape Town council's desalination debacle: Seawater 400% more polluted than City of Cape Town's tender data indicated,” News24, May 27, 2019, ➝.
“Environmental Summary Report on Modelling and Measurement Programmes: Green Point Outfall Reference,” CLS Southern Africa, August 8, 2022 ,CLS-SA-21-51 SPR GP V3.0, ➝.
Leslie Petrik, Lesley Green, and Adeola P. Abegunde et al., “Desalination and seawater quality at Green Point, Cape Town: A study on the effects of marine sewage outfalls,” South African Journal of Science 113, nos. 11–12 (2017): 1–10.
Chemical compounds like antiretrovirals and antibiotics would not have been washed out of dumpsters and they would not be found in stormwater gutters.
A report commissioned by the Water Institute of South Africa points to a history of treatment plants at False Bay over-chlorinating wastewater because of a lack of training amongst staff and poor environmental management that fails to account for the impacts of chemical run-off, see Vusumuzi Mema, “Impact of poorly maintained wastewater and sewage treatment plants: lessons from South Africa,” Water Institute of South Africa (2010).
“Case number: 15/2019 - City of Cape Town Vs. M-Net Carte Blanche-Balance,” Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa, ➝.
City of Cape Town, “Water quality of rivers and open waterbodies in the City of Cape Town: Status and historical trends, with a focus on the period April 2015 to March 2020,” Final Technical Report, August 2020, accessed 1 June 2023, ➝.
Bernard Steigler, The Neganthropocene (London: Open Humanities Press, 2018), 140.
Officials generate environmental readings in line with international safety measures issued by credible agencies such as the World Health Organization that lends legitimacy to decision-making. Or they use internally sanctioned measures, which in South Africa tend to keep shifting. The key performance indicators (KPIs) of environmental risks and safety exist across governments not only as a measure of pollution, contamination etc. but also as a test of whether officials and governments are doing a good job. By shifting the KPIs, governments can use safety measures to look effective and boost their reputation.
Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Cajetan Iheka, African Ecomedia: Network Forms, Planetary Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).
Planetary Portals website: ➝; Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, Kerry Holden, and Kathryn Yusoff, “Planetary Portals in the Upside-Down World” in Design Studio Vol. 4: Working at the Intersection ed. Harriet Harriss and Naomi House (London: RIBA Publishing, 2022); Kathryn Yusoff, Kerry Holden, and Casper Laing Ebbensgaard, “Planetary portals: ‘Dreaming in continents’ from east London to the cape in the colonial praxis of emergence and extraction,” Gropius Bau Journal, 2022, ➝.
Nnimmo Bassey, To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa, (Cape Town: Pambazuka, 2012).