On the night of 18 February 2022, while most of Queenstown slept, the community of Thulandivile woke to chaos. A nearby dam burst, unleashing torrents of water that tore through their small riverside town. Within minutes, homes filled with water, families were separated, and the community was thrust into extraordinary survival mode.
“I was woken up by a phone call around 1 a.m.,” recalls Nonkululeko Pokela (47). “The young men from a nearby informal settlement were shouting amanzi! from their rooftops. When I got up, the house was already flooded. The children were floating, screaming in terror. The young men had to carry me out.”
That night, Queenstown, now Komani, was hit by torrential rains that filled the already aging Bonkolo Dam beyond capacity. The dam, built in 1905 and long neglected, overflowed after days of intense rainfall. Years of silt build-up and cracked infrastructure had weakened its wall, while clogged drainage systems downstream trapped the surge of water heading toward settlements like Thulandivile.
What followed was chaos. Water tore through the settlement, sweeping away homes, bedding, schoolbooks, and the fragile stability women had spent years building in this rural village in the Eastern Cape.
When the floods receded, Thulandivile was unrecognisable. “Everything was destroyed,” says Melisa Matata (31). “The water was up to my knees. When we opened the door after the rain stopped, the fridge was upside down, the beds were soaked, our clothes ruined. It felt like our lives had been turned over too.” Like many women in the area, Melisa’s role as caregiver meant she could not grieve immediately. She had to find food, salvage what was left, comfort her child and her elderly mother.
In March 2022, just as the community began to rebuild, another flood came, this time more violent. Nonkululeko lost her sister in that second disaster. “I didn’t even have time to cry,” she says quietly. “Her children were left with me. Now I have additional children to care for, and no home of my own.” She details the struggles her children faced following the floods. Most children from Thulandivile, including her own, could not attend school for a month because they had lost everything. The school called them to return even though they did not have uniforms and school materials.
For Fezeka Bodlani (73), the sound of rushing water still triggers panic. “The second flood came to kill us,” she says. “It sounded like the ocean when it was approaching.” Fezeka, a retired nurse, lives with her two children (45 and 43), who are unemployed, and five grandchildren, who she supports through her pension. She laments the devastation of these floods, as well as the persistent unemployment plaguing the community. Fezeka fell terribly ill following the second set of floods and noted that the only thing that gave her the will to live was the responsibility on her shoulders to care for her family.
Nontozelizwe Dyanti (68), whose house was completely destroyed, adds, “I was fortunate to be relocated to a community centre. But many others were told to wait to be moved, and they are still waiting.” She has four children and ten grandchildren who are unemployed.
The 2022 floods were not simply an act of nature, they were a predictable tragedy. Experts warned for years that the Bonkolo Dam was structurally compromised. Local media had reported visible cracks and heavy siltation that reduced the dam’s holding capacity. When climate-fuelled heavy rains hit, the weakened infrastructure gave way.
By the time floodwaters reached Thulandivile, it was too late.
If the dam burst exposed Thulandivile’s physical vulnerability, it also revealed how deeply they had been abandoned. Residents say official assistance was almost non-existent. “Officials did not help with anything. Most of the help came from the church community. We didn’t even get cleaning material. Some had to rebuild their homes with their bare hands,” Fezeka explained. The Chris Hani District Municipality scrambled to provide emergency relief, shelters, food parcels, and blankets to communities surrounding Thulandivile. All they could do was watch through media, while they were left destitute.
The ward councillor admits as much: “We have not received any assistance from the provincial government or Disaster Management. The resources we have are not enough for the scale of this crisis. I have done everything I can within my capacity to advocate for our community,” she said.
In the absence of government intervention, women became the backbone of recovery for most families, cleaning debris, rebuilding their homes and comforting each other. Their labour, as always, filled the gaps left by official neglect.
Scientists have shown that extreme rainfall events like those in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal in 2022, are made more intense and frequent by climate change. In the Eastern Cape, rainfall is becoming more erratic, long dry spells broken by intense storms that overwhelm outdated dams and drainage systems.
But the impact isn’t equal. Climate disasters like this one ravage entire communities and disproportionately affect women, as most homes are women led. Babalwa Ntandiso (47) lives in a two roomed house with her two sisters (26 and 23) and her three children, the eldest aged 13 and twins aged 8 years old. Their house was completely destroyed. She recalls a government official walking into her house wearing water boots and a very bad attitude and said “we can’t help you because your house is a mud house. It wasn’t destroyed by the floods.” Babalwa, stilled filled with rage and deep pain three years on, exclaimed “our house was not a mud house, and even if it was, do we not deserve to be helped?” The sisters began the long arduous journey of rebuilding their house. They went to the riverbank to collect soil to build. This was a traumatising ordeal for them as they navigated the labour of rebuilding a house that was destroyed by floods, not once, but twice in the space of a month. They faced this mammoth task by themselves while fighting to support Babalwa’s children.
The community of Thulandivile no longer asks for charity; they ask for justice. For proper flood-defence infrastructure and for the rebuilding of their community. Early this year, Bonkolo Dam once again made headlines, not for flooding but for water shortages as levels dropped drastically, worsened by broken pipes and mismanagement. The same infrastructure that drowned Thulandivile could not provide clean water when the rains stopped. That is the cruel irony of climate injustice in rural South Africa: too much water one season, none the next.
If the government truly intends to confront climate change, it must begin by standing with those most exposed to its wrath. Thulandivile is not asking for charity, it is asking to be seen.
By: Pearl Nicodemus
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