Rivers, Politics, and Ecology in Jacklyn Cock’s Writing the Ancestral River and Dominique Botha’s False River

Abstract Tracing the history of the Kowie River in the Eastern Cape, Jacklyn Cock writes: “For me, the Kowie … connects a personal and a collective history, the social and the ecological, the sacred and the profane” (Writing the Ancestral River. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2018, p. 4). She goes on to detail the initiation and induction practices of the Xhosa people indigenous to the Kowie, and then the historical dispossession of these people after the Battle of Grahamstown in 1819. The colonial construction of a harbour in 1838 was, much later, followed by the capitalist development of a marina in 1989. These “developments” caused both ecological damage to the Kowie and economic devastation for the Xhosa. In this article, Cock’s book is juxtaposed against another river-based text, Dominique Botha’s debut novel False River (Cape Town: Umuzi, 2013), which centres on the farm Rietpan in what was formerly the Orange Free State. Because water is so scarce in South Africa, rivers are divided and violently contested. Botha’s text shares with Cock’s book not only a history of colonialism in which indigenous people are dispossessed, but also an ecological vision that offers social solutions to this violence. Cock writes: “Perhaps we can connect with our very different histories through our ancestors, and with nature and justice through rivers” (144–45).