When my wife, Helen, was eight years old, her grandfather, who loved to stimulate the imaginations of his grandchildren, once asked a group of them: “What would you say is the most wonderful thing in the world?” All of them thought for a while and then began the answers: a loving family, food, a donkey (this one didn’t take the question very seriously!), a nice house... Helen was thinking - and then came up with her answer. Water!
More than 65 years later, Helen was co-founder of an NGO called ARMOUR (Action For Responsible Management of Our Rivers). The year was 2015 and for two weeks untreated sewage from South Africa’s largest wastewater treatment works in Johannesburg, Northern Works, had been flowing into one of the major rivers of the province, the Jukskei.
A friend, who lived next to the Jukskei River, phoned Helen in desperation to ask what could be done about the stinking sewage pollution from upstream that had been reported to the authorities, with no action.
We were at a loss until Helen decided to start a petition to try and put more pressure on Johannesburg Water, the authority responsible for Northern Works. The petition went to friends and acquaintances along or near the river - and so a campaign began.
The petition was sent to Johannesburg Water and over 60 media, NGOs, local and national government and public bodies, identifying the crime of blatant pollution of a main river. The response was interesting.
The day after the petition went out, I got a call from a member of the Public Protector’s Office. “I’m here at the Northern Works,” he said. “I can see what’s happening. The sewage is being led past the works towards a sludge dam that is too full to manage it and so it goes into the river. But what must I do? I can’t shut down the Works!”
That was the first and only time I’ve been asked directly by a senior Government official for a solution to a serious problem. Unfortunately, I had no answer for him.
However, a surprisingly quick response came from Johannesburg Water. Their General Manager: Operations contacted me to thank us for the pressure we had put on the City of Johannesburg and said they had managed to get emergency funding to start rehabilitating the Works (all maintenance had been withdrawn months before this!).
A momentum had been created; ARMOUR was born as a campaign to restore the health of our waterways.
As ARMOUR began to establish itself as a serious NGO in the waterways sector, Helen decided to use Facebook to grow awareness of the parlous state of our rivers as widely as possible across South Africa.
From its start in 2016, Helen put a specific stamp on it. It would not just publicise ARMOUR but become a networking platform for all and any initiatives to cleanup and restore rivers and wetlands across the country.
“We’ve been involved in many river clean-ups over the years and I thoroughly enjoy picking up rubbish. I find it relaxing, and it’s also the people you meet - of all age groups and from the most diverse backgrounds - from executives of companies to waste-pickers who make their living from the waste they can recycle,” says Helen, now in her 83rd year. “On the river, all are equal.”
This ‘equality of effort’ - and ARMOUR is just one of many initiatives and NGOs involved - bridges the divisions in our society. Racial and cultural differences and hierarchies are put aside and all work side by side to make a difference, one river at a time.
Besides building relationships across the traditional societal divides while cleaning our waterways, there is another spin-off that’s having an often overlooked but profound effect on the country. New and caring communities are being created around a vision of “restoring what is ours” - groups of all races and classes taking on the cleaning up of their cities and suburbs and rehabilitating what has disintegrated in the face of corruption, mismanagement and ineptness of many local authorities. While politics tend to divide people, these new communities are uniting them.
The roots of Helen’s involvement with “people and planet” run deep. Her parents, Mike and Marguerite Horn, who farmed for many years on an irrigation scheme in the heart of South Africa, set an outstanding example of deep care for others. Both met MRA while at university and were a backbone of the movement in South Africa all their lives. Pieter, her younger brother, and his wife, Meryl, have been fulltime workers with MRA/IofC for more than 50 years.
As a youngster, in the 1950s, she and her family would visit two pioneering farming families in the Karoo, a dry, semi-desert area in the southern part of South Africa. The Rubidges and Kingwills made a profound impact upon Helen - and later on me as we visited them with our own growing family.
Roland (Roly) Kingwill was more than just a pioneer farmer in an unforgiving landscape. He was an early leader in sustainable farming in SA. This began when he and his wife, Moira, met two members of the Oxford Group, Peter and Betty Phillips in the 1930s. The vision of a world in trouble that could be changed by people like themselves totally captured the Kingwills.
Roly began spending the first hour of his day in quiet prayer and listening. And some dramatic thoughts began to shape him. One of them was to have a profound influence on the way he farmed. “I saw the damage cause by soil erosion (and over grazing), not only on my farm but through the whole Karoo,” he wrote in his book, Anchors in the Karroo. “I was concerned, and in my simplicity, I thought God might give me some great plan by which we could tackle this national problem.”
God did. “Begin with your own farm. Reduce your stock by one third. Introduce rotational grazing.” There was no expert guidance from farming authorities in 1938 with regard to this radical solution. After wrestling with the severe economic consequences of such a decision, Roly swallowed hard and followed his guidance. With that, he became a pioneer of responsible and sustainable farming in SA.
“It was the extraordinary care for life in the Karoo - for their workers and for the environment - that the Rubidges and Kingwills showed without compromise,” said Helen. “They were a different kind of farmer. They were inspired to do things no other farmers were doing at that time - stewarding their lands and their water, cutting down the number of animals grazing to protect and restore the grasslands despite what it cost them in the struggle to create a livelihood in such a harsh farming environment.”
Perhaps Helen’s determination to also do what she could to care for the environment and its waterways was living out what has been imprinted in her from childhood. And to honour that whisper in her ear so many years ago that told her water was “the most wonderful thing in the world”.
Link to ARMOUR Facebook page with 8,100 members
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