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Kakamas Becomes a Transport Hub

There are platteland towns that rate as dreadful dumps – and there are dorps with character. Sent to find a village with its heart in the business of road transport, FleetWatch correspondent Graeme Addison went roving and found Kakamas on the edge of the Kalahari. This is his story of how to eat a watermelon and where to make a couple of million in just a couple of years. Fleets of vehicles are at the centre of the booming grape and citrus industry along the Orange River, where cool calculations are turning hot profits in the dry lands.

Blindfold yourself, take a pin and stick it into a map of southern Africa. Chances are it will make a hole in the middle of nowhere in the arid wastes that make up 70% of the subcontinent. The middle of nowhere is where I found myself when the editor of FleetWatch instructed me to "Go Seek a Small Town where Transport is Big".

And so it is in Kakamas. Know the name? The golden delicious Kakamas Peach, which launched a billion cans of fruit and really got our canned fruit industry going in the 1930s, comes from around here. The bleak flat desert of Bushmanland stretches south from the Orange River, and to the north is the red Kalahari.

Kakamas is tucked back among stunted trees, looking out over a long flat bridge that crosses the Orange. I stood in the main street thinking that my editor is well-known for his sense of humour and it was my job to amuse him. The only problem was what to write about. Little did I realise - until a few inquiries opened my eyes - that I was standing on ground hallowed by the banks and foreign investors.

"Kakamas is becoming the agricultural capital of the northern Cape while Upington is the industrial centre," says the town clerk of Kakamas, Hannes Truter. He is proud of (and maybe a little puzzled by) the boom. Since 1998, packing stores and cool-rooms which have been built or planned involve capital expenditure of R148million.

Not bad, I thought, for a town of roughly 7 000 inhabitants serving the Kakamas greater area which has no more than 20 000 population overall. No wonder Christo Steenkamp, owner of the Waterwiel Lodge hotel and a town councilor can boast that "on the financial side things are going very well". Truck drivers sometimes stay overnight at the lodge.

Some 40km from Kakamas is the famous Augrabies waterfall. Just nearby is a hotel with some adjoining land that was sold in 1994 for R5-million and resold a couple of years later, agriculturally improved, for R13.5-million, according to a knowledgeable source.

New gold is grapes

The new gold of Kakamas is not peaches but grapes. Thousands of hectares of desert country flanking the Orange River for 300km have been put under vineyards with hundreds of hectares more being added each year. From Prieska and Groblershoop in the southeast, to Blouputs and Onseepkans in the west, a narrow band of perhaps 1km of vineyards flourishes mainly on the south bank of the river.

To the north, the Namibians are catching on, rather more slowly. The transport infrastructure is mainly in South Africa, with rail lines and roads that have made it possible for a number of operators, large and small, to convey loads to the outside world. Agriculture needs wheels. Kakamas is where the river runs through and the wheels do too.

Table grape growers are moving swiftly to extend the vineyards along the invitingly wide riverbanks. At Onseepkans, far west, sweltering amid doer solitary mountains where kokerboom forests stand like crowds of skeletons with upraised arms, a R500-million capital development has been underway for some years. At 30 pounds sterling (approx R310) for a 5kg box of export grapes, there is hardly a better agricultural opportunity in Southern Africa.

Kakamas is not a hole in the map, it is potentially a funnel of riches for those who know how to take advantage of opportunities.

The district capital of Upington, 100km from Kakamas, boasts the second largest Wine Cellar co-operative in the world and the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. I was also told it has the longest international jet runway in the world, because the air is hot and thin, the planes can’t easily take off.

The KWV depot in Upington keeps busy some 18 road tankers transporting grape juice to the Western Cape where it is mixed into wines or distilled for spirits. Some 10% of South Africa’s wines, mainly sweet wine, comes from the Orange River. Business along the river is providing opportunities for transport entrepreneurs in local delivery work. They move produce to the co-op depots and coolrooms. The pace of life is relaxed but the rewards are good.

On a hot day - and I mean hot, around 40deg C - I sat in the shade of an immense kameeldoring (camel-thorn) tree with a farming family. We watched the farmer’s wife slice a watermelon with scientific precision. She wrapped her fist around the blade six inches from the tip and pulled it longwise through the melon to make boat-shaped wedges with the pips all standing up like passengers.

We were not allowed to touch the cut slices for 10minutes. When we did, the reason for the delay was revealed: evaporation had caused rapid cooling and the red juicy innards were ice-cold.

Drive out into the district and signs of growth greet your eyes. Row upon row of grapevines and irrigation canals reach away into the glinting sunlight. Around Louisvale, just over the river from Upington, are massive concrete irrigation channels. These were the vote-getting product of the white nationalist government two generations ago and today’s irrigation is more modest and more automated.

It costs about R100 000 to develop a hectare of land for grapes. No wonder the banks love the place.

Citrus too is being planted in the rich, dark silt of the river floodplain. Cotton was never much of a success here, and the peaches have moved off to less harsh climates but grapes and dates – the sweet fruits of a harsh environment – are booming. No wonder some of the local residents call the Orange the Nile of Southern Africa and many compare the agricultural development to that of Israel which has made the desert bloom.

Growing grapes for export is the main focus of current developments. Matthee van Schalkwyk, production and marketing manager for the Orange River Wine Cellars (Cooperative) Ltd, says the company uses some 11 trucks of 3-5 tons for collections and deliveries - and it has a further 18 bakkies for general fetching and carrying. Private contractors used by the co-op have four or five more trucks between them.

This fleet is needed for the large area served. Glance at the accompanying map and you get some idea of how Kakamas and Upington lie at the centre of a hugely spread-out region with the river snaking past many a productive small hamlet. After 30 years in business, the co-op has cellars at Groblershoop, Grootdrink, Upington, Keimoes, and Kakamas.

In 1997, the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC) showed its support for the area by underwriting the new cellars at Kakamas and Grootdrink, part of a R30-million extension programme. Farmers were assisted to plant further vineyards and new orchards have been put in.

According to Kakamas councilor Christo Steenkamp, some 2 300 hectares of virgin land have been put under vineyards and citrus in the Kakamas area alone since 1998. The only threat to road transporters is that this year, for the first time, five trains were used to carry produce out of the town. But farmers still have to get their produce to the station and there is plenty of transport work for start-up enterprises.

Today many Coloured farmers are banding together in small co-operatives - or joining whites in capital ventures - to take advantage of the R15 000 per head housing allowance given to the disadvantaged. The money is being literally ploughed into the desert.

About 1 000 jobs are being generated by the IDC-backed Orange River wine cellars project, with additional exports of R30-million a year in grape juices and wines. Loans worth about R281-million have been granted for new land developments and pack houses.

Gauteng seems far away when you walk down the main street of Kakamas which is something like a cross between an Egyptian village and a Wild West film set. The town is graced with 11 Nile-style working waterwheels. It also has some very old hand-built irrigating tunnels. But at high noon it bustles like a frontier settlement, with farmers roaring to a halt at the local garage and the till at the supermarket ringing merrily.

The town is a stopover spot for tourists en route to Augrabies, the West Coast and Richtersveld National Park, and the Fish River Canyon. Tourists are drawn by the combination of village quaintness and the appeal of the open-air fruit drying pans and racks where peaches, dates, raisins and figs are exposed to the sun.

All of South Africa’s dried sultanas (some 250 tons) come from around Kakamas and Upington. They are processed, laser-scanned and packed for export at the SA Dried Fruit Co-operative in Upington.

Mining is a factor in the boom times too, for though a base metals mine at Aggenys, near Pofadder, has been mothballed, new pits for copper and zinc are being opened up in the mountains near Pella. The lifeline for all is the Orange River itself.

Grape grower Cobus du Toit, of Louisvale, a former policeman turned farmer, has a riverfront property where water is no problem but money for capital development is. Like many others, he has struggled to get on his feet and it did not help when, while on a holiday to the West Coast, the tide covered his new bakkie.

"I suppose we are all hoping that the boom is not temporary," he told me as we surveyed the district from the top of a koppie. Below us the irrigated lands were spread out for miles to the horizon. His bakkie has been restored, the sand taken out of the engine and he is investing every cent he can find in new vineyards.

Later we drank Orange River vintage stein wine in the light of a braai fire as the sun painted the river red. So long as the river flows, the money should flow too.

It never rains here – but it pours, once in five years. The last big flood was in 1997 when Bushmanland and Namaqualand (further west) were lambasted by a storm that turned dry riverbeds into paths of blood. Water Affairs Minister at the time, Prof Kader Asmal, visited the area and wrote later that the torrents that raged over bridges and cut off communities had not bowed the spirit of the people.

There was a scare last year when it was reported that the outflow from Katse Dam in Lesotho, near the source of the Orange, would be less than originally calculated. Farmers downstream could suffer. The fear seems to have blown over as the Department of Water Affairs and the Ministry moved quickly to reassure agricultural unions that their water needs would be met.

Now the plans are for water from the Gariep Dam and Vanderkloof Dam, both in the Free State, to be captured at Boegoeberg near Prieska in the Northern Cape. Boegoeberg has a dam already. Proposals are for the wall at Gariep to be raised and a new storage dam to be built at Boegoeberg. Both would ensure reliable seasonal supplies to the farmers of the Lower Orange except in the worst of drought years. Another dam could be built at Vioolsdrif on the lower Orange west of Kakamas

Coincidentally this will have benefits for South Africa’s industrial heartland too. With more capacity in Boegoeberg, the Vaal system feeding Gauteng may not need to release as much water as it currently does. The water can then be recycled locally and used to boost industry in Gauteng: thus offering an indirect spin-off to transporters in the central region of the country.

Kakamas is at the centre of a ganglion of roads spanning east, west, north and south. The connections with the main centres of the country are the major transport routes through Kuruman/Sishen, Kenhardt/Calvinia, and Springbok/Windhoek.

Now that I have been there, I can’t fault my editor for telling me to discover a dorp with its heart set on transport. Kakamas may not be the centre of the world but it is in a world – and certainly in a class – of its own. I can still taste the sweets of the desert, fresh dates, on the back of my tongue. Visit the place someday for a bite of iced watermelon or a sip of Cobus du Toit’s chilled wine.

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