Pollution stops Khayelitsha’s canoe club classes
Hyacinth and sewage are destroying the Blowy wetlands
Akhona Sopangisa, co-founder of Khayelitsha Canoeing Club, says they have not been able to give canoe classes or do water tours due to overflowing sewage and invasive hyacinth in the Blowy wetland in Makhaza, Khayelitsha. Photos: Vincent Lali
Members of the Khayelitsha Canoeing Club are pleading with the City of Cape Town to clear the waterways of the Khayelisha Wetlands Park (known as the Blowy wetlands), which are filled with pollution and invasive hyacinth.
The Blowy wetlands are used by the club to paddle. But it is overrun with hyacinth, blocking waterways in Makhaza, Khayelitsha.
Akhona Sopangisa, co-founder of the club, said that since September 2024 residents have had to divert sewage water from their homes into the canals, causing the hyacinth to grow. He said this was because a sewage pipe caused their drains to malfunction. He said the City of Cape Town fixed the problem about four weeks ago, but the sewage remains in the wetland.
Sopangisa and other volunteers now spend about two hours each week removing the invasive hyacinth. “We can’t work for too long in the dirty water because the smell is overwhelming,” he said. “We don’t know what diseases we will catch.”
Sopangisa said they have asked the City for machinery to better remove the hyacinth so they can use the waterway again. He said they have not been able to teach youngsters canoeing in the wetland or take tourists there for months.
Volunteers stand at the edge of the waterway at the Wetland Park now overgrown with hyacinth.
“To generate income, we are now focusing on walking tours, which involves taking tourists to community gardens where we use biochar as a fertilizer.”
Sopangisa and his brother Siyanda founded the Khayelitsha Canoe Club in 2023. They now work with over 20 volunteers to remove the hyacinth and rubbish from the wetland. We reported, in 2023, on their previous efforts to clean the wetlands.
A volunteer, Monde Kuse, said the overflowing sewage may be killing the wetlands fauna, including turtles and crabs. “We no longer see mudfish, which locals often fished for,” he said.
Zahid Badroodien, mayco committee member for water and sanitation, said the City plans to remove alien plants in Blowy from January.
Support independent journalism
Donate using Payfast
Don't miss out on the latest news
We respect your privacy, and promise we won't spam you.
© 2025 GroundUp. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
You may republish this article, so long as you credit the authors and GroundUp, and do not change the text. Please include a link back to the original article.
We put an invisible pixel in the article so that we can count traffic to republishers. All analytics tools are solely on our servers. We do not give our logs to any third party. Logs are deleted after two weeks. We do not use any IP address identifying information except to count regional traffic. We are solely interested in counting hits, not tracking users. If you republish, please do not delete the invisible pixel.