I was drawn to the Day Zero narrative and subject matter from the start because it manages to be both of this moment and ancient at the same time. In public perception globally, when the Cape Town water crisis made headlines around the world, it hooked into pervasive and escalating concerns about climate change. The term “new normal” was much bandied about, with a question mark appended to it. The story always resonated with a relevance originating in a simple, nagging realisation: if it happened to them, it could happen to us. In a century in which climate is going to be changing and extreme weather events become more frequent, could this be the face of the future for rainfall-dependent cities the world over? The story, and the way it was often framed and presented – as a cautionary tale for the 21st century – has always had a premonitory aspect. It was instinctively read as a story of our time, and the times to come.

But perhaps it also resonated globally because it is such an ancient story.

Indeed, many of the difficult questions grappled with in Cape Town at the time are as old as human settlement and irrigated agriculture, and would also at times have been burning issues in the city-states of antiquity. For example, in times of shortage, how do you decide the allocation between the competing needs of farmers and city-dwellers, when, after all, everybody needs both water and the food grown by the farmers, who need water to do so? In a stratified society, where power and access to material resources are unequally distributed, how do you ensure that everybody has enough water, a basic necessity of life?

this is a story that
manages to be both of this moment
and ancient at the same time

Even more ancient than that, though, it is a story as old as humanity itself, far predating our settlement twelve thousand years ago. Because it is the story of our ultimate vulnerability – all ingenuity and engineering acumen and social cooperation notwithstanding – to forces of nature, environment, weather, climate, all beyond our control. The story in Cape Town during that period was the timeless one of our relationship to the sky. It was a time of looking up, day after day, viscerally experiencing our powerlessness, utter dependence, our existence in a world crushingly indifferent to our needs or survival – the simple, primal awareness that defines our condition.

F ascinatingly, though, it is an old story also in another sense. One of the most striking features of this narrative is that, for a sequence of events in recent history, it conforms remarkably closely to the mythic story structure we all know from a thousand books and films. This is a timeline that can be reconstructed by lifting a series of cuttings from press reports of not that long ago. It is anchored in hard facts and key dates. It is, indeed, a “true story”. Yet the contours of the narrative hew surprisingly closely to the stages of the classic hero’s journey, the voyage and return story.

We all know it. It always begins from a point of departure in the ordinary world, where normality is upended somehow, leading to an increasingly persistent call to action, at first ignored or resisted. The initial reluctance to change is followed eventually by a separation from the ordinary world and a gradual, steady descent into a special world, disturbingly different from the one from which the protagonist had set out and which has now become inaccessible. Here we had water restrictions and tariffs being ramped up initially, necessitating some adjustments, then followed by steady deterioration of the situation, finally escalating to the very real prospect of dry taps and an utterly strange, nightmarish special world looming, a radical disruption of normality: an urban dystopia of manual water collection points; the spectre of everybody queueing day after day under police and military protection for small daily rations of water that we cart away in containers.

The protagonist encounters a great many tests on the way, along with allies, enemies and mentors. All these abound in the Day Zero story, punctuating its many twists and turns.

There is, finally, the climactic ordeal, a potentially existential threat to the protagonist, requiring the summoning of hitherto unknown inner resources. There is a thrilling escape from death, followed ultimately by a return, in this circular journey, to the ordinary world – with the reward, the elixir.

And as we know, from those stories, looking back, what it was all about turns out not to have been the external threat after all. Because what was gained from this momentous journey is the inner transformation of the protagonist. The initial state is now revealed as having been a condition of limited awareness; the elixir brought back from the special to the ordinary world is an expanded awareness, a deeper understanding, a new-found wisdom. The reward, wrought by the experience, is the lessons learnt – this is what the protagonist brings back; this is how the journey can bring renewal to the world, can bring an extension into the future of the continued possibility of the life of the community.

In this mythic structure, elixir and ordeal stand in a crucial relationship to each other. At the heart of the voyage and return story is a warning: the protagonist who fails to learn from the experience is doomed to repeat the ordeal.

Whether the lessons from the Day Zero story are clearly – and correctly – understood is all-determining. Do uncertainty, confusion, misstatement and disagreement continue to swirl around them? Or are they grounded in rigour and research, tested by scrutiny, carefully weighed, put in proper perspective, authoritatively articulated, clearly and dispassionately set out, comprehensive, accessible, applicable?

The learnings are centre-stage. They encapsulate the transformation. They are the elixir. And that, in the first instance, is what Day Zero is about.

Victor van Aswegen