The silence was the thing I noticed most. No fridge hum, no notifications, no streamed entertainment. The cellphone towers had drained the last of their backup batteries and the fixed-line internet had gone with them.
Still Bay, the small Garden Route town where I live, was not merely off the grid — for the better part of a week it was unreachable. The storm that did this has been called the worst to hit the Cape in at least 30 years, and from where I sat that did not feel like hyperbole.
Two low-pressure systems arrived in quick succession in the first half of May, the second and fiercer one from the 10th. The storm uprooted old trees, stripped roofs from buildings and turned roads into rivers.
Across the Garden Route, some 45 roads were damaged. The road through Meiringspoort, a ribbon of tar through the mountains between De Rust and Klaarstroom, was destroyed. Helicopters were scrambled to lift stranded residents and tourists out of communities the floodwater had severed entirely. At least three people died.
I edit a tech publication, which is a difficult thing to do with no way to get online. So, like many others, I got in the car. I drove to Mossel Bay and then further still, hunting a wall socket and a signal, working from coffee shops in towns the storm had treated more gently. That is an inconvenience for someone with a vehicle and somewhere to point it.
For others, the blackout was something closer to fear. The local Facebook groups, when anyone could reach them, filled with messages from Joburg, Cape Town and further afield, asking whether anyone had laid eyes on their loved ones.
People went for days without knowing whether family members were safe. The Garden Route district municipality noted, almost in passing, that several communities had been “cut off from communication”.
The claim that any of this is a special favour for one man is starting to wear rather thin
But there is a technology precisely suited to this type of natural disaster: low-Earth orbit satellite internet does not care whether the fibre has been severed or the cell towers are under water. A Starlink dish and solar panels — the latter already a fixture on countless roofs after years of load-shedding — will keep a home, a clinic or a municipal office online when everything terrestrial has failed.
Install a handful at libraries and community halls and you have, for very little money, a disaster communications network: somewhere a person can go to tell the world they’re safe. And Starlink will not be alone for long. Amazon’s Leo constellation and China’s Spacesail are both racing to fill the same skies.
Yet we have none of it — not because the technology is unproven but because it has become hostage to politics.
The fight is over BEE, and it came to a head in the very week the storm did. On May 13 the Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa) rejected communications minister Solly Malatsi’s attempt to let foreign operators satisfy ownership rules through equity equivalent investment programmes instead of selling 30% of their equity to historically disadvantaged South Africans.
The regulator’s position is that it cannot recognise that alternative until parliament amends the Electronic Communications Act. Malatsi said he would pursue exactly that amendment. The ANC and the EFF have resisted the idea at every turn, arguing it’s being done as a favour for Elon Musk, a divisive figure politicians on the left detest for his forthright views against BEE.
Transformation is a serious objective and deserves to be argued seriously; the inclusion of South Africans long shut out of the economy is no triviality, and Malatsi’s critics are not villains for defending it. But there is a difference between principle and paralysis.
Starlink, which already operates in 23 other African countries, including Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Botswana, has repeatedly said that four sentences in Icasa’s rules stand between the country and a licence. And with three constellations now competing for African skies, the claim that any of this is a special favour for one man is starting to wear rather thin.
Musk was born in Pretoria. It is a sour irony that the country of his birth remains one of the few on the continent unable to use what he built. While politicians continue to squabble over whose ideological worldview is the correct one, the people who needed Starlink last week did not have it.
They sat in the dark instead, uncontactable, waiting, not for a policy position but for the lights to come back on.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
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