Keiskamma River

Exit of the Keiskamma from the Amathole mountains around Fort Cox ( background center) and Burns Hill in a shallow valley at Middle Drift (left, beyond the image border )

The Keiskamma (English Keiskamma River, afrik. Keiskammarivier ) is a river in South Africa's Eastern Cape Province. It is about 263 kilometers long and has a catchment area of ​​2745 square kilometers. It rises on the southwest flank of Mount Thomas, close to the Dontsa Pass in the Amathole Mountains. Its mouth is located near the village of Hamburg on the Indian Ocean.

Course

In its headwaters, north of the village Keiskammahoek, it is fed by several small streams. These are the small rivers uMnyamana, Cata, Nxalawa, Nqolo, Ndlovini and Gwiligwili. Three water dams in the catchment area of its upper reaches are used for drinking water supply for the immediate and wider region. It is the Mnyameni Dam on uMnyamana, the Cata Dam in the watercourse and the Cata Sandili Dam at the confluence of the Wolf River in the Keiskamma River. The water extraction and treatment is carried out by the state-owned enterprise Amatola Water.

Its headwaters and upper basin is characterized mainly by Paleozoic rocks. These are sandstones, shales and gray schluffartige rocks of the Balfour Formation within the Beaufort Group. Until the close of the settlement Burns Hill of Keiskamma flows through the south to lowering field of Amathole Mountains. A few kilometers downstream, at Middle Drift, his run crosses a broad flat plain in the south of this town, he receives the Tyhume River. In the flat undulating landscape in middleware and drift down the river in the middle reaches only prevail Schluffgesteine ​​next sandstones, both from the Middleton Formation of the Upper Permian. Here is in its right tributary Debe between the railway breakpoint Will Merton and the settlement of Newtown another water reservoir, the Debe Dam.

Here the Keiskamma forms an important source of water in the ecosystem of the eastern Karoo.

In the lower reaches, the Keiskamma winds through a landscape that is characterized by bushland vegetation -like shapes and is cut at numerous points stronger by its course. This region is inhabited only very slight. In the mouth region of the terrain relief flattens out somewhat and he pours without delta, but with a great turn and a significant sandbank in the Indian Ocean. Here are largely deserted sandy beaches.

Use patterns in the catchment area

About 11 percent of its catchment area are used as agricultural land by small farms and forestry. Only 5 percent are populated country and 27 percent consist of areas that are threatened by erosion. The main part of its catchment area are only small changes in areas of savannenartigem grassland, bushland with shrubs and trees and extensive mountain forest areas by humans.

History

The Keiskamma river was the boundary between the district of the Cape Colony Victoria and the territory of British Kaffraria in the 19th century. After the second border war, the river formed together with the Tyhume River on the basis of an agreement between the British and the Xhosa of the eastern boundary of a neutral territory. Not far from Middle Drift lay in a river bend the Fort Cox.