But, as a beloved green (and blue) space, the people who use it won’t let it die. 

Wemmer Pan, in the heart of Pioneer Park in the suburb of Rosettenville, is a snapshot of a Johannesburg suspended in time. Its northwestern corner is home to the once delightful but now dilapidated Santarama Miniland, where a giant blue Michael Jackson keeps watch over the lake. 

Santarama is open, technically, but hasn’t been maintained in decades. It is now home to a Pentecostal church and occasionally holds markets and parties. A stone’s throw away on the northern bank is an inlet where pastors perform baptisms and cleanses, despite the dirty water. 

Above the pan to the north and east are abandoned mine dumps and to the south are the parts of Pioneer Park where every weekend the locals come out to play — drinks, picnics, music and photo shoots.

On the western bank, Wemmer Pan is home to some of Gauteng’s rowing clubs: Parktown Boys, King Edward VII (KES), Mondeor, Wits, Wemmer Pan, Vikings and the Johannesburg Canoe Club. This is by far the most diverse rowing community in Gauteng. It serves athletes aged 12 to 84 — novices and Olympians of all races, colours and creeds. Here children from Turffontein and Rosettenville share oars with chief executives and retired mine bosses. 

Last summer, the pan was engulfed by an invasive grass weed that rendered it unrowable. But every weekend in April and May, teenagers from Parktown Boys’ High School, KES and Sir John Adamson High School met up with adults from the Wemmer Pan and Viking rowing and canoe clubs to manually remove the weed. 

The ragtag team brought rakes from home fitted with ropes and pool noodles to harvest the long grass. They built a large rake out of a reinforced bar that they paddled out into the dam, dropped it in and pulled it to shore. This manoeuvre raked the grass to the edge of the jetty, where the volunteers did the heavy work of scooping it out of the dam. 

It was a quiet job. The church at Santarama occasionally played music in the distance as the crew joked or remarked on a big haul. Sometimes, a rake snapped. Otherwise, it was the monotonous splash and grunt of a seemingly endless task. 

The grass is like angel-hair pasta — a metre long and dark green, except where it’s black from absorbing the manganese from an acid mine drainage spill in 2021 that has settled at the bottom of the pan. 

The spill killed the carp that had been eating their weight in grass every day since the early 2000s. This sterilised population of 600 fish had dwindled slowly in the past 20 years until a big die-off. 

Over time, silt from the north side’s abandoned mines has been pouring in slowly but surely, shallowing the pan. Some parts that were once 4m deep are now just 15cm. When the depth of the water drops to 2m, the sun is able to reach the bottom, creating perfect conditions for the invasive grass to grow. 

And so, it grew and grew, first taking over the southern bank and eventually straight across, so much so that the pan had become a swamp. It collected litter on the top of a bright green sticky algae. The Wemmer Pan Aquatics Club, which is the corporate body for all the member rowing, canoe and sailing clubs, contacted the City of Johannesburg and Joburg City Parks and Zoo for help, but there was little response.

One of the main problems is a lack of departmental ownership and governance, said Rod MacKinnon, the chairperson of the Wemmer Pan Aquatics Club. Joburg City Parks and Zoo owns the surrounding land. The water flowing into and out of the pan is stormwater and runoff that is the responsibility of the Johannesburg Roads Agency. 

Johannesburg Water is responsible for the pan’s water quality and does test it at the inlet and outlet monthly and is reliant on the other departments to take action for low water quality. The old mines that surround the pan are technically responsible for clearing the silt that now makes up the bottom of the shallowing pan. 

Alan Bentley, captain of the Wemmer Pan Rowing Club, said they are trying to persuade DRDGold, the owner of the old mine dumps, to dredge the dam.

“In the long term it doesn’t matter if we get rid of the weed and we get the water clean. You can’t row here because it’s too shallow.”

MacKinnon said he has a great working relationship with Wiseman Ndladla, who is responsible for water quality and catchment management at Johannesburg City Parks and Zoo.

Ndladla said that from the perspective of its environment and infrastructure services department, the catchment area upstream of Wemmer Pan consists of former mine land, making it likely that seepage from this part of the catchment will “carry a strong signature of mine wastewater, particularly during storm events”. 

The city does not have the authority to regulate mine-related water quality problems, so these concerns are referred to the department of mineral resources and energy for appropriate action to be taken.

But mine wastewater isn’t the biggest pollutant found in the water quality tests. Pollution sources include contaminated stormwater runoff (non-point pollution), industrial effluent and sewage spills. 

Ndladla said the water quality monitoring data highlights significant problems in Wemmer Pan, with microbial contamination and organic pollution being the primary concerns. 

“The high levels of E. coli, phosphates and ammonium suggest that untreated sewage, stormwater runoff and possibly industrial effluents are the dominant contributors to the declining water quality,” he said. 

“While there is no strong indication of mine wastewater pollution, the persistent nutrient and organic loads are probably contributing to the invasive grass weed infestation. 

“Addressing these pollution sources is crucial to improving the ecological health of the pan and mitigating the spread of invasive vegetation.”

The high E. coli counts point to ongoing contamination from upstream sources, probably from sewer spillages and untreated sewage entering the water through stormwater systems, he said. Incidents of sewage pollution are escalated to Johannesburg Water sewer networks.

Ndladla said his department is collaborating with various municipal entities and departments, including environmental health and Joburg Water, through a multidisciplinary catchment management approach.

“This approach involves regular pollution investigations, consistent water quality monitoring, escalation of sewage pollution incidents to Joburg Water sewer networks, and the issuance of notices, fines, and other enforcement actions in cases of noncompliance.”

Ndladla acknowledged that the pan has experienced significant infestation of invasive alien vegetation, primarily grass weed, but said that no funds have been allocated for the control, eradication and removal of invasive alien vegetation. 

“However, recognising that most water bodies throughout the city, including Wemmer Pan, are under stress from invasive vegetation, the environment and infrastructure services department will be implementing invasive alien vegetation control at selected water bodies through the Public Employment Programme, funded by the treasury.” 

He said an assessment of the infestation will be undertaken to ensure the allocation of resources. Although the budget is limited, this programme will “contribute positively to controlling the grass weed infestation”. 

Whether Wemmer Pan will be selected as one of the water bodies to receive the department’s intervention is not known. 

The Wemmer Pan Rowing Club’s Bentley said: “We’re not at all convinced that anybody cares enough to stop it [the pollution]. 

“People live downstream of this, all the way to Alberton, so there’s toxic mine water … the E. coli values here are through the roof, in the hundreds of thousands.” 

While the city and the collaborating municipal entities and departments analyse their data and decide how to allocate their resources, the sewage, pollution, litter, stormwater, silt, acid mine spills and — for whatever mysterious reason — a lot of single shoes continue to find a home in this government-neglected puddle. 

But because the canoe and rowing clubs rely on the pan for daily use, they’re not giving up. And after the hard work of April and May, the splish-splash of oars made its way back onto the pan — for now.

Madison Bannon is a writer, climate activist and rowing coach.