Greetings from the deepest darkest Northern Cape!

So, I’m in the penultimate day of Wild adventure, having spent the last week travelling around the Northern Cape to see what’s going on with SA’s astronomy initiatives. As my deputy news editor told me, “science doesn’t happen in the newsroom. It happens out there.”

And so, here I am — travel-weary, dust-covered and being that irritating out-of-towner who asks too many questions.

(You may ask why there’ve been no blog posts — simple. You need internet to post a blog. Very often, even cellphone reception is a big ask.)

Today, there was a story published in print about whether large science projects actually benefit the small towns in which they’re situated. In short, the answer is yes. The slightly longer — and yet still truncated — version is in today’s Business Day. The long and complete version follows.

At the moment, Wild headquarters is temporarily situated in Carnarvon, 80km away from the proposed SKA site. Worry not, there will be blogs and stories to follow about what’s actually going on in this little town. (Although, I must admit suspicion: Any place in which the streetlights are in the middle of the road needs to be treated with caution.)

DO LARGE SCIENCE PROJECTS BENEFIT SMALL TOWNS? SUTHERLAND THINKS SO.

“We’re lucky” is the refrain from the community of Sutherland in the Northern Cape, home to the optical South African Large Telescope (SALT). “We’re lucky to have the telescope.”

Next year, SA will find out whether it has won the bid to host the Square Kilometre Array (SKA). Some argue that a developing country, such as SA, should host the world’s largest radio telescope because it would create employment and boost human capital development. Others say that SA should focus on poverty alleviation and the problems facing the country, rather than spend millions on arcane scientific equipment.

The SKA bid is similar to SALT in a number of ways: the projects are funded by international consortia, they would both be based in small farming communities in the Northern Cape and would focus on pure, experimental science.

The question is then whether large international scientific projects actually benefit the communities in which they are based. According to every person Business Day spoke to in Sutherland – from headmasters to small business owners to police officers to waitresses – the answer is an unequivocal yes.

With a population of under 4 000 inhabitants, Sutherland relies on tourism and agriculture to generate income. Unfortunately, agriculture is seasonal, offering unreliable employment opportunities when demand warrants it – whether it is potato picking or sheep shearing, among other things. This means that the town’s unemployment rate sits between 70% and 75%, and many are reliant on social grants.

Tourism offers stable employment for many of the town’s inhabitants – whether as small business owners, tour guides or service and maintenance staff.

While there are few direct employment opportunities at SALT, local businesses have benefited from domestic and international interest in seeing the stars. Small business owner Jurg Wagener owns one of the 45 guest houses and guest farms in Sutherland. “I often have bus loads of tourists, people coming throughout the year,” he says. Consequently, he employs 10 people at his guest house.

The town’s main road – dusty and wide enough to allow two carts to pass each other – is flanked by guest houses, curio shops and restaurants, each trying to catch the attention of passing star-gazers.

And there is plenty of attention to be caught: according to South African Astronomical Observatory officer Anthony Mietas, SALT has more than 10 000 visitors a year.

There are other spin-offs to having a multi-million-dollar science observatory in your back garden: the local schools – as well as the hostel which houses 85 pupils between grade 1 and 12 – have been upgraded through funding from the National Research Foundation. While some say that this was because they are Dinaledi schools – schools with a special focus on science and maths – there is also the reality that it would look very bad to have a state-of-the-art observatory looking down on schools that were falling apart.

Primary school headmaster Neville van Wyk says that the highschool has had a 100% matric pass rate for the past 10 years, although the classes have been very small with only 18 pupils matriculating last year.

However, the town still suffers from the endemic problems of small towns in SA: unemployment and alcoholism.

Warrant Officer Marius Malan cites alcoholism as the most serious problem facing the town, and the cause of most of Sutherland’s crime. “But compared to other places, it’s very good. It’s mainly domestic violence. People withdraw the charges when they’re sober….
“We have a murder once in a blue moon. We’ve only had one this year,” he says, adding that it was also related to alcohol abuse.

Also, although poverty is a problem and a lot of people in the town are poor, no one is starving, he says.

The bottom line is that without the telescope, Sutherland would struggle like many other small farming towns in SA, where employment opportunities are thin on the ground and future prospects even slimmer. While very few – if any – of the town’s inhabitants will become astronomers or even be directly employed by the facility, the trickle down effect equates to jobs, social development and other benefits that wouldn’t be possible without the SALT telescope.