Two weeks ago, in Cape Town, I waited for a thunderstorm. The weather report had called for rain, and, despite the ninety-five-degree heat, the cloudless sky, the drought having been declared a national disaster that day, and the weather report having repeatedly shown itself to be an instrument of torture, I believed it. There is something wrong with a city in which it just never rains, and there has been something very wrong with Cape Town for a long time. Evidence of how bad things are is all around us—the signs at the airport begging tourists to use water carefully, the electronic billboards on the freeways flashing words like “critical” and “severe,” the hospital smell of waterless hand sanitizer in the office buildings, the dead grass in the parks, the empty shelves and refrigerators in the grocery stores, the empty municipal pools, the empty dams. The subject of the drought can be avoided only with great determination. Any attempt to have an ordinary conversation about ordinary things that might happen in the future inevitably gives way to speculation about Day Zero, the date on which the municipal taps get switched off and Cape Town’s four million inhabitants begin lining up for their daily twenty-five-litre rations. Earlier, the city’s deputy mayor had announced that Day Zero had been pushed back again, from May 11th to June 4th. (At one point, it had been April 16th; a week ago, it was changed, again, to July 9th.) The news felt like an unearned gift, something that could be snatched away at any time.

A friend texted me, “I can’t stand this.” I started to reply with meteorological encouragement, but he was talking about the Presidential recall. Everyone was. At a press briefing that afternoon, the secretary-general of the African National Congress, Ace Magashule, had confirmed that the Party, which holds nearly two-thirds of the seats in the South African National Assembly, had asked President Jacob Zuma to resign. The country had expected the announcement since three o’clock that morning, when news of the decision was leaked to the press, or, rather, since December, when the A.N.C. elected Cyril Ramaphosa as its new leader. Compounding the sense of suspended animation, Magashule said that Zuma had not been given a deadline; he was “sure,” however, that the President would respond “soon.”

As it started to storm, many hours after it was supposed to, another friend texted me to say that the cloud had burst. She, too, was talking about the recall, and she was optimistic. I listened to the cheers from the street and tried to work out what was being celebrated—the rain, or the official acknowledgment that the President couldn’t stay where he was. Zuma left office the next day, Valentine’s Day, and Ramaphosa, as his deputy, automatically took his place. The morning after that, on my way to a natural spring in the suburb of Newlands, I stopped for gas and asked the attendant whether he was happy about the news. “About Cyril?” he said. “Yes.” He paused. “But it needs to rain more. It needs to rain every single day for a long time.” He banged his hand on an empty watering can for emphasis.

On Springs Way, a narrow cul-de-sac lined with pretty Victorian houses on one side and an old-age home on the other, the atmosphere was calmer than it had been the last time I visited, a few weeks earlier. (The storm had changed nothing, of course. If Day Zero had been pushed back, it was because of a dramatic decline in water usage, and because farmers had recently released ten billion litres of water from their private reservoirs into the Steenbras Dam.) The spring was now under twenty-four-hour police patrol, and traffic services were on site to manage congestion. A woman carrying two full twenty-five-litre containers—about six and a half gallons each—smiled at me as she walked up to her car. She asked the policeman on duty if she could bring a flatbed trolley down the narrow road later, and he told her that she had until eight o’clock to do so, after which point flatbed trolleys were banned. Residents had complained about the squeaking of the wheels.

Like every significant problem that Cape Town has faced since the end of apartheid, the water crisis brutally illuminates the extent to which the city remains segregated and unequal. If it has been difficult to imagine how a middle-class person might manage the challenge presented by Day Zero, it has been impossible to envisage how a poor person would do it. As Jo Barnes, an epidemiologist and lecturer at Stellenbosch University, recently told a local radio station, twenty-five litres per person is not enough to keep a household clean and safe in the long term. “Most people bring up the scenario of dying of thirst,” she said. “It’s not going to happen. What’s going to happen is that the population is going to get very ill, a lot of them.” Richer people can, to some degree, insulate themselves from the disaster: they can dig boreholes in their gardens, stockpile water in their spare rooms, or, as I overheard in a restaurant in Tamboerskloof, “hire someone to queue for us.” Most people who live in Cape Town’s townships and informal settlements, like Khayelitsha, do not have the means to mitigate the threat that Day Zero poses. They will be obliged to rely on government assistance, and to hope that the assistance is more effective than present signs indicate it will be.

Newlands is one of the city’s oldest, richest suburbs, which is to say one of its whitest. Relatively few of the people drawing from the spring lately have been white, and it’s not hard to imagine what violently ugly sentiments might be concealed beneath complaints about squeaky wheels and outside visitors taking more than their fair share. Still, people were smiling at one another and forming orderly lines. I spoke to a woman who lived in nearby Rondebosch, and who said that she’d been coming to the spring since November. Between shouted instructions to her teen-age grandson—he was holding the container at an awkward angle under one of the taps, and she worried that he would hurt his wrist—she told me that there wasn’t a water shortage at all. She gestured to the mountain above us, the artesian spring water pouring from holes punched in a white plastic pipe affixed to the fence, the bottle-green ivy crawling up the walls of the houses that abutted the street. “There’s water all around us,” she said. I asked her why she came, then, and she shrugged. “We were told the water from the taps was contaminated,” she said. “We come here because we have to.”

Cape Town is run by the A.N.C.’s main opposition, the Democratic Alliance, which even before the water crisis had been in the midst of a political meltdown. In the absence of clear and consistent official messaging about Day Zero, conspiracy theories have flourished. Mayor Patricia de Lille’s frequently repeated assertion that “a well-run city does not run out of water” was passed around as a token of reassurance for months, but the phrase has started to take on a different meaning: If well-run cities don’t run out of water, then what has happened here? Last Friday, the A.N.C.’s Sharon Davids, a member of the Western Cape’s provincial legislature, suggested that the Democratic Alliance had manufactured the crisis to justify entering into water-desalination contracts with “the Jewish mafia.” Compared with this unhinged outburst, what the woman at the Newlands spring told me sounded mild. “You know our government is bankrupt,” she said, shrugging. “Day Zero is a way for them to make money.” She did not seem especially put out by the idea, and cheerfully turned her attention back to her grandson’s inept handling of the containers.