Komati River

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The Komati River is a river in South Africa, Swaziland and Mozambique (where it is called Incomati). The Maguga Dam is going to be constructed on the river. It rises at an elevation of about 5000 ft. in the Ermelo district of the Transvaal. It flows in a general North and East direction and reaches the Indian Ocean at Delagoa Bay, after a course of some 800 kilometres.

In its upper valley near Steynsdorp are gold-fields, but the reefs are almost entirely of low grade ore. The river descends the Drakensberg by a pass 30 m. S. of Barberton, and at the eastern border of Swaziland is deflected northward, keeping a course parallel to the Lebombo mountains. Just W. of 32 E. and in 25 25 S. it is joined by one of the many rivers of South Africa named Crocodile. This tributary rises, as the Elands River, in the Bergendal (1961m.) near the upper waters of the Komati, and flows E. across the high veld, being turned northward as it reaches the Drakensberg escarpment. The fall to the low veld is over 600 m. in 30 m., and across the country between the Drakensberg and the Lebombo (100 m.) there is a further fall of 900 m. Just over a kilometre below the junction of the Crocodile and Komati, the united stream, which from this point is also known as the Manhissa, passes to the coast plain through a cleft 190 m. high in the Lebombo known as Komati Poort, where there are some picturesque falls. At Komati Poort, which marks the frontier between South Africa and Mozambique, the river is less than 60 m. from its mouth in a direct line, but in crossing the plain it makes a wide sweep of 200 m., first N. and then S., forming lagoon-like expanses and backwaters and receiving from the north several tributaries. In flood time there is a connection northward through the swamps with the basin of the Limpopo. The Komati enters the sea 15 m. N. of Maputo. It is navigable from its mouth, where the water is up to 5 m. deep, to the foot of the Lebombo.

The railway from Maputo to Pretoria traverses the plain in a direct line, and at kilometre 72 reaches the Komati. It follows the south bank of the river and enters the high country at Komati Poort. At a small town with the same name, 2 m. %V. of the Poort, on the 23rd of September 1900, during the war with England, 3000 Boers crossed the frontier and surrendered to the Portuguese authorities. From the Poort westward the railway skirts the south bank of the Crocodile River throughout its length.

This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.