A rambling history of SANRAL

Unthinking we travel on the great national roads, from Cape Town way north to the border with Zimbabwe; Cape Town via Port Elizabeth, East London, Durban up to Richard’s Bay; Durban to Johannesburg; the Mozambican border via Pretoria to the Botswana border. We hardly talk about these roads, because there is so little to say. They’re so good you hardly notice them. Our national roads are among the best in the world.
This year, we celebrate both Nelson Mandela’s centenary and the 20th birthday of the body responsible for these excellent roads. It was during Mandela’s presidency that the South African National Roads Agency SOC Limited (SANRAL) came into being. The year was 1998: two years before the end of a century, three years into our democratic South Africa. On 19 May, SANRAL was registered as a public limited company.
It was tasked with the financing, improvement, management, maintenance and upgrading of the national road network (not to be confused with all the roads in the country). Though the network has grown, the agency’s core mandate hasn’t changed. SANRAL’s roads now make up 22 197km out of the grand total of 750 000km of South Africa’s roads. The rest are provincial, municipal or uncategorised. Back in ’98, the idea was to create a national roads authority that would make sure that the most important roads crisscrossing our country are well managed and any new economic arteries are well built.
And so SANRAL was born, with the Department of Transport as its parent, or sole shareholder. The roads agency is run by a board of eight members, who serve three-year terms.
Of course, South Africa’s roads did not pop into existence in 1998. There is a whole history of toil, trouble and triumphs before that memorable year. Our country’s roads started life as ruts and footpaths. People drove their cattle over mountains to better grazing, creating roads. They walked along footpaths either to visit other people or to trade with them. Later, when transport was done via ox wagon, those mountain routes and footpaths became the roads the wagons travelled. The first built road came into being in 1666, when the early Dutch settlers constructed a rudimentary road from Cape Town to Kirstenbosch, to get to the forests above. Apart from walking and riding, ox wagons and horse carts were the most common forms of travel.