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List of drainage basins of South Africa

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 15, 2026
Entity authorityQ4787951 ↗
Source-derived summary

A drainage basin is an extent of land where water from rain and melting snow or ice drains downhill into a body of water, such as a river, lake, reservoir, estuary, wetland, sea or ocean. The drainage basin includes both the streams and rivers that convey the water as well as the land surfaces from which water drains into those channels, and is separated from adjacent basins by a drainage divide.

The drainage basin acts like a funnel, collecting all the water within the area covered by the basin and channelling it into a waterway. Each drainage basin is separated topographically from adjacent basins by a geographical barrier such as a ridge, hill or mountain, which is known as a water divide.

Other terms that are used to describe a drainage basin are catchment, catchment area, catchment basin, drainage area, river basin, water basin and watershed.

The drainage basins in South Africa do not correspond with the Water Management Areas, and have the letters A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J, K, L, M, N, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V, W, and X. The Area A comes close to the same area that the Limpopo WMA seems to cover. Apart from these letters they seem to have no name referring to them. What seems to be the case though is that each area refers to some major river systems and their tributaries (a region for each major river system).

List of drainage basins

A ^ Drainage basin code assigned by the Department of Water Affairs (South Africa); see for details.

B ^ The Limpopo River Basin is not wholly located within South Africa, it straddles four countries, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

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“List of drainage basins of South Africa” enters the record as wikimedia list article. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what List, drainage and basins can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current 287-word lead offers orientation but no explicit four-digit date, so chronology should not be assumed. The selected authority fields contribute no independent date. Its strongest next move is a source search built around List, drainage and basins.
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This entry incorporates text from “List of drainage basins of South Africa” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.