South Africa’s long walk from the Union of South Africa, a colonial-type state established in 1910, to a liberal democracy more than 80 years later, is evident in the way it perceived water scarcity and dealt with the emergent crises of water scarcity and regional aridity. For the greater part of the century, the state’s climate and water experts were reluctant to acknowledge climate change. Because of the country’s racial policies, South Africa was increasingly marginalised in the realm of international politics from the 1950s onwards. Two decades later, South African weather scientists were excluded from participating in the activities of the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) where climate change was in focus. In the 1970s, developing countries of the Global South increasingly shaped international politics and collaboration. The South African state was then isolated because of its apartheid policies. In a number of critical fields South African science and technology was in danger of falling behind in ever-modernising international trends. Meteorology was one such field. Only after the country made the transition to a liberal democracy in the 1990s were the country’s scientists able to rejoin WMO activities and United Nations (UN) deliberations on increasingly important global climate change conditions.