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South Africa: A Revolution Fuelled By Organic Vegetables
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9 January 2008
Posted to the web 9 January 2008
Helen Kilbey
Cape Town
A quiet revolution is pulsing through the huge residential areas spread out on the edges of Cape Town.
Home to nearly a million people, these areas – known to South Africans as townships — are no strangers to revolution. Hotbeds of anti-government activity in the final years of apartheid, their potholed streets have been pounded by countless angry protestors, the walls of their homes privy to many a mutinous conversation.
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Asanda Jezile/allAfrica Fezeka community garden, Gugulethu |
But 13 years after liberation , the battleground looks somewhat different. The enemy, once clear, has become vague and ill-defined. Those who once lived in fear of government bullets are now far more likely to be killed by Aids; those who hoped for "a better life for all" (the slogan that swept the African National Congress into power in 1994) are still faced with joblessness, poverty and crime.
Against this altered landscape, it makes sense that if the seeds of revolution are being sown, they are being sown a little differently.
Quite literally, in fact.
For today's weapon-chest is becoming increasingly filled with vegetables:cabbages, carrots, beetroot, spinach leaves and heads of broccoli. One hundred percent organically grown.
It is a revolution fuelled by vegetables.
They are being grown out in the open, in community food gardens created on previously unused patches of land all over the townships – Khayelitsha, Nyanga, Gugulethu, Crossroads – with more springing up every year. Almost all of them are owned and run by township-based women; pensioners in many cases.
A revolution led by grannies, based on spinach?
When the adversary is hunger, sickness and disempowerment, mothers and grandmothers may be the best people to overcome it; and an organic food garden could prove to be a far more effective weapon than an AK-47.
Phillipina Ndamane, 72, is a typical township food gardener. With five other women, she co-owns and runs the Fezeka community garden in Gugulethu, where she lives. The garden is about three quarters the size of a soccer field, and is filled with rows and rows of flourishing vegetables. Each woman has her own plot, on which she grows food for herself, her family and her neighbours. In the middle of the private plots is a communal plot, on which the women grow vegetables which they sell, sharing the profits.
Like her five partners, Ndamane relies on a government pension to make ends meet. At R800 (U.S.$115) a month, this does not go very far in feeding herself, her elderly sister and the nine children she supports – six grandchildren and three others, all orphans. "We can't buy vegetables," she says. "The garden is helping me a lot because we don't [need to] buy the things we grow here – I'm taking some to the house."
The social benefits of Fezeka radiate further, too. As Fezeka co-owner Shaba Esiteng, 77, explains: "We are helping the others who don't work, the sick people... people who have HIV, old people – we help them with our vegetables."
Esiteng is living proof of the nutritional value of the vegetables she grows: "When I first came to the garden, really, I was thin. I was sick. I can feel that I'm strong now… maybe it's because I didn't have any vegetables. I'm very strong now, I'm eating vegetables every day… [and] I'm getting exercise."
"She's fat!" chimes in Joyce Nyebela, 65, laughing. "She wasn't like this [before]; she doesn't get old!"
Nyebela, another Gugulethu resident, is sold on the benefits of gardening: "We come to the garden to take exercise, to move the nerves, to meet people and talk – it's better that way."
Her husband, on the other hand, "just sits, eats and drinks coffee," she says in a disparaging tone. "Men don't want to do anything – they just want to eat and talk and, you know, rule you – that's all."
Doesn't she want him to join her in the garden?
"No, if he wants he must do something, not come to work with me, no. Here it's only women."
Her negative feelings about men are shared by many of the other women who work in communal gardens across the townships – explained partially by the fact that many of the men who have been involved in gardens in the past have had problems accepting women's leadership.
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Rob Small, resource mobilisation manager for the Cape Town-based urban agriculture association, Abalimi Bezekhaya ('Planters of the Home') – largely responsible for stimulating the food gardening movement in Cape Town's townships over the last 25 years, and still heavily involved in developing it – explains how this has happened, and how the situation is changing:
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The organic revolution in Africa should be harnessed with more aggressive foreign direct investment (FDI). Development needs to focus on various elements of “human” security to support development initiates in post conflict regions. this can be supported by intgrating Critical Risk Analysis (CRA) with models of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). It is impossible to develop solid development methodologies without substantial and multi-tiered analysis of post conflict regions. This is one of the reasons humanitarian aid is inappropriate outside its original scope of responsibility in the stabilization of post conflict regions.
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