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South Africa: Urban gardens one solution to corruption and hunger

11 June 2022: Loraine Gay Mfeka, 72, started her urban farm on an overgrown, illegal dumpsite in Montana Park, Pretoria. She cleared the brush and now grows organic vegetables for the community and passers-by. (Photograph by Ihsaan Haffejee)

Academics and pavement gardeners say growing food in the city can alleviate hunger, shorten the food supply chain, mitigate climate shock and bring previously divided communities together.

By Anna Majavu
New Frame
20 Jun 2022

Excerpt:

From growing food, the next step is sharing it, and from there the apartheid and class-based spatial barriers that still exist today will break down, says Pretoria pavement gardener Djo BaNkuna. He grows bananas, herbs, avocadoes, spinach, beetroot, sweet potatoes and onions in his backyard and on the pavement outside his home, which he and his wife, a social worker, distribute to child-headed and unemployed families in nearby Soshanguve.

“Many of us cannot begin to imagine the hunger that is out there. It makes me cry when I see a young child of five who has not eaten for two days living right here in Soshanguve, close to the mall. There are child-headed households where one girl of 13 years old is raising five children who have to wake up and go to the mall and pick up scraps of food. Our country is in very bad shape,” says BaNkuna.

He became famous in November when metro police officers ordered him to rip out the vegetables he had planted on the pavement outside his home and replace them with flowers or grass, and pay a R1 500 fine. When he refused to do either, BaNkuna was summoned to appear in court, where the case against him was withdrawn.

“I would encourage gardens, although our government is not progressive in that sense. Unfortunately the gospel of Pick ’n Pay and Shoprite is being drummed up so much that people have lost all sense of reliance on themselves and nature, yet the soil is there to give us food,” he says.

Read the complete article here.