Anele Zama from KZN

My name is Anele Zama and I live in a rural community called Amahlongwa, just outside of Scottburgh on the south coast of Durban, KZN.

I started farming very informally in 2018.

I had just resigned from corporate and I wasn't really sure what to do with my life at that point, so I started growing chickens for eggs and then because I was cleaning the coops and getting rid of so much chicken poo, it started making compost in the garden and then I decided to just try growing veggies using the compost. It went really well.

How did you start doing what you are doing now? 

Some of the people in the community started wanting to buy the veggies that were growing in my garden and then I decided to do it on a little bit of a bigger scale and learning trial and error until a local business decided to invest in some of the community members and they sent people to teach us about permaculture.

They taught people that were already farming and they just taught us how to do it correctly, not the way it's always been done.

In 2019, I started volunteering for a non-profit organisation called Made for More. The organisation did sports for people with disabilities in different homes and schools until COVID hit and then they couldn't do sports anymore.

At that time, they approached corporates for food parcels and we then started delivering the food parcels to the people in the different areas that we served and in delivering the food parcels, my thought was this is not a long-term solution.

We need to do something more because lockdown at that time seemed like it was going to be and because I had the farming background, I then started teaching moms and guardians of children with disabilities how to grow their own food so that we help in a way that is sustainable and in a way that will exist beyond Made for More.

We slowly started taking the food parcels away and giving more seedlings and then buying the veggies from the people and we would sell to the local urban communities and that is when the Veggie Box initiative at Made for More started in 2020 during COVID. Because we were essential services delivering food parcels, we incorporated farming there and we were allowed to deliver veggies locally.

What are you most proud of in this process? 

I am proud of having given people more than just what they need today, sort of like the story of either teaching a man how to fish or giving the man a fish and then my biggest thing is sustainability and doing things beyond just this generation.

What advice would you like to give to others who are younger/earlier on their journey?  

The advice I would give to people is: don't be scared to just say you do not know and learn because then you do not make as many mistakes as I did! You are constantly learning in farming and just when you think you have learned, you know what you are doing and then you always learn new things! Don't be afraid to let go of your old ways because sometimes our old ways work but they are not always the correct way of doing things.

What I would like to see us do is to go to different communities especially in the rural areas because I feel like I relate more in teaching people this kind of skills and to see every household in rural areas having veggie gardens no matter how small, where they can eat, they can sell, they can swap with their neighbours, and so on.