Donna from KZN

Tell us a little about yourself!

I had the best of childhoods growing up in the 60s on a mixed farm in Mooi River, KZN. Some of my earliest memories were teaching the Friesland calves to drink milk from a bucket on bitterly cold early mornings when winter temperatures often dropped to -10 C, learning how to fold and throw a shorn sheep’s fleece after watching the Sotho shearing crew’s blades flick over a sheep in minutes, playing a very scratchy hide-and-seek in the hay bales in the barn with my sister, licking frozen milk as it came from the cows into the cooler room and then into milk cans (out of view of my father, the induna and the milk inspector) and riding a horse at full gallop without a saddle or bridle across the eragrostis field. They were formative years and my heart never really left the farm. Discovering the horrors of apartheid, and the promises of Marx and feminism in my teens and university years propelled me away from commercial farming into political awareness and action research. Anyway, I was a girl and girls didn’t inherit farms when I grew up.  

After completing a masters in political philosophy, I had a spell as a journalist, of which the most profound experience was in 1993 when I spent two months with a community of labour tenants who had been given a farm, Mooibank, by Mondi. The idea was to identify and write about some of the deep trends facing us as a society. I stayed with the Sithole family and people came from miles to tell me their stories. There are so many anecdotes but some were key and shaped my subsequent work life. One old man said he had heard a story that apartheid was ending and it must be true because he had never thought it was possible for a white person to stay with a black family. When we finished talking, he held my hands and said he was glad to be alive to see this moment. Another man was showing me where he lived and he pointed to a tree and said “there is my father, who I talk to every day”. I looked and looked and could see no one, until Baba Sithole, seeing my confusion, explained: he means his father is buried under that tree. The penny dropped: the present tense structure of the sentence meant that his father was an absolute reality who had simply gone to a different realm. I stayed with the Sitholes in July and August that year and food was extremely scarce. We ate a lot of maize processed as sour porridge (incwancwa), fermented maize drink (umdokwe), isijingi (a maize pumpkin dish), phuthu and maas, cabbage and imifino (wild spinach). Later, I heard the term “the hungry months” and thought, yup, that’s what it was. Mooibank gave me the beginnings of an understanding of how deeply apartheid had structured the world we lived in and that the journey of understanding was going to be long and hard.

I found it impossible after that to go back to being a reporter on a daily newspaper with the 24 hour deadlines so I left and joined a land rights NGO, the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), and did another masters in development studies. I spent most of my working life in some kind of relationship with AFRA, and it was there that I developed an activism informed by action-research. In the early years, I focused on labour tenants, then I moved into researching how customary tenure systems work and finally into food systems and a focus on what it takes to support young people to farm. I took a break for a while in 2010 from doing to thinking about land reform, which was looking pretty rickety by then, and spent some years picking away at a PhD at PLAAS, under the guidance of Prof Ben Cousins, at the University of the Western Cape, and then a post doc, which took me to the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague for a short spell. It was a wonderful and very privileged experience: my journalist husband, Yves, took a break at the same time to do his PhD, and we had many long walks talking about the state of the media and agrarian issues. We solved none of the world’s problems, and probably never will. 

I retired two years ago and shifted focus to my own farming on the one hectare we live on with our son and his partner, and to supporting a young farmer in the rural township that borders where I live. I milk two goats, Molly and Beatrice, and raise chickens for meat and eggs, rabbits, pigs and guinea pigs. We eat meat, milk, cheese and vegetables from our little farm. My main aim this year is not simply to feed the humans but, as far as is humanely possible, to produce the food for the livestock too. Black soldier fly production has become my most frequent question to Chat GPT!

How did you come to be both a farmer and a researcher?

Farming, or growing food and keeping livestock, is my happy place. Even when I lived in a garden flat in Durban, I grew spinach on the balcony and kept a rabbit in the bathroom. I guess everyone has the thing that gives them peace and mine is farming (although the many crises are not at all peaceful, but that’s another story!). I also love looking at, and eating a plate of food that has all come from my hands. It’s really just the child that never grew up.

Working as a researcher satisfies a different need which is to understand the world I live in. And a lot of research – or the more ethnographic way that I liked doing research - is listening to stories and wonder at a world that slowly gets revealed.

I was once mapping household land rights in a customary setting using photos where household representatives sat with their neighbours and drew the boundaries of the land they had exclusive household rights to. At the end of a long day, with the mapping nearly all complete – a stunning visualisation of land rights – one granny was still struggling. In desperation, she said to me “I can’t see where my house is.” When I asked why, she said “my children are all dead of Aids and they have left me with so many grandchildren and the stress is making me blind”. I thought tenure was about land and boundaries and exclusive and shared use areas. This lady was telling me it was also about the shape of families, the devastation of Aids and the horrific physicality of the pain that Aids deaths left across the country.

Because most of my research was rural, the two worlds of farming and research often came together. The tenure issues that plague our country are seldom expressed as a problem of tenure but rather as something that is blocking action or a development that a community wishes for, and quite often those developments in rural areas present as a farming issue eg, We can’t produce crops because livestock go into the fields; we can’t expand our forestry because the municipality can’t fix our roads; we can’t grow food because the farmer doesn’t want us to live here anymore.

In the last project I did with AFRA before retiring, research and farming came very much together. The project aimed to mitigate and address some of the shocks to the country’s food system that came with the COVID lockdown, and a bit later, the unrest in KZN. I grabbed the opportunity to focus attention on what I think is South Africa’s single greatest problem, namely youth unemployment. My colleague, Ayanda, and I worked with young women and men who were interested in farming and had an enormous amount of fun (and frustration) visualising setting up small farm enterprises and learning to follow young people’s dreams rather than to direct them.

What are you most proud of in this process of becoming?

After I retired, one young man who had received support through the AFRA project approached me to continue supporting him. I didn’t know where it would go, but Thobz has an enormous smile and oodles of charm and works like a Trojan so I figured why not?

Today, Indalo is a small but successful business selling Thobz’s incredible organically grown veg and free range eggs, my goat’s milk produce and free range broilers and some local smoked produce and sauces and pastes. Thobz’s history of drinking and partying as a taxi conductor prior to Covid is far behind him. He generates a fair livelihood from his farm, is building a house and owns a bakkie and his son, Ndalo, thinks his father is a hero. For me, Thobz has redefined what development is: it isn’t simply money in one’s pocket that one didn’t have before (which, being a materialist, I thought was what mattered most), it’s also about your family and community recognising you. “I now have dignity,” is how Thobz explained it to me, “and I’m building something for my son to take over.” I don’t know if Thobz’s business will sustain into the long future but what he’s learnt about himself will, and what I’ve learnt about being South African will too. We’re all in it together so we may as well try and make it work.

What is one way that your farming experience has informed your research?

I think food systems are extraordinarily complex and difficult to change intentionally. I know that my body (my labour) can produce enough food to sustain my family on less than one hectare, more or less through the seasons. I also know that I’m privileged: I have capital I can invest to make my farming successful and enough education that I can find answers I want to the problems that farming throws at me. I think too many agrarian researchers and activists have no experience of farming and are often glib in what they think is possible. Clearly that mode of farming that has become a huge industrialised factory with externalities the world can no longer afford is a problem, but I don’t think we’re anywhere near finding solutions with trade-offs that are palatable. I call myself an agroecologist in practice and an ideological sceptic because I’m not convinced that agroecology can feed the shack settlements, either in the distribution of the quantities required or at the price that the poor can afford. I think the meatification of our diets has caused emissions that contribute significantly to climate change but I wouldn’t want a poor child to be deprived of cheap chicken imports in the efforts to reduce the production of meat. I think genetic modification of seed and the poisons we pour on our food crops and soils are a silently exploding bomb but what does one say to the elderly grandmother who is feeding a large family of young children and who uses a knapsack of roundup to spray weeds?    

Are there ways that your research has informed the way that you farm or interact with your community?

A clever historian once said, when it comes to farming, we don’t have an access to land problem in South Africa, we have an access to capital and labour problem. I do think that’s right but it isn’t the whole story. Land in KZN, with its layered, complex rights takes so much talking and negotiating that it is often very difficult to farm. We don’t think of land rights as being physical things but sometimes I think land is so encumbered that it’s like those zombies my young grandson loves so much to watch: dead but moving shadows lying all over the land and blocking activity. I’m specifying KZN because I don’t know enough about the weight of the social over land in the rest of the country. I’ve learnt this because for a decade and more we’ve lived on my parents-in-law’s property, where every decision has had to be negotiated. I often thought of myself as farming the margins because I’m a messy farmer and that disturbed my mom-in-law’s beautiful aesthetic, which caused difficulties for both of us. We think of farming as the production of food but actually, farming produces a social sphere, and the social sphere that is produced is what makes the farming possible or not. That’s why I do think that refrain ‘think global, act local’ has merit despite all its political limitations. I have a friend who says she’s a locavore: I like that. Know your food, know your farmer and know your community through your food, and eat only what is good for the planet.

When you look at the South African food system, what changes have you seen over the course of your lifetime?

The massive increase in the size of farms – my dad had 60 milking cows when I was growing up. That was the primary farm income and it put four children through private school education. Today’s dairies are often a 1000 cows or more. I can’t even imagine the infrastructure needed to manage that many dairy cows, the amount of grass they eat, the water they drink, the shit they produce and the amount of milk that must be sent off somewhere every day. In addition to the managerial challenges – through snow, electricity outages and road blockages - these huge, capital intensive farms also squeeze the space for anyone trying to enter farming. I’m not surprised land reform farms have struggled the way they have. Of course the reasons are complex but the constant weight of competition makes it very difficult for newcomers to succeed. As this juggernaut has come to dominate farming in South Africa and across the world, so has the resistance to it grown, which is also new. The form of resistance takes many shapes from organic farming to agroecology, regenerative farming and biodynamic farming, and has been accompanied by an emerging food politics as a serious social phenomenon. There is much more awareness now of the food we eat, how it is produced, and its impact on our health and the planet, including the amount of meat, hormones, anti-biotics, chemicals and micro-plastics in our diets and environments. 

What are the most important problems that you think food researchers should focus on in the next decade?

I think the most important questions for food system researchers is how do we, at local and global levels, produce food that doesn’t destroy the planet and that everyone can access in sufficient quantities for a reasonable life? What social and economic organisation is needed? And how do we get from here to there in the fastest possible way?