Cultivating selves: A farmer profile of Fakazile Mthethwa

abstract

This is a story of one farmer, Fakazile Mthethwa (also known as Gogo Qho).¹ We have followed her singular story intensely for four years, learning about her attempts to use indigenous plants to cultivate her autonomy from the dominant food industry in the small town of Mtubatuba in northern KwaZulu-Natal. She relies mostly on her own indigenous vegetables for her sustenance. Hemmed in by the corporate food industry, scorned by neighbours, ridiculed by traditional authorities, finding little succour from her family, Gogo Qho continues to carve spaces of food sovereignty (McMichael, 2015; La Via Campesina, 2013) by growing imifino (leafy green indigenous vegetables). By engaging in her work, we ask how her attempts to cultivate these vegetables, to cultivate indigeneity as it were, differ from those of the State and other actors. What does it say about the system of food production when a woman – an unmarried 65-year-old pensioner and grandmother – takes it upon herself to surreptitiously challenge the dominant food regime (Friedman, 2009)?

In this profile of her work we use the concept of entanglements (Li, 2007) to view her imifino as an abbreviation of social relations, connected to the production and reproduction of social life in Mtubatuba and ultimately to the political economy of food in South Africa. We use photographs and interviews to probe the impact of a strong patriarchal order in Mtubatuba, family life, traditional authority, and the State and the dominant corporate food industry on her work.

keywords:

• indigenous vegetables
• indigeneity
• gender
• entanglements
• food sovereignty

Notes

1 We are grateful to Ms Fakazile Mthethwa for opening her home and work to us to do this work. We are also indebted to the National Research Foundation (NRF) and the University of KwaZulu-Natal for generous research support. This paper complements two other articles published in 2016 in the Journal of Agrarian Change and also in Contexto Internacional. Smanga Mkhwanazi, Mohammed Khan, Nokuthula Ngubane and Menzi Bhengu offered excellent research assistance.

2 Laura Washington, “I eat like a normal person”: An examination of food systems in Mtubatuba, Field Trip Report for the course on Agriculture and Rural Development, University of KwaZulu-Natal, November 2013.

3 In 2007 Tiger Brands was fined R98.8 million (roughly equivalent to US $12,8 million) by the South African Competition Commission for colluding with other bread producers to raise the price of bread by between 30c and 35c per loaf.

4 African Centre for Biosafety: Heavy Hands. Monsanto’s control in South Africa; available at: http://www.acbio.org.za/index.php/publications/gmos-in-south-africa/357-heavy-hands-monsantos-control-in-sa

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mvuselelo Ngcoya

MVUSELELO NGCOYA teaches agrarian studies in the School of Built Environment and Development Studies at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. His main area of research revolves around food production, particularly the social life and political economy of indigenous plants. His collaboration with Narendran Kumarakulasingam on this topic has yielded two research papers in the Journal of Agrarian Change (2016) and Contexto Internacional (2016), and a book chapter in Knowledge Production in and about Africa (edited by Hana Horáková, LIT Verlag, 2016). He also does work on decolonial conceptions of the international in International Relations. His recent paper on this topic, ‘Ubuntu Cosmopolitanism’, was published in International Political Sociology in 2015.

Narendran Kumarakulasingam

NARENDRAN KUMARAKULASINGAM is honorary research fellow with the School of Built Environment and Development Studies, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban and Visiting Scholar, Centre for Refugee Studies, York University, Toronto. His work with Mvuselelo Ngcoya can be found in the Journal of Agrarian Change (2016), Contexto Internacional (2016), and in Hana Horáková (ed.) Knowledge Production in and about Africa (LIT Verlag, 2016). Email: [email protected]