Gardening in Eden: Township Agriculture for Everyday Life

By: Sarah Mock

December 13, 2013

There are few places in the world less suited for growing food than the forgotten clay hills of an informal settlement called Enkanini in South Africa. And yet, somehow, walking the broken streets and jagged pathways of this shantytown, I found gardens bursting with vegetables, fruits, and even decorative flowers seemingly around every corner.

As part of my home stay in Enkanini, a settlement near Stellenbosch’s sanctioned township, Kayamandi, I spent time shadowing Yondela, a resident of Enkanini, entrepreneur, and co-researcher with Stellenbosch University’s Sustainability Institute. To get me out from under his feet one afternoon, he took me on a tour of Enkanini’s independent gardens.

We started at a large vegetable garden at the edge of the settlement, and Yondela told me about the single man who cared for all of it. We passed houses surrounded by milk crates, buckets, and pots overflowing with plants. We arrived at a garden right in the heart of the settlement, and happened to meet the farmer himself. He explained to us how he had laid pipe to bring water from a nearby tap and devised his own sprinkler system to water his rows of spinach, cabbage, and maize. He bemoaned the recent theft of his gardening tools, and wondered how long it would take to earn enough to buy them again. Finally, he packed a bag full of spinach for Yondela, charging him five rand for the lot, the equivalent of 50 cents.

As we made our way back, I reflected on my experience in Enkanini’s official neighbor, Kayamandi, with an NGO called Love2Give. This NGO has an initiative for unemployed mothers to learn how to garden. The gardens are located on school grounds in the Kayamandi township, and much of the produce goes towards student lunches. On a tour, I met the garden manager who was credited with turning the red clay dirt of this area into fertile brown soil. She was an old and wizened Xhosa lady who earned her green thumb growing up in the Eastern Cape. Despite the distance and the years, she still remembers the lessons she learned from the land as a child and uses them here to give women the power to feed their children.

Back at Yondela’s place, he tells me about ideas he has for his own garden. I was in Enkanini with a team experimenting with urban gardening methods, and Yondela’s house was to be our example. We eventually decided on three prototypes: a garden built into the tires of the retaining wall, a container garden in a set of recycled wine casks, and a vertical garden made with recycled PVC piping. It seemed that every step of the way, from sourcing and mixing soil to building and protecting beds to planting and watering, Yondela, other co-researchers, and passers on the street were a veritable font of helpful tips on how to deal with erosion, poor soil, exposure, even pests.

At the end of each afternoon, I would sit on Yondela’s stoop and look out over the township towards the city of Stellenbosch and Stellenbosch Mountain. The beauty of South Africa’s Western Cape inspires a unique sense of love and loyalty in me, and I wondered how beautiful the Eastern Cape must be to inspire the same in Yondela and so many others. The Enkanini gardener I met had actually carried his plants with him from the Eastern Cape, from his family’s farm, when he had come to the Western Cape in search of work. It was the only way he could bring a piece of home with him, a piece of his family, his past, and hopefully, his future.

My time gardening in Enkanini in many ways challenged my perception of why urban agriculture is valuable. I had always seen the task of growing food as one of utility, a development tool useful in terms of improving diets and protecting the environment. But particularly in Enkanini, its most important role was symbolic. The act of farming helps people stay in touch with their roots; it helps them remember lessons their parents had taught them and empowers them by giving them the opportunity to make something useful and beautiful without having to be hired or pay for it. I witnessed gardens big and small that seemed to do the impossible: bring life, nourishing life, from hard, dead ground, with nothing more than recycled containers, two hands, and memories.

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