00:03:57.980i've never been to south africa but from what i've learned the political and geographical
00:04:06.540landscapes of south africa are both awe-inducing and haunting and as we know what is haunting about
00:04:14.920how people treat one another is inseparable from what is haunting about how this civilization
00:04:20.560treats land and the lands and waters of south africa's cape just sound divine and it's considered
00:04:29.220the fifth floral kingdom and one of the most biologically diverse regions on earth it's home
00:04:35.700to 9 000 species of vascular plants 69 of which are endemic so i'd really love to begin this
00:04:42.720conversation with reverence for this unique landscape you call home and ask you to speak
00:04:47.740about the ecology of the Cape. And then perhaps the second part to that question is how apartheid
00:04:53.920or the continuum of settler colonial structures has impacted not only the way South Africans are
00:05:01.720able to live in relationship with the Cape, but also the flora and fauna themselves.
00:05:06.820Such an ancient land here at the southernmost tip of the continent, and such a massive landmass as
00:05:13.960we know as well. And sometimes we feel very isolated here at the bottom because it's very
00:05:19.380far away from, for example, the rest of the country. We're in the very southwest. But there's
00:05:25.260a lot to be said for the fact that we're such a coastal country. South Africa, I think it's
00:05:32.560roughly around 5,500 kilometers. I'm not sure what that is in miles, but it's pretty large
00:05:38.320of coastline. And here where we are is one of the meeting points where both the oceans,
00:05:44.340the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean meet. So this, I imagine, or I understand, gives rise to a very
00:05:51.940diverse coastal environment. And ecologically, I think we know as little about ocean ecology
00:05:58.680as we do about the galaxy, about the universe. There's so much diversity, there's so much
00:06:04.580even invisible that exists underneath the oceans right beneath us that we've never even met before
00:06:10.900species that we you know can't even imagine and this influences the land in such a way and
00:06:16.600the geology of the land the landscape and in its antiquity and how that shapes the way we move
00:06:24.440around the city the shapes the way that we the foods that we eat all of these things and how
00:06:28.960so much of that has been lost and so much of that has been buried, that to this day when I find
00:06:34.700myself as in my, what am I now, in my 34th year, being born into the family I've been born into,
00:06:43.140in this body that I've been born into, it has guided so much of who I am. But it's so much
00:06:49.520about what I do is from this land. And it would be so difficult for me to leave and be somewhere
00:06:54.800else because I would be a little bit lost. But when I kind of take a moment and look up and step
00:07:01.260away from that, and I look around me at all the people who are drawn here, who have been drawn
00:07:06.620here for centuries, for many, many, many generations, even before colonization, this has
00:07:13.480always been a very powerful place that's called people for time. And it becomes so obvious as
00:07:20.740Well, there's definitely a force that attracts to this land.
00:07:26.420And with all the endemism, it becomes such a shame that so much of it, like I said, does get buried.
00:07:34.540And so much of it is, I guess, a lot of that knowledge system and a lot of that is lost.
00:07:39.960And especially through things like the development of a city, especially through things where a huge agricultural zone, not just of the land, but also the oceans.
00:07:49.080There's so much that's happening, but also so much that's having to stop happening.
00:07:54.240In regards to your question around the influence of apartheid and just generally, I think if we can just kind of look at the heritage, if I can say, of capitalism, the way that it came into the Cape through the Dutch, through the British, this kind of imperial global trade, the global corporations, as it were.
00:08:16.920And the kind of influences that it's had on the Cape and through things like slavery, where, for example, my people would have come through.
00:08:26.000So something like where I work around food, our food is so inherited from those global trade systems, from those colonized cultures, that to find a sense of endemism in our food system, that indigenous food reclamation and the work that's happening around there, it's very, very complex and difficult.
00:08:47.120because apartheid really severed a lot of the ties that people have with land
00:08:53.880because people were forcibly removed for hundreds of years,
00:08:58.120denied access, denied crossing rivers, denied access to the mountains,
00:09:02.340to the places where the food flows and has flowed.
00:09:05.840And to this day, if you come to the city,
00:09:08.520you will see that our city is basically built around the mountain.
00:09:12.080We have the two oceans that I say kind of meet at the coastline
00:09:16.260and the coast rises very sharply and quickly into the mountain which is the Table Mountain
00:09:23.800which is now a national park and then it kind of falls behind the mountain out into what's called
00:09:30.480the flatlands and in the apartheid system when the apartheid special planners were designing the city
00:09:37.960they would literally lift whole groups of people and say okay this area like on a map this area
00:09:44.380is now going to be a whites-only area.0.96
00:09:47.460And so everybody that lives within this space needs to move.1.00
00:12:52.880it is a noun that literally is defined as separateness.0.52
00:12:56.440And like colonization itself, apartheid should be looked at not as an event with a beginning and an ending, but as an insidious structure that continues to shape the economic and psycho-spiritual well-being of the Black body.
00:13:13.800And as a system of institutionalized racial segregation, apartheid in South Africa officially ended in 1994. Yet South Africa remains one of the most economically unequal countries in the world, with 1% of South Africans owning 70% of the wealth.
00:13:32.580And given that Cape Town was spatially engineered to physically separate Africans and colonizers, I'm curious to hear about how the legacy of apartheid is living on in the infrastructure of the city and the fabric of the communities.
00:13:49.500yeah it's deeply I think it's in the spirit of the people now it's that moment of our so-called
00:13:57.780independence 1994 Nelson Mandela is released from prison there's a lot of cheer there's a lot
00:14:04.560of joy we're free now democracy the future is great the rainbow nation I don't think there was
00:14:11.360ever a moment where people actually questioned, okay, how does independence from an apartheid
00:14:19.260system come out being thoroughly healed? How do we move forward in a way that processes the kind
00:14:27.500of traumas and grief that we've known of the past? And I was 10 years old in 1994. And we had
00:14:36.540something called the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where people who had committed
00:14:42.100apartheid crimes were put on trial, so to speak, and faced their victims or faced the families of
00:14:47.860those who they had afflicted. And there was this kind of, I guess, like using the judicial
00:14:55.600system or using a tribunal in order to, I guess, encourage that healing or at least try something.
00:15:05.500But it didn't really last, and it didn't really do the kind of work that needed to be done. There wasn't that transition. Everybody just kind of picked up and like, okay, right, now, today, there's no apartheid, so today we're fine. Today, racism doesn't exist.
00:15:21.620Yet we know that these things, exactly as you've said, that they're so embedded in who we are.
00:15:27.080And, you know, fundamentally, I think also that once we start working through healing and understanding that it's not just the people that have suffered, there's so much suffering that's come into play that the land itself is heaving with pain.
00:15:41.880And if we look at an easy way to see this as well, as we look at the oceans, and because we're such a coastal country, the oceans form such a big part of who we are, even economically.
00:15:55.840It's one of the oldest industries that we have is the ocean industries.
00:16:00.360And even I think maybe a year or two ago, South Africa was granted, I don't know who gives this kind of granting, but that South Africa has more jurisdiction over the oceans. And thus, if we look at it in terms of surface area, South Africa has more jurisdiction over ocean surface area than land. And so fundamentally kind of operates in that way, I guess, as an island.
00:16:24.780And if you were to come to South Africa, especially to the Cape, the most common reaction that people have is that it doesn't feel like you're in South Africa, let alone that you're in Africa.0.95
00:16:38.140One of the legacies of our history is that there are so very many white people.
00:16:44.320And in our kind of the indigeneity of this land, the Kwe Kwe, also known as the San, the Kwe San, in Apartheid, we had this racial profiling.0.68
00:16:57.660And I know in America, it's a very bad word to say this, but here we say that you're black, white or colored.
00:17:04.220So if you're like a mix of the two, you know, if you're in the middle, then you are known as colored.
00:17:10.680And then that has different racial profiles.
00:17:14.320So I'm of, I would have been of a racial group called Cape Malay, which is of Malay descent, often of the Muslim faith.
00:17:24.600And then you have, you know, then they'll sub classify also as Indian, as X, as Y, as Z, all of these other things.
00:17:30.500So there was all this kind of confusion.
00:17:33.100And now, you know, now that we're not in apartheid anymore, do we still classify in terms of race?
00:17:38.760We're a rainbow nation and we need to celebrate all different races.
00:17:41.540I mean, but obviously at that moment as well, it was, I think the biggest thing that happened was that our trade embargoes that we had experienced the decades before and all kinds of embargoes, not just trade, but, you know, certain musicians weren't able to tour to South Africa.
00:17:59.700Like Bob Marley wasn't able to come to South Africa because he spoke out against apartheid, you know.
00:18:03.920a lot of artists and musicians were exiled. And so a lot of the true wealth or richness of our
00:18:12.300land through our people, like the artistry, a lot of South Africans haven't even heard. And so you
00:18:17.960find a lot of musicians have been recorded elsewhere in the world. And, you know, these
00:18:22.980legacies kind of never even came back home. And it also, it's such a strange feeling, like this
00:18:30.060kind of de-centered homeness you know but what i was saying was that the one of the biggest things
00:18:36.040was that with the trade embargoes that were lifted all of a sudden post 94 you started getting all of
00:18:41.980these welcoming of the free market system a welcoming of privatization because we now and i
00:18:48.360use quotation marks here we had to catch up with the rest of the continent or with the rest of the
00:18:52.780world in terms of economy so all of a sudden things would you know the floodgates opened and
00:18:58.440And you'd have these huge corporations coming into the country, for example, like Parmalat, which essentially killed the local trade and the locals specifically around food.
00:19:09.120Because with those trade embargoes, a lot of the food and a lot of what was being produced locally was being consumed locally.
00:19:17.480And so you had a much more finite system and you had much more support for the smallholder fishers and farmers.
00:19:23.660But as soon as that free trade opened up and the market became privatized, all of that fell away.
00:19:30.640And so this discrepancy with economy and how the poorest of the poor is the majority of the people, it makes sense that it happened because in a way it was designed to be that way.
00:19:43.200but now we're sitting with situations for example where like with this drought where those who have
00:19:49.880access to the water are still very very small percentage of the population of our city and a
00:19:57.640lot of people are sitting without any access to water or water is getting tracked in and I think
00:20:03.120there were very specific things that happened over the past few years to kind of lead us to
00:20:08.640where we are now, one of which was the Marikana massacre, which was the Lonman mine, the miners
00:20:16.800banding together and realizing like, we're doing the worst of the work, the most hectic of work,
00:20:22.640yet being paid so little. And we have to stand together and demand better conditions, you know,
00:20:28.400not just better pay, but better conditions, living away from family in conditions very ill for,
00:20:34.100how do I say, bad for the health and so on. And that ended up being a massacre where police
00:20:39.800opened fire on the striking miners. The following year, if I'm not mistaken, and then again,
00:20:46.060when was it, 2012, we had farmworker strikes around the conditions on farms and specifically
00:20:51.980the wine farms in the Southern Cape were the same thing. There are still farmworkers who are
00:20:57.440getting paid on the DOP system, which was an apartheid system where farmworkers are getting
00:21:02.360paid in wine. And of course, all the effects that that has. And so as well as the fact that now
00:21:08.580people are not being paid a very good wage, people have been born on the farm and for generations
00:21:14.900now you're living on the farm, yet you have no rights to the land that you're living on. You can
00:21:19.080get told to move at a moment's notice. If it's your husband that is working for the farmer and
00:21:23.840he passes away, then everybody has to get out and where do you go? So all of these conditions and
00:21:29.340All of this silencing and making these people invisible, these people who are working in the mines, who are working on the farms, the silencing of them.
00:21:37.960And then after that, we had the Fees Must Fall, Roads Must Fall movement, which was so profound because immediately that was based within the cities as opposed to being a rural experience, right?
00:21:51.520And it was the children in the homes of mostly middle class families who could take the movement forward. And really talking about issues of inequality within the university systems, how are we going to treat all the students equally, yet fees cost so much, yet we're living in a colonial legacy that is not comfortable, that is actually very violent.
00:22:15.840And all of these things are rising, rising, rising and bubbling.
00:22:19.120And it took those kinds of moments for people to kind of turn around and say, whoa, no, wait, Apartheid didn't end, actually.
00:22:28.320You know, I think a lot of people were living in this rainbow nation bliss.0.56
00:22:32.540But not only did it not end, but it's so heavily embedded in everything down to the water.0.99
00:22:38.920So, yeah, it is also something that is going to take a lot of work to unravel.
00:22:45.840And because it is so embedded in everything that we are and all of who we are, but it also comes at a time where globally a lot of these issues, I guess, around, for example, around identity and being much more vocal and the global uprisings that are happening, they're all connected.
00:23:05.180And there is a way for all of us to continually be self-critical and to understand where our limitations and our soft judgments lie within ourselves, to be able to unravel constantly.
00:23:20.960And I guess towards that, to not have the fear to do so, because change for a lot of people is very difficult. And to be able to, I guess, be a better person or to be able to understand what struggles people are facing, whether it's our own or others, it doesn't matter what kind of economic bracket you are.
00:23:40.640in this case as well, for example, with mental health, the need for compassion is so paramount,
00:23:47.080but also to forward those struggles that are more than our own. And so there's that constant,
00:23:53.100it's like a shuffle or a constant balance to be able to recognize and to have enough grace and
00:23:59.760humility to stand down when standing down is needed, but then also to be able to stand up
00:24:05.600when it's time to. So for those of us who are of the younger generation in South Africa,
00:24:13.000it comes much easier. But our parents, our elders, a lot of it is not easy at all. So it's just,
00:24:19.980I guess, just this constant backing and forthing and lots of prayers and lots of discussion and
00:24:26.820lots of trying to figure it all out because this is one of the last things that I'll say,
00:24:31.420But a good example of the discrepancies is when we look at the struggles around food, there is an organization that's been monitoring how much a basic basket of food costs, comparing it to basic economic, for example, like the minimum wage that we have.
00:24:54.900And so we know that the minimum wage is X amount, but how much is a basic basket of food costs?
00:24:59.660And so they quantified in terms of a nutritious basket, which includes fruits and vegetables, these kinds of things.
00:25:06.420And then a very basic basket of food, which is just covering basics, which is things like flour, oil, sugar, salt, a mini meal, which is like a type of cornflour.
00:25:18.100But all of these things are very nutrient or nutritionally deficient, nutritionally defunct, very refined.
00:25:27.140I did an art about it actually called Our Food is White because all of this stuff is like, you know, it's really, really refined food.
00:25:34.120It's all these different shades of beige and white, basically, because the mini meal has to be, you know, the whitest of white in order for it to be good.
00:25:42.520But that is not, you know, at all what a nutritious basket of food looks like.
00:25:47.320And so this is what the majority of the population is eating, is food that is not nutritionally there at all.
00:25:54.340it just kind of fills the gap, because that's what people can afford. And so if the basic health
00:26:00.980of the population, I think the stats still stand, which is one in four go hungry every day. And so
00:26:09.200much of that hunger is hidden hunger. So it's hunger that's not vocalized, it's hunger that's
00:26:13.860not seen. And so when you look at that, if you just look at a school of children, how many of
00:26:19.280children are going hungry every day and are not able to learn, let alone to just basic function
00:26:26.020of growing. And then through the workforce and how many of our people are going to work every day and
00:26:32.000unable to eat a nutritious meal. And, you know, so all of these things, the complexities are so
00:26:38.420complex. Look at the kinds of legacies that we face, yet there's just forward, forward push
00:26:44.740towards being more and more economically viable and, you know, the neoliberalism of it that's
00:26:50.680become so entrenched in how people also want to be seen and the kind of desires that people have
00:26:56.880to be seen at a certain supermarket or to be eating a certain kind of food. You know, all of
00:27:02.180the cultural things that have become cultural norms, even though they might not be what's best
00:27:08.800for people the complexities are so complex that it's so difficult to unravel them or like whoa
00:27:15.960let's just take a step back and just assess the situation there aren't really moments for that
00:27:21.020and so we find ourselves having to work in very curious ways through this but at the same time
00:27:27.240without burning out because that's also a very real reality that's also something that we are
00:27:35.220faced with. A lot of activists and a lot of people who are working within these spaces are
00:27:41.300just not able to keep up with the amount of work that is needed. So yeah, just I guess finding this
00:27:47.260balance within this time that we're in, which is I think also can be pretty magic because I think
00:27:54.000we are moving forward. It's just how can we do that with the kind of gentleness or kind of,
00:27:59.980I guess, grace, so that the work that we do is empowered and can be empowering.
00:35:13.420Yet there's all these armed policemen and all these caspires1.00
00:35:16.640threatening in case anything does happen.1.00
00:35:19.940But at the end of the day with what Surplus People Project do
00:35:22.920is the work that they have is very important because on the west coast of South Africa,
00:35:27.620where you were saying that in ANC, African National Congress is talking about this transfer of land
00:35:33.140when they came into power in 94. Yet what had happened was during apartheid and subsequently
00:35:40.100people that were forced off land, a lot of people were granted land back, but that was more in the
00:35:45.160east of the country and that would have been what they call the homeland. So they then look at the
00:35:50.200kind of African model law and looking at the different tribal systems that exist,
00:35:55.140going through kind of the kingdoms, the different chiefdoms. And so that was all established. But
00:36:02.320on the west of the country where Cape Town is and where this organization, Surplus People Project
00:36:08.480work, like hardly any of it was reformed. And still to this day, it's less than 2% of the land
00:36:15.140was reformed and most of that land is kind of natural landscape it's desert or semi-arid desert
00:36:22.360or we call karu but it's lots of farmlands also game land this kind of thing so people are farming
00:36:28.980animal and and different kind of farming systems but the kind of farming that is in existence is
00:36:36.320decimating for the landscape and if you kind of just at certain vantage points you can stand you
00:36:42.560can look out over many kilometers and see that because of this drought as well and people have
00:36:47.480been farming things like wheat and canola which i think you guys call rapeseed yeah these are very
00:36:54.700thirsty they extract a lot out of the land and so when the drought hit the land was just it was just
00:37:02.160sand and soil and blowing for kilometers across and just lying naked and exposed and kind of as
00:37:09.680if it had been torn. And the further up you go, you start to see that even though these spaces
00:37:17.460are some of the most diverse spaces in the world, when you look at them, it looks as if there's
00:37:21.420nothing growing there because the plants are so finely attuned and adapted to those environments
00:37:27.140that they almost look like they're soil. The only land that kind of continues to be reformed,
00:37:32.280and it's almost redundant in many ways, is because they have divided the land up in specific types
00:37:39.000of land and so one of the lands that gets reformed is what's called commonage land and commonage
00:37:44.640land is often land that's to put it lightly it's not really of use to anyone it's land that's used
00:37:49.960to be dumping ground it's land that it used to be have building on it you know and now the buildings
00:37:54.680have been taken away but this is the land that that people are given to farm on which is not
00:37:59.200nutritious it takes a lot of work to make that land fertile and healthy so it's a very redundant
00:38:04.340system. What's happened recently where our president stepped down and we got a new president
00:38:10.720for the time being, and the new land reform policies have been re-sparked and spoken again
00:38:17.380of. I'll be very interested to see what has happened. But ultimately, ideally, if I could see
00:38:23.600a land reform process that would be perfect, I guess, would be one that allowed for a certain
00:38:33.160amount of how do I say on the one hand there is so much land there is so much land and if you look0.96
00:38:42.340at the kind of farms that the big farmers have the big kind of white farmers some farmers have
00:38:48.780so much land that they they never even visit all their land in a year they have so much land that
00:38:53.600goes across the country very very very wealthy individuals but if you look at that piece of land
00:39:00.380A lot of it isn't even used. There's no one living on it. It's not quite virgin land, but it's kind of kept that way. And so there's these different crucial points. And the one is between social and ecological, environmental, where the argument is that, no, but we have a botanical legacy or we have a natural history legacy. And this is a great point for tourism or this is a great point for our blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:39:29.520So a lot of emphasis is placed on those spaces and that land, and of course, which is also very valid. But ultimately, what that means is that there's also this, what Frank Matoso is a sociologist, he calls the militarization of conservation, which means that within the conservation land, no people must reside.
00:39:52.000And that deep connection that a lot of people have with the natural land to be able to hunt, to be able to forage for food, to be able to harvest from the ocean, all of these things, people are immediately cut off from.
00:40:07.100And on the one hand, a lot of conservationists will say yes, but if people are allowed to forage and harvest and hunt, then it will decimate the natural populations of the animals and the plants and et cetera, et cetera.
00:40:18.600Yet, as we know, it's not this that is decimating the populations. When we look at the kind of developments in agriculture that are just literally plowing hundreds of kilometers of ecosystem away, if we look at the kind of illegal mining that happens in South Africa also, where coastlines are being decimated and whole coastlines are crashing to the floor,
00:40:43.840The power plays in the shift of outlook to where the power lays.
00:40:50.060And I mentioned it earlier, but the way that we see the poorest of the poor and the way that we see poverty,
00:40:57.400that when there are uprisings in the street, because of the legacy of apartheid and the violence of the uprising,
00:41:02.600when there was uprisings, you were told as a kid, like, don't go to those places because they're throwing petrol bombs.
00:41:14.360So you're instilled with this fear, but never really encouraged to engage further because actually fundamentally, systemically, this is the reason why people are forced to use violence.
00:41:26.180This is the reason why people are claiming land and occupying land because other side of it, nothing is happening.0.62
00:41:32.840and there's still this kind of fear towards the white farm owners or the landowners to not stir
00:41:39.900up or disrupt too much because that's where the economy lay that's where the money is coming from
00:41:45.760and which is also like very much a half truth because that money does not trickle down to the
00:41:51.880people and even the people who are living on that very farm so it's a very complex system and so
00:41:57.440So I guess my answer to the question is it's almost like even with this experience of working for this land reform organization, I'm still not entirely clear about what a land reform process ideally would look like.
00:42:12.400That kind of ticks all the boxes of needs.
00:42:16.020It definitely runs along the lines of breaking down those lands that are owned by one person, even if it's a trust, those huge land masses and subdividing them.
00:42:29.800And also what is very important to go hand in hand with that, which doesn't get discussed at all in any of the national conversations, is around agrarian transformation.
00:42:39.760So we are very much stuck in that colonial mentality of farming, of agriculture, and we've kind of lost our African understanding of agriculture, if I can call it that.
00:42:51.760we've adopted these foreign ways of farming and I believe because of those the opening of that
00:43:00.140free market system and the need to catch up and have higher yield and be operative on a global
00:43:07.260scale the encouragement of those of the current agro-industrial complex that has created such
00:43:15.400decimation socially but also obviously environmentally in many cases economically
00:43:21.560also we're kind of in this like every step we take kind of feels like we're stuck so it's vitally
00:43:28.580important that the land reform process has to have agrarian transformation embedded within
00:43:34.940its discourse otherwise we're just going to be in this very similar situation perhaps just a
00:43:43.440different race and power that's how it feels and so there's not systemically it doesn't change it
00:43:48.980just looks like it's changed from the outside
00:46:43.440I think about what happened in Zimbabwe in 2000 when I think it's Mugabe, the controversial
00:46:57.200leader who stepped down after reigning 30 years following a coup last year and the violent seizure
00:47:04.240of over 800 white-owned farms causing thousands of settlers to flee. And it really just shows
00:47:10.140the messiness of what land redistribution as a reality looks like, as well as the unwillingness
00:47:16.360of settler descendants to give up what their ancestors stole. Yeah, it's just the mind virus
00:47:22.840of capitalism muddies the waters of land reform even more, you know, as corrupt and power-hungry
00:47:28.860politics shape if land is actually redistributed justly. It's just, it's such a, it's such a messy
00:47:37.540situation, but I really hear that, yes, it's about land redistribution, but it's equally about what
00:47:46.620happens to the land once it's redistributed. And I hear that with the industrial agriculture
00:47:54.260takeover, how the land really should be tended, and also who gets even access to the land once
00:48:01.820it's been expropriated and without compensation. And also, do you think that this land redistribution
00:48:10.360in South Africa could revitalize traditional or more communally based land stewardship?
00:48:16.860And I guess the last thing I was thinking about is, while reading about what went down in Zimbabwe,
00:48:22.880it was interesting to hear about the economic decline that followed the seizure of white farms.
00:48:27.720And I think it's important to reflect on the potential disparities between what the media portrays and what is being felt at the grassroots. And I wonder, was the economic decline of industrial agriculture considered a good thing in rural Zimbabwean communities? So I know I just threw out a lot of questions. If there's anything there that sparked you, I'd love to hear about it. Otherwise, there's so many other things I want to ask you about, but this is just such a big topic.
00:48:55.580On the one hand, it's very specific to each region. When you speak to Zimbabweans, when they talk about the difference between Rhodesia as it was under colonization to what it became then Zimbabwe, there's good and bad in everything.0.97
00:49:11.820And the amount of displacement that's happened subsequently in Mugabe's reign, where a lot of people will say, a lot of black Zimbabweans will say, no, things are not good in our country.
00:49:22.640I was lucky enough to go to Zimbabwe, I think, the year before last around Seed and Knowledge Initiative, which is a research institute that works around seed and knowledge in the Southern African democratic community region and very much based initially in between Zimbabwe and South Africa, but the other countries within the economic community also.
00:49:47.040And having gone to Zimbabwe, we went to a very rural part in the northeast and still the same and talking about the differences between the two.
00:49:57.880And yes, some things are good, but yet if it was the way things are now, but 80 years ago, it might be a different situation.
00:50:06.080Because currently this neoliberal industrial complex that has embedded itself in everything is one of the biggest reasons why the suffering is so much.
00:50:17.880Of course, it's very complex with the kind of political arena Zimbabwe is in.
00:50:22.620The basic things that we can count on or monitor, like hunger, for example, like minimum wage, like access to basic amenities.
00:50:31.140then looking at other aspects of it like how much freedom do people have how the fact that so many
00:50:37.880people have to flee the country just in order to survive so this there's so much to consider and so
00:50:43.780much to count into everything but there's still that kind of i don't know how one would call it
00:50:50.640like the spiritual acknowledgement of you said it so well with land stewardship because what is
00:50:57.660owning land you know what does that mean and how how strange is it that you can that you can own
00:51:03.580a piece of land now it kind of makes sense in the sense of that ownership is just you know
00:51:09.840everything is owned and that's what capitalism is but to also answer the previous question that
00:51:15.260ultimately a land reform process that is healthy in a land reform process that counts what ticks
00:51:21.760all the boxes with you know socially economically politically etc would be one that encourages a
00:51:26.800communal sense of land stewardship. And you'll find that in many different spaces in South Africa,
00:51:32.020whether it's tribal, indigenous, whether it's people from the cities that have moved out
00:51:37.560into a rural space and have created this, those also come with a lot of issues. And often there's
00:51:44.400a lot of social and cultural complexities that are at stake or are at play in those spaces.
00:51:50.920so it's not a very hard and fast understanding and I think each situation each person and each
00:51:58.180space of land is going to have its own successes and failures at the same time
00:52:02.760but it can't happen the other part of it is that the government from what I understand and all my
00:52:08.720work with government is that the government isn't really of South Africa it's not really
00:52:14.020in a space to support a process such as this because the kind of support that is needed
00:52:20.380is that people have been severed from the land.
00:52:24.280There's none of that learning from your gogo, from your oma, from your grandmother.