Land as Mother: The sacred politics of food

Rebuilding a just system recognises that enduring solutions might lie in combining modern tools with older ethical frameworks grounded in reciprocity and collective responsibility

- Philile Ntuli

Unrecognised asset: Restoring women's agency in agriculture is a practical pathway to resilience. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy

(Delwyn Verasamy)

n 2021, a small cooperative garden in rural KwaZulu-Natal quietly transformed a community's relationship with food.

What began as a handful of older women planting amadumbe, cowpeas, imifino and sorghum on communal land grew into a seed-sharing network that could supply nearby households.

Their harvest was modest but the effect profound. In the fields, the elders began teaching planting rituals and seasonal knowledge. Previous reliance on supermarket staples began to decline.

The project succeeded in the absence of external funding or new technologies. It thrived because it revived a sacred logic of food as central to relationships with the land, with ancestors, with community and crucially, to the gendered knowledge systems that have long sustained everyday nourishment.

As South Africa grapples with rising food insecurity and deepening inequality, the question is not only how to produce more food but also which food system we are relying on and which we are trying to build. Most critically, whose knowledge counts in shaping South Africa's food systems?

Our national food policy debates and frameworks tend to approach hunger as a governance or economic failure: insufficient supply, broken value chains or affordability gaps. While these are real and urgent concerns, they often obscure a deeper historical truth: food systems are primarily social and cultural institutions before they are markets.