Bringing pigeon fancying to the people

Lodumo Nkala is a young man with a plan: he wants to bring the sport of pigeon racing to South Africa’s rural townships. He shared his vision and strategy with Susan Marais.

- Susan Marais

FAST FACTS

The world’s most expensive pigeon to date is Armando, a long-distance racing champion purchased by a buyer from China for U$1,4 million (about R24 million) in 2019.

Pigeon racing is a dying sport in South Africa, but Lodumo Nkala aims to revive it by introducing it to people living in townships and rural communities.

While pigeon racing is an expensive sport, the beauty of a communal loft system is that the costs are distributed amongst the members.

Nineteen-year-old Lodumo Nkala, based in Pretoria, became interested in racing pigeons at the age of nine, when he saw a flock of the birds fly over his grandparents’ garden in Rustenburg.

The pigeons belonged to the father of his soon-to-be best friend, Matthew Last, and Last taught him the basics of pigeon racing when he asked him to help clean out his father’s lofts.

“From then on, my love for pigeons grew, and I made it my goal to one-day own racing pigeons,” Nkala says.

In 2017, while visiting his grandparents, who had subsequently moved to Hammanskraal in northern Gauteng, Nkala noticed a very colourful wild pigeon in the maize fields. “Its beautiful colour attracted me, he remembers. Thus, he set a primitive trap for the bird and caught it.

At the time, he didn't have a pigeon loft, so he kept the bird in his grandparents' spare bedroom. When he returned home to Johannesburg, where he lived at the time, he took the pigeon with him, and set about building a small loft out of spare planks of wood.

“I remember going through bins on trash day to see what scrap material residents threw away that I could use.

Once the loft was ready, he decided that he wanted to get more pigeons to grow his flock.