Chantell Witten: A champion for breastfeeding and early childhood nutrition

Fifty-one-year-old Dr Chantell Witten says her journey with early childhood nutrition is one that she has been on since birth. Born in Eswatini to a 21-year-old Swati mother and a South African jazz musician father, Witten says her mom came from a rural area.

“If I really think about it from a public health perspective, I could have easily been a statistic – you know, born to a single mom, living in a rural area… I could have been one of the malnourished children I’m fighting for.”

Witten told Daily Maverick she has always felt a sense of displacement, having moved from Swaziland to Cape Town and not being able to speak a word of Afrikaans. 

She says it was when she started at Belgravia and Thornton high schools that she began developing her sense of Black Consciousness and activism that characterised many of her high school years. Witten says that by the time she began studying at the University of Western Cape (UWC), social justice was a part of the culture there. 

“Even though we were pursuing our degrees, we were also pursuing a better South Africa… equality was part of our conversations. I was fortunate to be there when Rhoda Kadalie was teaching medical anthropology,” says Witten. This was “fused” into her BSc dietetics programme. 

She says the programmes were greatly influenced by David Sanders’ work in nutrition and public health, adding that her BSc programme was different from those at other universities in that it also focused on the social factors that affect communities’ health.

“I’m proud to have been part of David Sanders’ grooming, coaching and mentoring… a lot of people forget that as early as 1996, David was already looking at malnutrition in the Eastern Cape.

“He called the then minister of social development, Zola Skweyiya, and told him, ‘these children are in hospital in Mount Frere and Mount Ayliff and they are being discharged back into households where there is no food’.”

This, Witten explained, was when they were already aware of the inventory of 10 food items that were needed in a household in order to receive adequate nutrition, and most households in the Eastern Cape at the time had five or fewer. 

She says this created an awareness that South Africa’s malnutrition problem was not clinical, but rather a “social construct” as a result of poverty.

Witten says she returned to UWC as a researcher and later went to the University of Cape Town, working on the link between formula feeding and breastfeeding of mothers who had HIV, as part of the prevention of mother-to-child transmission programme. 

She also says she is proud to have been a part of the pioneering research into the integration of vitamin A into diets after studies showed that 66% of children had a vitamin A deficiency, resulting in micronutrient research aimed at fortifying foods like biscuits, peanut butter and sweet potato, which she says never quite took off.

“Research can be cutting edge, but if that research doesn’t reach the people who need it, it’s wasted… I’m trying to think, ‘how does research become useful? How does research translate into changed lives?’” 

Speaking on adequate nutrition for children of school-going age, Witten says “we have a national school nutrition programme that feeds nine million children, but we still need to bridge that malnutrition gap”.

Breastfeeding