Maverick Citizen

One artist sows the seed for Bathurst’s food security

Lina Ndesi with her crop of spinach and mielies in Nolukhanyo, Bathurst. (Photo: Lillian Roberts)

21 Feb 2025

Tori Stowe takes Daily Maverick on a meandering tour of the myriad Nolukhanyo Grows home garden projects in Bathurst, Eastern Cape, to see which have grown roots of their own.

A woman carries water up a hill, children play in the streets and elders sit on the stoep.

Nolukhanyo in Bathurst, Eastern Cape is a mix of brick and corrugated iron houses. It has bumpy and bare dirt roads, dogs, goats and the odd cow. There’s also the occasional stock theft, murder and a drug issue in the pineapple-producing town.

Tori Stowe, the locally famous ceramic, paper and fabric artist (as well as graphic designer), has a to-do list for the new year:

Supply 20 food/indigenous trees a month – a long-term goal to create a food forest. Even if it “takes her lifetime”;

Stock the school gardens monthly with seedlings and perennial food plants; and

Support up to 20 home food gardens with seeds, seedlings, fencing, trees, vines, tools and water systems such as tanks and guttering.

Almost every street in Nolukhanyo contains evidence of the longevity of the project. Stowe hasn’t been back here in a year but the gardens continue.

“The point was to set up a sustainable food support project, with very little money.”

The seeds and seedlings were cheap, either donated or funded, supplying 50 gardens twice a month. Funding came from friends, family, institutions and businesses.

“I’m quite prolific on Facebook and I went to a private school,” Stowe says, aware of her privilege and what to do with it. Nolukhanyo Grows began in 2019. By the end of 2023 there was donor fatigue, she says.

“I started to feel like I was begging rather than raising funds. Also, I was personally battling so it felt more like begging.”

Whose veggies are they anyway?

Tori Stowe started the Growing Nolukhanyo food garden project. Artist Tori Stowe ascribes the success of the Growing Nolukhanyo home garden project to finding interested people, with skills passed down generationally. (Photo: Lillian Roberts)

One of the school gardens almost didn’t get up and running — because of a lack of water access. After getting funding for water tanks, the school and the clinic next door now have a flourishing patch.

“That was hugely successful. The government funds a group of people (whose name I can never remember) who wear orange uniforms, and their job is to wander around and be vaguely employed, picking up rubbish and stuff. It’s poverty alleviation.”

They suggested the workers help out. But they took the vegetables, causing a dispute with the clinic staff about whose vegetables they were.

Stowe’s solution to the question of “who owns the veggies?” on communal/government land was to supply more vegetable seeds/seedlings. It worked, until she “ran out of energy, not resources”.

Nokuzola Ntlokwana

Nokuzola Ntlokwana stands in her mielie patch in Nolukhanyo, Bathurst. (Photo: Lillian Roberts)

“She’s a single mom,” Stowe says, as we drive up to Nokuzola Ntlokwana’s brick house, with its fruit trees, an area cleared of rocks and the fenced vegetable patch. A curious Africanus dog pricks its ears at us from the doorway, while Ntlokwana greets us. The garden has been going for four years, she says.

“A lot,” Ntlokwana says of the amount of food she generates. “I can eat, I sell, I give [food] to my family.”

She works at a vegetable farm, working all day and returning to her own plot. Ntlokwana has five children, with the oldest born in 2004 and the youngest in 2023. She points to the cabbage, beetroot, chillies, bananas, and mielies growing in her garden.

“I don’t even have municipal water. When it rains, I have a drum at the back. Now it’s not raining, [the garden] is suffering.”

The gutters are held together by wire, leading into a drum. If it’s full, it lasts her about a week.

Death and life, next door

Stowe says success came from finding interested people, with skills passed down generationally. She says she just introduced the idea of a perennially growing garden.

“They say if they have vines, someone is going to steal fruit, and then if they’re there they may steal other things,” Stowe says, pointing to a vine. “People say they don’t want fruit trees because they’re going to bring thieves, which is very counterintuitive.”

The project is trying to ensure everyone has fruit, so theft becomes a non-issue.

“Elderly women were the mainstay of [the gardens], but our youngest kid was eleven, and we had men too.”

A sloping plot, previously farmed, lies across the road from an RDP house.

“It was beautiful, it looked like something out of Tuscany. She supported both her daughters and her grandchildren, but then she [hanged] herself. What happens with these houses is people sell them for cash, but the deed still belongs to the original person. She got into some kind of problem with that, and she couldn’t see a way out. It was very traumatic.”

Around the corner another garden has a peach tree, spinach, potatoes, pawpaw, fig and avocado. “Everything we gave her, she made the best of,” Stowe says.

She explains that while Bathurst had good spring rains, gardening is difficult without a tank. Municipal water is spotty: three hours on, three hours off.

A door frame of one’s own

Stowe believes vines and fruit trees along with seasonal planting to be the sustainable way to go.

“There’s so many little kids that run around here. I tried scattering gooseberries, granadillas, hoping they would grow. All the little plants get eaten by goats and cows.”

Animals even ate entire avocado trees.

The size of plots in Nolukhanyo is ideal for home gardens, with the houses fairly close together – for shade and water run-off, Stowe says.

“The soil here is absolutely amazing. What we started here absolutely thrived, because the conditions are there. It’s become culturally a bit unpopular to grow your own food; people see it as backwards. I think that’s shifting now, in all our minds.”

You need a space the size of a door to grow, Stowe says.

One man uses permaculture principles and sells his produce at the local farmers market, providing for his family. He’s commandeered gardens nearby, giving vegetables to people and taking his own harvest.

Celebrities, wheelbarrows and fence people

A few high-profile celebrities worked with Stowe on the project, something at odds with the goats and people going about their everyday lives.

Stowe stops by a school garden. A permaculture specialist asked to use the next-door building’s roof as a water run-off for a tank.

“It wouldn’t have occurred to us, because South Africans are ‘fence people’,” she says wryly.

She says the Bathurst community provided plants, materials, any help needed — all from shoutouts on a Whatsapp group.

“A lot of wheelbarrows were donated. In a car-less society (which this basically is) they’re a transport. So you’d pay R40 to deliver a load of sand, stone, or fetch gogo’s shopping.”

It’s an income source, and useful for gardens, Stowe says. Of donated items, water tanks, wheelbarrows and fencing are the three things that make a “permanent difference”.

“What I want to do next year is focus on the ones that worked. Some people are interested and have capacity, and others don’t. They have a lot going on, you can’t judge people,” she says. “The growth and the support was indefinite. It was one of the most organic things I’ve ever done.”

Julia Memani and Lina Ndesi

Lina Ndesi with her crop of spinach and mielies in Nolukhanyo, Bathurst. (Photo: Lillian Roberts)

Julia Memani hugs Stowe and leads her to her neatly sprouting crops. Memani has planted cabbage, mielies, vines and more. Memani calls out to a neighbour’s place one door down, where Lina Ndesi lives. Both homes have beautifully painted exteriors — Memani’s is teal, while Ndesi’s is burnt orange.

Ndesi walks out the gate slowly with a crutch. She hugs Stowe too. A little path is next to the house, with a rusted water tank on the right and an avocado tree. Mielies, chillies, cabbage, spinach, strawberries and onion grow in weeded rows. A small vine of grapes grows, as well as a banana and a peach tree.

“I’ve got problems with my knees,” Ndesi says. She grows all of the food herself.

“I take my time. I don’t rush. Sometimes I come, sometimes I sleep,” Ndesi says. “I’m selling the spinach – if someone wants it, I make bunches.”

The grandchildren are visiting Ndesi for the holiday. Both women lean on the gate, surrounded by a manicured lawn, after goodbyes are said.

“They’re old ladies and partially disabled, or rather disabled by being elderly. They support each other, share seedlings. It’s a little community; the problem is it’s not passing on to the next generation, the knowledge or the resources,” Stowe says.

Actually, food is free

“It’s a fairly integrated society for the Eastern Cape, which is not very integrated,” Stowe says, making her way to the Seventh-day Adventist church and creche, where she got the idea to start the gardens. Stowe noticed the half-day sun, black loam soil, and saw the potential.

They used fence pallets, planting trees, vines, veggies and flowers. It was a phenomenal success, she says. Spinach grew very high, but someone jumped the fence and cut it down.

“The disparity is apparent sometimes.”

Stowe drives past a farmer, a police vehicle and a few dead sheep that are being tied up – possibly the result of stock theft.

“It was not uncommon during my work to just see a body lying on the road,” Stowe says. “The crime here is just crazy. The situations that people deal with, with rape and violence. On one hand you become desensitised and on the other hand you become completely destroyed by what you see, caused entirely by poverty because people are desperate.”

“What I found amazing about it was how much change you can make with how little, when growing food. Because actually, food is free. It’s provided for us. We have this idea that you have to buy it, but it’s everywhere. You just have to encourage it in your own space.” DM

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