WHETS TO NE
Growing Wild Food in a South African Township CONTRIBUTOR
Ilana Stone PHOTOGRAPHER
Petrus Malherbe
U
nlike most white people in Cape Town, wild food
ban garden Moya we Khaya. We’re miles from Cape
advocate Loubie Rusch regularly drives the sand
Town’s colonial-era oaks and plein trees, and the
swept streets of Khayelitsha, the vast township on the
wealth of biodiverse plant life on Table Mountain.
city’s crime-ridden Cape Flats. She does it without fear. With Rusch at the wheel, we drive into Khayelitsha’s
Fynbos, or ‘fine bush’, is the colorful plant life that
Section A, passing corrugated tin and wood shacks oc-
most equate with the Cape Floral Kingdom, one of
cupied by families, hair salons and butchers. We’re just
the richest regions in the world for flora, yet, the
a few minutes from the coastline, yet I’m struggling
Cape Flats, with its ecologically sensitive sand dunes
to marry her claim that “we live in a bloody gastro-
areas (and poverty), also belongs to this Kingdom.
nomic landscape” with the immediate surroundings.
Here in Khayelitsha, where most see only weeds and sandy, infertile soil, Rusch sees a budding local
Rusch is a landscape designer and gifted networker turned activist. Our destination:
Food Garden, her pilot project at community ur-
20
economy, on a landscape that was once well foraged.
The Cape Wild “The Cape Flats as terroir is both a new notion for us as
