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From the Suitcase to the Mayor: Growing a Subversive Politics of Care in Napier Informal Settlement

In its power to nourish, to secure one’s presence in a place and to remember human intimacies sowed through labor, soil is a domain of the political. The gardeners of Napier Settlement, a multinational, multigenerational community of over 400 residents living in self-built structures in a tourist village in South Africa, show how soils can be activated as political spaces of everyday struggles of citizenship [1]. They exercise what Bayat (2010) terms the ‘art of presence’, claiming space in the soil using what they have on hand [2]. In so doing, they simultaneously encounter and resist the state, shaping new spatial realities in subtle ways. Building on Tornaghi and Certoma’s (2018) concept of political gardening, this piece questions what politics emerge through the practises of the urban dispossessed in working the soil of the city [3]. We employ homestead biographies to trace the practises of one particular gardener that emerged during a week of collaborative ethnographic work in Napier Settlement in February, 2020 [4].

Professor is a 35-year-old transplant to Napier from the Eastern Cape, and an expert vegetable grower. In addition to a childhood spent learning gardening which forms an important part of his identity, he also worked for eight years on commercial farms. Professor started his Napier garden in 2017 out of necessity while unemployed. After he arrived in town, the municipality allocated him a small plot of land in the settlement on which to build his house-- a manner of land occupation often described as ‘informal’, but is inscribed here in state processes. After building his house, the remaining space in the plot was so little that Prof began his garden not in the ground, but by filling a suitcase with soil and spinach seeds. He has since expanded into the remainder of the plot and patches of soil offered up by neighbors, who like him, live on occupied municipal land. While plots are allocated to individuals, the garden resists these boundaries. It sets up an alternative spatial reality that reflects Prof’s close neighborly relations and simultaneously provides sustenance outside of the market. Through the quiet, everyday practises of gardening, Prof and others do not merely appropriate the soil of the city for their own survival, but in so doing also reconfigure the built environment, adding green space and blurring plot borders.

Professor dreams his community will have access to ‘that special food, fresh from our soil [5].' He doesn’t hope for cash to buy groceries, but rather more space to grow food for all. He already shares his produce with neighbors and has even declined an opportunity to sell in Cape Town, despite his food’s notorious deliciousness compared to the ‘tired’ vegetables in stores. Prof has been in negotiations with the municipality to establish a larger community garden in a nearby piece of land. His practices of communal land use, occupation, and free food sharing constitute a particular politics characterising marginalised urban spaces, a subversive politics of care. To achieve his ultimate vision of personal and community nourishment, he is asked to articulate his citizenship in Kafkaesque ways to the neoliberal state. He renders himself a proper citizen by establishing a co-op, filling out legal documents, and various other actions towards bureaucratic legibility. He combines the ‘use of formal, legal strategies with informal survival livelihood practises and with oppositional practises’, entering the state-citizen interface only where necessary to eventually subvert it through ‘counter-hegemonic moves’ towards care and away from neoliberal market logic [6].

Professor has gone from gardening in a suitcase, to appropriating small spaces around the settlement, to engaging the mayor over access to the very soil of the city. His efforts to make use of discarded municipal land epitomise the discreet and persistent ways through which the urban dispossessed ‘quietly encroach’, appropriating the city’s soil for survival while impinging on existing centers of power [7]. Every claim he makes on the city’s soil becomes a platform from which further claims can be made. Professor maintains a vision of an alternative politics and future, not of ownership, but of care, practiced materially in the present through his relationship to the soil and community.

[1]Sophie Oldfield, Geetika Anand, and Alma Viviers, eds, Present and Visible: Napier Settlement and its Stories (Cape Town: African Centre for Cities, 2021). The conversations with gardeners that informed this piece took place as part of field research organized by Sophie Oldfield, University of Cape Town, in collaboration with the NGO People’s Environmental Planning, culminating in Present and Visible. The book, composed of research from Napier residents and students from UCT and University of Basel, provides narrative insight into the lived experiences of Napier’s residents as the municipality prepares an in-situ ‘upgrade’ of the settlement. Researcher and Napier resident Atabile Gwagwa organized interviews with settlement gardeners and provided indispensable agricultural knowledge with her educational background in plant sciences.

[2]Asef Bayat, Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Amsterdam University Press, 2010).

[3]Chiara Tornaghi, and Chiara Certomà, eds, Urban Gardening as Politics (Routledge, 2018).

[4]Rebekah Lee, ‘Reconstructing “Home” in Apartheid Cape Town: African Women and the Process of Settlement’, Journal of Southern African Studies, 31(2005), 611-630.

[5]Interview with Professor, 2020.

[6]Faranak Miraftab, ‘Insurgent Planning: Situating Radical Planning in the Global South’, Planning Theory, 8(2009), 35-37.

[7]Bayat (2010).