By Elizabeth Vibert
Daina Mahlaule stakes tomatoes at the drip-irrigated community vegetable garden. All photos by author.
The people of Jomela village in eastern Limpopo Province, South Africa, feel like canaries in a coal mine. The local metaphor features a snail collecting ashes. When I last visited Jomela in April and May, sixty-five-year-old vegetable farmer Daina Mahlaule told me that home food gardens in the village produced “nothing, nothing at all” in the recent growing season. Scant rain had come too late for the maize and groundnuts that are staples of the local diet.
Now Mrs. Mahlaule and her neighbours find themselves living through one of the worst droughts in a century. This year’s extreme El Niño event – which may mean a mild winter for many of us here in Canada – has already delivered blistering heat and deepening drought to much of Southern Africa. It is now the middle of the southern hemisphere summer, the ‘rainy season’ on which home-based, rain-fed agriculture depends. But there is no rain. Rivers run low or dry, major national reservoirs are dangerously depleted, groundwater reserves are dwindling, and tens of thousands of cattle have perished.
Five of nine provinces in South Africa have declared a state of disaster. Neighbouring Zimbabwe has declared a national emergency. Malawi, Zambia, Lesotho and Mozambique are also affected. Neighbouring states have often turned to South Africa – with its massive, irrigated corporate farms – to purchase maize when their supplies run low. This year South Africa will have none to sell and will have to import up to half its own supply. My research assistant in Limpopo tells me that men with access to pick-up trucks are running a brisk business, buying up maize in 80 kilogram sacks at local mills and selling it around the countryside to panicking households.
Research indicates the enormity of this El Niño event is linked to, or at least exacerbated by, human-induced climate change. So beyond the statistics – millions across the region facing hunger as a second rainy season fails, basic food prices up by a third and maize by as much as 70 percent over recent averages – what does climate change mean in people’s daily lives in places already deeply affected? I focus here on women, who are the main household farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. Continue reading
As anyone who has ever done archival research knows, there are moments where things can get incredibly dull. To get over this, we all try to find little things that keep us going. When I was in the midst of reading every issue of the Moose Jaw Times between 1931 and 1934, for example, I very much enjoyed following the daily exploits of Little Orphan Annie. Most days nothing noteworthy happened – in fact, some strips were simply announcing that she was changing locations – but it all worked together as a serial and, every couple weeks, something exciting happened that made you glad you had followed the story all the way through. When compared to today, where people binge television programs, the long-term connection and slow unfolding of story lines over the course of weeks and months seems to have been lost.
