Land as Mother: The sacred politics of food

In 2021, a small cooperative garden in rural KwaZulu-Natal quietly transformed a community’s relationship with food. 

What began as a handful of older women planting amadumbe, cowpeas, imifino and sorghum on communal land grew into a seed-sharing network that could supply nearby households. 

Their harvest was modest but the effect profound. In the fields, the elders began teaching planting rituals and seasonal knowledge. Previous reliance on supermarket staples began to decline.

The project succeeded in the absence of external funding or new technologies. It thrived because it revived a sacred logic of food as central to relationships with the land, with ancestors, with community and crucially, to the gendered knowledge systems that have long sustained everyday nourishment.

As South Africa grapples with rising food insecurity and deepening inequality, the question is not only how to produce more food but also which food system we are relying on and which we are trying to build. Most critically, whose knowledge counts in shaping South Africa’s food systems?

Our national food policy debates and frameworks tend to approach hunger as a governance or economic failure: insufficient supply, broken value chains or affordability gaps. While these are real and urgent concerns, they often obscure a deeper historical truth: food systems are primarily social and cultural institutions before they are markets.

For many indigenous communities in Southern Africa, food was and remains embedded in what scholars call a moral economy, which denotes a system of production and distribution governed by principles of reciprocity, care and shared cultural norms. Harvests were tied to seasonal rhythms. Rituals marked planting and gathering and access to food was mediated through kinship networks rather than purely through purchasing power.

In IsiZulu culture, it is believed that a good harvest is derived from Nomkhubulwane, the goddess of fertility, mist, rain and agriculture. She is honoured through a festival in which young women sing and chant, guided by elders who perform rituals to request rain and a successful harvest. In his seminal poem Vision of Nomkhubulwane, Professor Mazisi Kunene recorded that:

“She is the white cloud veiled in crimson/With footsteps as gentle as the movement of water/She follows the young stone and the young plant/From the river her shadow rises against the hill/And the curled wave tosses the ripe fruit./The small creatures of the earth declare a festival.”

Colonial land dispossession and later apartheid planning fractured many such rituals. The shift from sacred local production to migrant labour economies did more than change diets; it severed the everyday relationship between people, land, ritual and nourishment. 

Food insecurity today cannot be fully understood without acknowledging this rupture.

At the heart of sacred indigenous food systems lies a gendered yet complementary division of responsibilities. Women were typically responsible for seed storage, crop cultivation and household nutrition management. Women preserved biodiversity and transmitted knowledge about soils, weather and medicinal plants. Men often focused on livestock, territorial protection and certain ritual roles tied to land.

In many cosmologies, land itself is understood as a feminine, life-giving presence. Sanusi Credo Mutwa frequently spoke of the earth as a mothering force that nourishes those who remain in a right relationship with her. Although expressed differently across communities, the core principle is consistent: food production is grounded in a relationship of reciprocity with the land rather than in extraction.

When colonial and apartheid systems eroded women’s control over land access, seeds and local markets, the consequences were not only economic. They were spiritual and ecological. Knowledge systems were fragmented, dietary diversity declined and the social fabric that ensured everyday access to food weakened. In this sense, gender inequality in food systems is not just a matter of justice; it is a structural driver of hunger itself.

The recent resurgence of interest in indigenous crops such as sorghum, millet, African leafy greens and amadumbe is often framed in financial, nutritional or climate terms. According to the National Agricultural Marketing Council, the combined monetary value of medicinal plants and indigenous crops in South Africa is about R12 billion a year. This figure represents less than 3% of the country’s total agricultural production, which is estimated at about  R450bn a year.

Yet the foods are drought-resilient and nutrient-dense and their deeper significance lies in the systems of care and knowledge that accompany them. Community seed banks, women-led cooperatives and informal food markets across the country demonstrate this resilience. Yet they operate largely outside formal policy frameworks while sustaining many households.

Recognising and supporting women-led systems could shift our national food policy from a narrow focus on large-scale production towards a more plural, diverse and community-grounded approach.

National policy debates on food often revolve narrowly around efficiency, investment and technological innovation. 

While these are important, they nonetheless risk repeating a familiar mistake: treating food as a commodity alone rather than a social entity embedded in reciprocity.

Rebuilding a just food system in South Africa does not mean romanticising the past or rejecting innovation. It means recognising that the most enduring solutions might lie in combining modern tools with older ethical frameworks grounded in reciprocity and collective responsibility.

Women’s knowledge, in particular, remains one of the most under-recognised assets in the food economy. From informal traders to subsistence farmers to household caregivers, women’s labour continues to hold communities together despite structural neglect. 

Therefore, restoring women’s agency in agriculture is a practical pathway to resilience.

As the country debates the future of its food policies, the challenge is not only to feed the population but to decide what kind of food system reflects our constitutional promise of dignity and care. Reclaiming the wisdom embedded in indigenous practices and the gendered knowledge that sustains them offers a powerful starting point.

The South African Human Rights Commission, in fulfilment of its mandate to protect, promote and monitor the observance of human rights, will conduct an inquiry into South Africa’s food systems from 12 to 20 March 2026.

The inquiry will interrogate, among others, the government’s approach to indigenous crops and medicinal plants.

In 2025, the minister of agriculture approved the inclusion of indigenous crops and medicinal plants in the list of declared agricultural products in terms of the Marketing of Agricultural Products Act, 1996 (Act No. 47 of 1996), as amended. 

The inquiry will, among others, seek to assess the envisaged and actual effect of this decision on communities and indigenous food growers across South Africa.

The commission is receiving and inviting submissions from interested parties with information that may assist in this investigation.

The call for submissions is open until 27 February 2026.

Philile Ntuli is a commissioner of the South African Human Rights Commission. Her focal areas include land rights, the right to food and the national preventive mechanism. She is also a recipient of the M&G Power of Women 2025 award.

This is the third of a five-part series.