Cultivating hope in a garden that became a symbol of SA's political transformation

It is spring. Time to clear, trim, plant, sow, compost. Time to kickstart the garden into the flourish of summer. I started my garden of national unity last year, a few months after I moved back to Jozi, having lived in Limpopo for 20-something years.

I pretty much lost everything when our family farm there was sold. Dispossessed of my house I washed up in Jozi just in time to vote in South Africa’s ninth democratic election in May.

I had to forsake my provincial vote, which underlined my sadness. Having voted in a suburban polling station staffed by delightful and polite rainbow-vibe volunteers, I went back to my strange new home and, tearfully and unsteadily, began to feel out a new life. 

Autumn was in the air, the trees began losing their leaves, the shrubs started dying back. I was crying into the kitchenware box when the news came in that the ANC had lost its majority for the first time in 30 years and that the new MK party had taken KwaZulu-Natal. The country was entering into a brave new world — the era of coalition politics. OMG South Africa!

My quiet home got noisy fast. All my friends were suddenly their very own talk-show hosts, opining from their very own soapboxes. The airwaves were jammed, the newspapers crammed, the streaming became torrential. Could we pull it off?

There was horse trading, flesh pressing, political flirtations, angry break-ups, meetings within meetings, meetings behind closed doors, press briefings. And as the indomitable spirit of South Africa prevailed, I decided to start a garden. I’ve always gardened, and this was to be my garden of national unity.

There’s a saying: sow seeds of love over seeds of fear, sow seeds of peace over seeds of worry. I ordered a tonne each of compost and potting soil, delivered by two men both called Tshepo, which arrived on the day that South Africa’s seventh Cabinet was being sworn in.

“Please sit,” said then Chief Justice Raymond Zondo to the PA’s Gayton McKenzie as we watched television cameras panning over a desk with papers awaiting a signature.

“The last time a judge told me to sit, I got 15 years,” shrieked McKenzie. Cut to President Cyril Ramaphosa’s tears of mirth. And so it began with all of us – the EFF, FF Plus, DA, IFP, ActionSA, Rise Mzansi, MK. And two tonnes of soil.

“Far from being a genteel exercise in tinkering with the delight of plants,” says one plant nursery website, “gardening is arguably a front-line political endeavour. Its very undertaking either an act of rebellion or solidarity, depending on what end of the horticultural spectrum you wander into.” 

I wandered into your basic bohemian cottage garden, food and flowers, designed in a series of no-dig beds, based on the principle of companion planting — grouping certain plants near each other for mutual benefit. Like growing nasturtium alongside pumpkins to deter pests, or planting basil and tomatoes together. Or, in the case of the garden of national unity, hoping like hell that Melon Zille would grow well alongside Sorrel Ramaphosa.

There were many trials and tribulations. Fights with the mousebirds, water shortages, underestimating the Highveld heat. But also, an enormous spiritual joy as it emerged, led by the first curious green snouts poking out of the soil in spring, and became in full summer a heady mix of zinnias and giant marigolds and producing spinach, tomatoes, chillies, pumpkins, soundscape bees and birdsong. Start a garden, they say, and change the world. DM