Garden, amphitheatre no dump now
MAKING organic food freely available to the community of Khayelitsha was as easy as clearing a dump site.
Now, almost a year later, the communal garden Ujamma in Harare, Khayelitsha, launched its communal amphitheatre.
The mastermind behind the idea, Qaba Mbola, said the area where the garden was initiated was on a place that was used by the community as a dump site.
“Early last year in August we started working on the site by removing the waste and started designing creative beautiful gardens.
“The idea of these gardens is to make organic food freely available in the community.
“We view the idea of putting conditions such as a price tag on things like food a serious error because it deprives the majority of the population of good nutritious organic food that is so desperately needed.”
Mbola said the launch of the communal amphitheatre was exciting and it was a great success. The area will be used by the community for meetings, film screenings and forms of artistic expression.
A children’s gardening competition was also announced as an attempt to get children off the streets.
“There are few or no programmes designed for them while they are on holiday. What they have to do is to design a beautiful water-wise garden, as we lack water in the Western Cape.”
According to Oxfam International, while South Africa is considered a food secure nation, one in four people suffer from hunger on a regular basis, and more than half of the population are at risk of going hungry. Mbola hopes to change these numbers with the communal gardens. .
“These gardens create an enabling environment for social cohesion within the community… In our garden we have planted cabbage, kale, spinach, beetroot and lettuce.”