Mettle nets Mogale medals, mealies
Mpumalanga farmer won’t let condition bring him down
● Born without arms due to a rare condition, Sibusiso Mogale was five years old when he had his first hard brush with reality.
“There were kids I used to play with every day and the one day they just ran away. When I asked the one why, he said they were told not to play with me because me having no hands could be contagious.
“That was the wake-up call for me because all those years I never saw myself as different to them. I did everything with my feet, mouth,” said Mogale, 33.
Since then, he has tackled other hurdles and cleared them, and now he is a smallscale farmer who employs more than a dozen people.
Standing among the spinach on the land he leases in Kabokweni, about 30km from Mbombela in Mpumalanga, Mogale told the Sunday Times about being born with phocomelia, a rare condition that causes very short limbs.
Mogale now grows cabbages, mealies, spinach, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, potatoes and chillies, depending on the season.
He said that he offers the harvest he doesn’t sell to locals, in return for labour in the fields.
“My idea is to teach people to earn their way and not just always want hand-outs. I look at myself and see the fact that I am socalled disabled but I am not sitting waiting for hand-outs.”
Most of his clients are street vendors and recently the local Food Lovers store bought the bulk of his spinach.
Challenges include the theft of crops and not always being able to do things on his own in the fields due to his disability.
He employs 15 people from the community to help with planting and harvesting.
Mogale’s love of farming started at a very young age after watching his grandmother, Johanna Nkosi, feed the family with the sweet potatoes, mealies, cabbages and spinach she harvested from her garden.
“I realised that if you plant something it grows, and all you need to do is take care of it. All my life I had people wanting to do things for me, even if I didn’t ask, and farming was almost like an escape for me.
“I said if I plant this without anyone helping
All my life I had people wanting to do things for me even if I didn’t ask, and farming was almost like an escape for me Sibusiso Mogale
me, I can be proud to say that I planted, and when we eat the fruits of that plant it makes me very proud to say I did that. I always wanted that confirmation to say that I did it myself and no-one else helped me.”
Mogale’s life has been filled with challenges. His father abandoned him when he was a baby and his grandmother and mother, Zandile Mhlanga, raised him.
The two women shaped him into the man that he is today, Mogale said.
At the age of six, he had to say goodbye to his loved ones to attend a school in Limpopo that catered for people with disabilities.
This was one of the hardest things to do, Mogale said.
Four years later he moved to a special needs school in Westcliff, Johannesburg.
“What kind of changed is understanding that I was spending most hours at a school with pupils with different disabilities, but when I come back home, all my other friends and everyone else were normal.
“I didn’t want to be boxed into a school with physically or mentally disabled people. I started competing with the able-bodied people to show them it is doable.”
His love of sports and excellent performance secured him a sports scholarship at a mainstream school in Bedfordview.
He began athletics, but it was a near-fatal drowning at a dam in Kabokweni that started him swimming.
“I was a child and I saw my friends playing in the water and then I tried to do the same, forgetting that I don’t have hands,” he recalled.
“I nearly drowned, but the waves of the water pushed me to the shallow end and I was able to use my legs to get up and get out.”
He went on to represent SA at tournaments in the UK, Australia, Brazil and the Netherlands, among others.
“For swimming, I will forever be grateful. I told myself I needed to learn how to swim as I didn’t want to be beaten by something that I didn’t know how to do.”
Mogale said his wife, Nomonde Mahule, and two-year-old daughter Nosibusiso Mogale, are his driving force. “My daughter needs to have a better life than what I had. Also, she needs to understand that as much as her daddy doesn’t have hands, he is capable to do what is needed.”