Nazeer Sonday
Chairperson, PHA Food & Farming Campaign
I was born in the Philippi Horticultural Area, Cape Town on a smallholding raised by my parents and grandparents, and grew up amongst crops, cows and a café. Our family was forcibly removed from the land in 1973 as it was declared a white farming area under the Group Areas Act. I returned to the farming area in 1991 and purchased one hectare where, in 2006 after quitting my bakery business, I pursued a livelihood as a small-scale farmer.
I've invested many years in small-scale farming as a way to raise my family and as an economically viable livelihood. I helped start local organisations including the farmlands’ first non-racial civic association, an emerging farmers organisation, and the housing committee. Later these organisations merged into the PHA Food & Farming Campaign. The Campaign was set up in 2013 to protect the farmlands from urban sprawl and urban developments that would destroy existing farmers' livelihoods, destroy 200,000 tonnes of vegetables supply per year to the city, destroy 3000 direct farm jobs, destroy 30,000 indirect livelihoods linked to the farming economy, and impoverish the land reform dreams of hundreds of emerging Black farmers who can potentially double the production output with organic produce. If the PHA foodlands is lost, food prices will skyrocket in the city increasing hunger and poverty.
I am currently engaged in modelling the small-scale farm of the future based on the principles of farming with nature and as a model for land reform in our area. I am also modelling a training methodology on the farm based on farmer-to-farmer learning and knowledge production in the Freirean tradition. This tradition places farmers as both learners and teachers at the centre of their learning exploring their traditional knowledge combined with science.