Gardening in Africa: A Note on Hope

Africa, the enigmatic continent bursting with wisdom and life, but also with droughts and starvation, bloody conflict and undemocratic democracies, seldom allows me to settle into a state of ongoing hopefulness. Just as one peace agreement is signed, another coup is announced. And there is never enough news in most mainstream media to make sense of it all. So I tighten my focus to South Africa and feel grateful every day to witness our imperfect democracy in action. While wealth inequalities, trauma, violence and corruption continue to obstruct the way, there is lively public debate, commissions of enquiry, court cases, and parliamentary sittings, in which voices from across the political spectrum make themselves heard.

Hope is future-oriented. When I find myself pulling weeds in public parks, I know I am being eccentric. Recently, I’ve asked myself about this compulsion of mine, and conclude that it certainly isn’t about hope – I am not curating a vision of a future park that is weedless. I am trying to control the present, when catastrophe threatens to overwhelm me. When I’m trying to defend against hopelessness and death. Weeding is a protection against the breakdowns already happening.

These descriptions of states of my being are background to this: I am a mentor to a young South African woman who had lost hope. The future was imagined only as catastrophe, and she had given up on the kinds of weeding that might have eased her passage. She avoided answering even urgent e-mails, failed to respond to offers of help. Without employment, and with no source of food except what she found in her garden, she was hungry and frightened. She also felt ashamed to find herself in this state of need. She clung to a desperate state of isolation, refusing to ask kin for help. When telling me that days would go by in this desert place without connection to anyone, and with nothing to eat, she covered her face with a shawl, unwilling to show me the weeping. There was no plan for the