Fifteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

Social activism can be a form of self-negation. In the act of fusing with collective and solidaristic communities, the individual willfully commits to an act of de-individuation, in which only collective memory is salient. Between 1976 and 1994, as a South African trade unionist and community activist, the ethos of the collective imprinted itself on my personal subjectivity. Branded as a ‘comrade’, I jettisoned the individual memory of the ‘Coloured girl’. I gained many things from the Collecgive, but what I lost was a heritage that white colonial and Apartheid South Africa had already taken away from me. How do you lose something that was never there, of which you were never aware, except as negation? Heritage amongst the dispossessed does not disappear: it merely fades through a lack of awareness. My act of retrieval happened through my academic journey and my relationship with Food Studies. In this paper, I characterise my reconnection with my Heritage and my ancestral homes as a process of Reconnection with the Earth and with food. I chart the various food studies I conducted in my academic life using a cyclical conception of space and time, beginning with a doctorate on the Big Food regional multinational, Shoprite, and its transformative impact on Southern Africa (1998), and ending with the ‘Small Food’ community gardeners in my home town of Cape Town (2016). The auto-ethnographic exploration presented here is framed within an analysis of Food, Nature and Women’s Leadership, and the necessity of ‘excavating the vernacular’.