3 - With Pots and Pens to Parliament: Understanding and Responding to Crises through a Critical Feminist Lens in Cape Town, South Africa

Summary

For decades, South Africa has been battered by crises and its people, tired and bruised, are raising their fists in resistance. The country continues to wrestle with the impact of decades of institutionalized racism, sexism, exclusion, structural violence, and other factors that undermine human development and social cohesion. The COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns were associated with a spike in gender- based violence (GBV) and femicide. Power, patriarchy, and a lack of participation in decision- making processes and structures remain the most significant obstacles to the realization of food security. Here, hunger is a driver of social unrest and violence. It is a slow violence that eats away at the fibres of Cape Town's social fabric. In a national multiwave study to document the impact of lockdowns, 47 per cent of the respondents indicated not having money to purchase food in April 2020 and, of those living in urban spaces, shack dwellers in informal or marginalized areas were most vulnerable (Spaull et al, 2020; Van der Berg, 2021). In early 2020, the state temporarily closed informal trade and, with it, the main food sources for vast swathes of the population. People lost their jobs and their access to cash to purchase what little food there was. Urban farmers were banned from travelling to their gardens (Buthelezi et al, 2020). Yet, women played a major role in spearheading change and re- establishing hope. Their networks braided together to set up makeshift kitchens in private spaces where hot food was served daily, conversations bloomed, the shame of hunger began to dissolve, and dreams bigger than just bowls of soup took shape.

This chapter shares the perspectives of four of the women (co- authors of this chapter) who established networks of women running community kitchens during the pandemic. We use the term ‘community kitchen’ in this chapter as an overall description for local structures such as soup kitchens or communal feeding schemes that provide free meals in their immediate neighbourhoods. The kitchens we write about are situated across the low-income areas of the Cape Flats area of Cape Town, a city that maintains the blueprint of its apartheid history within its spatial framework, infrastructure, and political ecology; it is a city of contrasts, inequality, and a deeply contested food system.