Leonie Joubert Launches The Hungry Season with Don Pinnock at The Book Lounge

The launch of The Hungry Season: Feeding Southern Africa’s Cities by Leonie Joubert, with photographs by Eric Miller, brought a full house of guests to The Book Lounge, all of them hungry for the truth about food security in South Africa. The author was joined by Don Pinnock in a fascinating discussion that revealed many powerful and disturbing truths on a platter.

Pinnock introduced the book, describing it as “part travel writing, part science writing and part investigative journalism”, which is why he believes journalists make better science writers than scientists.

According to Pinnock, Joubert’s latest work seems something of a departure from climate change, referring to her previous book, Scorched: “Leonie’s gone from writing about climate change’s impact on the natural environment, to what it means for people, particularly the poor and vulnerable, living within those spaces. It’s not an unlikely step to move over to looking at food security.”

Joubert observed that, just as with climate change, she didn’t really know what food security meant when she started looking at the topic. “It made me think of farmers in safari suits, driving Toyota Hilux bakkies. But while the agricultural side is the very headwaters of the food value chain, I wanted to look at what food security means from the context of the city dweller, particularly since 60% of South Africans now live in cities. The issue is not whether or not the region produces enough food, but how people access that food and what decisions they make once they have the food. Generally there’s enough food to go around and yet we still have such high levels of hunger and malnutrition,” she said.

Pinnock asked about her visits to the eight families around South Africa that comprise the stories in the book, introducing the different issues underpinning hunger and malnutrition. He singled out the story of migrant mine worker Thabiso Qhasane, which Joubert elaborated on: “Thabiso has worked for the past two decades as a miner on the Reef, seventeen of which were on the night shift prepping the rock wall for blasting. He comes up the shaft in the morning and spends the day sleeping in a dormitory which he must share with seven other men, like a boy in a boarding school.

“His wife, Mapheello, knew what she was getting into when she married him: her own father had worked as a miner, sending home money from time to time, and eventually died when a mine roof collapsed on him when she was ten. She knew she was in for a life where there was a husband-shaped vacuum in the home, the marital bed, at the dinner table. She is relatively food secure though because of the money he sends back each month, even though it’s only not much (he earns about R5 000 a month),” said Joubert.

“One can see the relevance of the Marikana protests,” interjected Pinnock. A communal reflective silence reverberated around the room before Joubert continued, “Mapheello lives in the constant knowledge that one day the telephone call could come, saying that he has had the life crushed out of him by a world of falling rock.”

Pinnock asked about her visit to a white squatter camp, which brought an discomforting answer for the largely white audience. “Black poverty is somehow so normalised, so accepted,” said Joubert, who wanted to deracialise the topic by looking at it through slum life from a different context. With the mushrooming of white slum settlements north of Pretoria, she thought she’d visit a community there to see how people get hold of food when they live off the fiscal grid. She want to know what social networks they relied on. But she discovered, once she got there, that there was the potential for this to be voyeuristic because of the strange fascination with white poverty.

Joubert also commented on childhood malnutrition and the resultant permanent stunting, quoting some troubling statistics, “One in five South African children is stunted, that means too short in height which is a proxy measure of chronic malnutrition. By the time a child reaches the age of two, he or she will have most of the brain that they’ll take with them through the rest of their lives. If they don’t get the right nutrients from conception to the age of two, they can end up with a permanently underdeveloped brain. They will arrive at school with a lower IQ, will be less likely to emerge from school with a good education, and will be less employable as adults. The World Bank estimates that someone can lose about 10 percent of their earning potential through the course of their life due to this sort of malnutrition.”

Joubert concluded by reading an excerpt from ‘Sunshine Corner’, the story of Cornelia Terblanche, an out-of-work car guard who has become the matriarch of the Sonskynhoekie slum where she has lived for the past nine years. The tender story of Cornelia held the audience spellbound.

Liesl Jobson tweeted from the launch using #livebooks:

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Book details

• The Hungry Season: Feeding Southern Africa’s Cities by Leonie Joubert, with photographs by Eric Miller
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  EAN: 9781770102293
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