Mail & Guardian
Mail & Guardian
Philile Ntuli

Creator

Philile Ntuli

Philile Ntuli is a full-time commissioner for the South African Human Rights Commission. She is also a member of the panel of the national hearing into the July 2021 unrest. This article does not contravene the rights and powers of the Hearing Panel contained in section 18 of the South African Human Rights Commission Act (40 of 2013).

Cause and effect: Community members giving out free meals to those in need. Persistent food price inflation makes healthy diets unaffordable for
many. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy

Post-diagnosis: Towards a just food system

The South African Human Rights Commission inquiry into food systems arrives at a critical juncture, offering a rare opportunity for a turning point, where no stomach goes to bed…

Structural glitch: In a policy environment that supports and promotes large-scale production at the exclusion of small-scale farmers, food wastage
becomes a norm. Photo: Foerster via Wikimedia Commons

The state’s role in corporate capture of our food systems

Hunger in the country persists not because the system is failing but because it is functioning according to a set of rules that reward scale, concentration and profit

Agriculture can drive large-scale employment. Photo: Delwyn Verasamy

Land as Mother: The sacred politics of food

Rebuilding a just system recognises that enduring solutions might lie in combining modern tools with older ethical frameworks grounded in reciprocity and collective responsibility

Shameful legacy: Land dispossession, the destruction of indigenous food systems, the criminalisation of informal trade and the concentration of
food production and distribution were deliberate, legal acts, the effects of which endure today. Photo: Madelene Cronje

Hunger by design: colonialism’s legacy

The Blue Book explicitly warned that the production of food by African people in excess of their own requirements was undesirable, ‘as it diminishes their incentive to labour’

Scarcity in the land of plenty: It is an anomaly that in a country like ours – capable of feeding all – there are people who still go without food, especially children under five, who face
chronic malnutrition, according to Unicef’s State of the World’s Children report. Photo: Benjamin Anguandia

Who eats well, who doesn’t?

This is why hunger cannot be addressed through food parcels, feeding schemes or emergency relief alone

Failing local government systems: Alexandra’s perpetual affliction

To turn the tide against malfunction in the public service, a radical shift towards habits that initiate a culture of care and interrelatedness is needed

#TheTotalShutDown: The march, which marked the start of Women’s Month, could represent a total shift in the trajectory of gender politics in South Africa. (David Harrison)

Beyond #TheTotalShutdown: Lessons for the movement

The frictions that came to the fore at the march expose a need for forms of mobilisation independent of party politics

Nonkanyiso Chonco: Othered to sustain our public gaze at Zuma

An otherwise anonymous young woman is invisibilized so that the public can retain its focus on the main subject, the former president

Tradition of anti-feminism: The ANC Women’s League must liberate itself from self-inflicted sexism before it can claim custodianship of the women’s movement in South Africa.

Buttock protest sabotages fight for equality

The ANC Women’s League’s decision to march in support of the supreme patriarch is ill considered.