by Asanda Josephine Magadla
Land as a nature as one of the Teach-in “IDEA” was one of the sessions that rural women participated in regarding land during the 2023 General Assembly. The purpose of the session was to educate and empower women from all over the countries to understand the reason they need land and also why land is important. Women are considered to be the guardians of land. Some of the women own land that they inherited from their parents and it’s about 2 hectares but other women do not have land yet. The question is how much land is enough for a woman in order to feed their families? Other women want land that is more than 2 hectares in order to feed their families and to sell their produce that they made. The countries that participated in the session were Madagascar, Mozambique, South Africa, Lesotho and Zimbabwe.
Women from these countries shared their experiences and challenges regarding the access to land and ownership to land. In Swaziland, for example, a married woman cannot have access to land because she needs to work at the husbands or in-laws’ land for survival but when it’s time for harvesting the husband’s family comes to collect the produce and the money made out of the land. In addition if the husband has more than one wife (polygamy) the traditional leader will not give a woman access to own land rather they lease it to her and still charge her more money out of the produce she will be making.
Mozambican sisters shared a painful story on how they have lost their land in their country. During the war they had to move out of their homes and leave their land to a refugee camp where they resided until the war was over. When they return to their homes they have lost the land and the traditional leader will count four steps and say it’s your land. Obviously the land that was given to people was an insult because it is not even enough to build a house let alone planting crops to feed a family. In South Africa, women work on the farms but do not have their own land. If you are rich in South Africa you can buy land and own it. However, commercial farmers are the ones that buy the land that people own.
The question is how is land related to nature? Land is part of nature because people need to take care and look after it. If commercial farmers continue to apply chemicals and pesticides to the soil it will harm the original texture of it and whatever that grows on that soil will cause sickness and diseases to people. Today we are facing global climate change because of other things that were removed from the land and also those things that form part of nature. It is now difficult to survive in today’s weather conditions and also continue planting crops that grow naturally. Women are encouraged to use Agroecology methods all the time when working on the land to fight climate justice. Land as nature goes a long way and it is diverse.
