The Hushed Havoc of Hazard

Mpilo started working at the Lerotholi food garden in 2020, during COVID. He joined his mother, Mam T, who had grown vegetables in the garden since the 1980s, when it was a Red Cross NGO project. There isn’t a day Mam T does not go to Lerotholi, and while slow because of her age, every morning she makes her way down the ten metre rows of spinach or onions bending and weeding.

I had recently started work in Langa, exploring climate change and its impacts on health in Cape Town’s vulnerable urban settlements. My time shadowing Mpilo happened to be in the weeks leading up to my grandmother’s passing; she was in the ICU at a hospital in Johannesburg, and themes of illness and death contoured our conversations. Mpilo told me that these days in Langa, it is as though every weekend there is another funeral. On two occasions, he had to leave the garden early to pay his respects to a family in grief.

Mam T has high blood pressure, but Mpilo affirms that she is healed by the garden and the meals it provides her. The same cannot be said for the majority of Langa’s residents, who bear the brunt of a country-wide food crisis and the associated health “havoc” described by Mpilo. A ‘hushed havoc’ (drawing from Nixon’s writing on slow violence), invisibilised and attritional.

In macro terms, South Africa is one of the most food-secure countries on the continent. Each year, we produce more food than is needed to meet the nutritional needs of our whole population. And yet, 63.5% of South Africans are food insecure, an alarming statistic that emerged from the National Food and Nutrition Security Survey of 2024. This seeming contradiction attests to the systemic inequality of our food system. Food insecurity is a real threat to the country’s poor, Black majority. Exacerbated by the COVID pandemic, more and more households are reliant on meagre social grants to put food on the table.

The City of Cape Town has the highest hunger levels amongst other major South African metropoles. Most of the city’s residents rely on supermarket-bought food and thus primarily on 5 mega-retailers who alone profit from over half of food retail sales in Southern Africa.

Lack of access to nutritious food is a major risk factor for non-communicable diseases (NCDs), and for South Africa’s majority, the risk of starvation or slow death by chronic illness is an everyday risk. It is also women-headed households who are more likely to be food insecure, and women experience higher rates of chronic illness, the most prevalent being high blood pressure and diabetes, both of which are largely determined by access to a nutritious diet.

High blood pressure and diabetes are framed as “lifestyle issues”, and yet all 15 of the people I spoke to in Langa raised NCDs as the dominant health concern in their neighbourhood, in response to which, besides taking pills prescribed at the Vanguard clinic, there is nothing else they can do.

For Langa’s residents, as for most people in South Africa, high blood pressure, diabetes or even stomach ulcers can be a terminal diagnosis. The prescribed responses “eat less fat”, “cook fresh food”, “manage stress”, and “don’t take medication on an empty stomach” are absurdities in a context of rampant unemployment and soaring food and electricity prices.

Thus, health outcomes in Cape Town’s vulnerable urban settlements cannot be understood without engaging the crisis of food insecurity.

This is the context in which climate change lands in Langa. It’s impacts not necessarily the sensational images of disaster, but an amplification of health hazard that is slow moving. Residents experience the ‘climate hazards’ we asked about in our interviews through their chronic illness, exacerbated by hunger.¹

Nomkhitha and ZK, whose blood pressure soars from the stress of sweeping water when it floods, also suffer from stomach ulcers.