I was born and grew up in Sterkspruit in the Eastern Cape. When I was a child, my parents farmed. They had mielies and mabele and pumpkins and spinach and amabeche melons. My father didn’t drink, but he grew mabele to sell to others to make beer.

My father would say ‘we are farming people. You have to plant my boy. That is how we get food to eat.’ When he was in the fields he would pray and sing church songs because of this I always think of God being in the fields.

Sometimes my 14-year-old grandson helps me in the garden - I think it is good for children, boys and girls, to learn such skills and it helps them get strong – but I am very clear that his schoolwork must come first. Nothing must disturb his schooling.

My family also had goats and cows for milking. Sterkspruit can be very cold in the winter – especially in the early morning to do the milking. We boys would sometimes stand barefoot in the fresh cow dung to keep our feet warm. That milk tastes different to milk in town. When they pasturise and put it in a carton, something bad happens to the taste. Especially the amasi taste – it is nothing like the taste you get when you have your own cows. We would make amasi in a calabash and then eat that with crumbly pap as umvubo.

As young boys we would go hunting – Sterkspruit is close to the Free State, and we would take our dogs (my dog was called Dep). We caught blesbok, umvundla (rabbits), imbila (badgers). These days there are hardly any animals but in those days, there were many. You had to be careful, because if the farmers caught you hunting, they would shoot at you and those guys know how to shoot. We would skin and portion our catch and take it home. Everyone would get some meat. Even Dep. My mother and sisters would make stews with lots of lovely gravy in cast iron pots over a fire. We would eat it with pap. Later our family were forcibly removed from our Sterkspruit land under apartheid. We are still waiting for compensation.

I came to Johannesburg in 1970. I have done all sorts of jobs – restaurant work, bar work, railway goods loader and finally as a petrol pump attendant. That was my last job. That ended in 1992, and I haven’t worked in the formal sector since then. I have lived all over but I came to Swaneville in 1997.  At first, I was a tenant on someone else’s property so I couldn’t plant there, but I became part of a gardening project that an organisation (I can’t remember the name) set up. They would bring us seeds and feed us. Between 2002 and 2007 I worked there growing morogo, mielies, potatoes. In 2007 they didn’t have money to feed us anymore, so I stopped going.