Photos from the adventures of a full-time Capetonian...
Follow the link to the first installment of this photojournal here.
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I've been spending time at Erf 81. It's an abandoned military base in Tamboerskloof, that I've blogged about before. A community live there now, and they've turned it into a permaculture farm and are extending into general social outreach. It's one of the few places in Cape Town that is not cripplingly pretentious. It's all about the soil between your toes, and the most important things in life: community, land custodianship....
Erf 81, 09.08.2017
The buildings are run down, but in my eyes, they are beautiful. Because they're being used for beautiful things: they are spaces for collaboration, for creativity, and spaces that watch over the business of establishing and running a permaculture community in the heart of Cape Town in a way that is open to everyone and does not practice economic exclusion. In South Africa, at the moment, it is especially sacred to be doing the work of healing the various fractures we've perpetuated in our society. We're still very much divided along linguistic, cultural and economic lines, and this is not useful to anyone, because we can't work together to find sustainable solutions for the challenges we all face: like the extreme poverty faced by most of our population and our failing service delivery infrastructure, for starters....
The building pictured above is the old munitions store. It was built in the late 1800s. In South African terms, that's fairly old for a building: we were only colonised in 1652.
If you're around in Cape Town on Sundays, come through to their organic food and craft market. Details of it can be found on their Facebook page.
Peace out, for now. And remember that all that glitters is not gold.