The PhD student Deepthi, placed at Hochschule Karlsruhe in Germany, had already been in the field collecting ground truth data and talking to informants, before I got the chance of accompanying her in early Sep 2022. In the meantime, we had regularly communicated between South Africa and Germany about what she had learned of the area so far. With me being around, the ideas had been to give me the chance of getting to know the four study sites and to better understand livelihood challenges in the area, to revisit sites Deepthi wanted to show and discuss with me, and most importantly, to also explore the rural parts of the overall study area by means of transect drives.
I purely enjoyed it. Fieldwork in Africa is what I should do more often. Being outside all day, absorbing the landscape features (under the steel-blue sky of South Africa), observing people following their daily chores, talking to those open to sharing their experiences – you learn so much. This not only by watching and listening, but also when conversing with the team in the car. Melon and Izelque joined us some of the days to add to their understanding of livelihoods in the area. On almost every other day, we had a student from the University of Limpopo with us helping with approaching people and translations. It was interesting how differently Paul, Kgaogelo, Regina and Thlologelo interacted. And for sure, each one of them enjoyed being in the field with us because often these were new places to them, too. By jointly reflecting on what we learned and observed, it helped in sharpening Deepthi’s PhD study conceptually and more particularly in deciding on the land use/cover classes to differentiate in satellite image analysis.
What did I learn? During my first short visit to the area (Nov 2022), then mainly driving along main roads, I got the impression that there were hardly any people around and many houses looked deserted. This time we encountered many people. Even when talking to women living just across the road from each other, they can have very opposing judgements on their place. Performing agriculture on this soil must be a very hard job. Nevertheless, you can find houses with very beautiful decorative gardens. Size of cattle can be huge, especially in the rural areas. That is also where Mashemo is still practised. While close to Mankweng the younger generation expressed that they did not move to the place to continue practising agriculture. The lack of services becomes most apparent by the many waste being dumped openly and blown around by the wind. Where population pressure is not as high, the landscape’s vegetation is astonishingly diverse with trees flowering in different colours.