In reaching for home and in the making of it here, in South Africa, there are labours to be borne. The labours our hands and bodies bear as women born borders beyond South Africa. These labours are read as hauntings, an absent presence in the act of home and place making for women considered marginal.

​

This project looks at memory, the intimacy of personal history & lived experience, to uncover the labours embedded in the home making rituals enacted by migrant people through food.

These labours of body, hands and speech experienced by migrant people mu kurima, (ploughing), kukomesha, (growing), kubebesha (collection), processing(kutwanga), preservation(kuchunga) and preparation(kupika), of these foods, particularly cassava, in its prevalence in the foodscape of migrant foodways in varying forms; these labours are read, embodied and traced through text, performance and film, then drawn or made.

​

Home cannot exist without the words of my mother's tongue, without the work in her hands and body, carried by her mother before her, and other women that host the places that bear these traces of home in food. We are daughters of the same grain, in garri, uji na ugali.