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What a nice start and surprise: at We can Woman Development Centre the project team was greeted with dancing and singing! Wearing community face masks added to the colourful dressing. And luckily, excitement was expressed through clapping and cheering, too, because during COVID-19 the many smiles are unfortunately hidden. However, we had made friends already and could drive on with our trip through the study area.

For me it was my first closer look at a dramatically growing small town in a former homeland of South Africa. I learned about areas where people had already built houses which are now abandoned and falling apart. Reason was that the land had been handed over without the knowledge of the land owner. Actually, many of the houses next to the roads, on which we drove, looked either unfinished or uninhabited. But the latter might not be true; it depends on the time of day how many people you see outside. And I am sure, the more often we will visit the place the more we will learn about the lives of the people struggling to make a living in these peri-urban neighbourhoods.

Although it was a short visit only, I can now imagine the research challenge of linking women’s perception and place dynamics more fully. In Germany, even if the geodata is a couple of years old it represents the current state still pretty well. For Mankweng this is not the case. People move in quickly and form communities which become villages as soon as they get a name, as we were told. Infrastructure and services are lacking behind severely. Even within small areas, the diversity is high. Nevertheless, the project aims to combine knowledge which will be produced at the microscale with results to be derived by analyzing geodata and thus covering a much wider spatial extent.
Of the workshop activities, most fun was codesigning the project’s logo together with the women. They got excited and learned “how to make the logo lekker”. While we learned how best to perform a voting by the participants for the best logo design. Another highlight was the participatory mapping asking many questions related to accessibility and addressing, perceptions of place and livelihoods dynamics. It always amazes me that single people stand out who are able to read a satellite image despite the fact that it is the first time for them. The two activities helped in getting to know the women and their lives and in creating bonds. Here, speaking the local language (Sepedi), which I don’t, definitely helps.
The many impressions led to a lot of bilateral exchange of thoughts between the project team members. However, back in the accommodation everyone was still busy preparing for the various workshop activities. Although we had arranged for a project meeting on the last afternoon in Mankweng, only on the drive back to Pretoria we finally found ourselves in an intense discussion and exchange about our final project aim, i.e. the modelling of sustainable livelihood scenarios for Mankweng and surroundings by integrating the various research results. This discussion would not have been possible without the joint look at the geodata for the study area and the decision on study sites on the afternoon before.
Even though I had prepared various geodata beforehand, the landscape of the study area is more versatile than I had imagined. The same is true for the weather. So far, I had experienced only blue skies in South Africa. The project partners from Limpopo had told us to expect sweating hot weather. Having left bleak November weather in Germany, I therefore had hoped for lots of sunshine and warmth. But it turned out much cooler, rainy and windy than expected, with some of the project team repeatedly admiring the clouds. Responsible might have been the Rain Queen, not a myth but real as I was told, who lives in the mountains to the east of Mankweng.
I am sure there is much more to learn and discover during the four years of our post-Covid-19 transformation project which has only started. Ending up in a 2-week-quarantaine back home in Karlsruhe will not prevent me from travelling to South Africa again.