‘Africa’s future lies in agriculture’

To repair soil is to repair relationships. The future does not lie in oil and war; it lies in the land, in agriculture, in production and in putting wealth at the service of the people.

These are some of the insights that emerged from the African Environmentalism of Soil webinar, hosted by the University of Cape Town's (UCT) Environmental Humanities South (EHS) from 22-24 July.

The three-day series explored African environmentalism by placing soil at the centre, and was a collaboration between the Club of Rome, the Fifth Element, the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance (NMSPG), and the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) Press.

The last day of the webinar focused on the launch of To Defend the Earth is to Defend the Human, a new publication exploring agricultural engineer and diplomat Amílcar Cabral's contribution to what is now known as soil science.

Former Cape Verde president Pedro Pires, who is now the chairperson of the Amilcar Cabral Foundation, commended the production of the English-language editions of the book. He said a new avenue was opened that would allow people to understand the scientific side of Amílcar Cabral.

Speaking in Portuguese, he delved right into the importance of the work under discussion.

"Personally, we believe that the future does not lie in oil and war; it lies in the land, in agriculture, in production, and in putting wealth at the service of the people.

"I would also draw your attention to the new needs facing humanity, particularly the protection of the land and the environment."

He said Africa's new power lies in arable land.

"For this reason, I consider your work to be timely and hope it will be successful."

A man ahead of his time

Honorary Professor at UCT's NMSPG, Carlos Lopes, the editor of To Defend the Earth is to Defend the Human, said he has always been fascinated by Cabral's work. Lopes, who is also a visiting professor at Sciences Po, Paris, and associate fellow at Chatham House, London, said Cabral was ahead of his time even in his 20s.

"He [Cabral] was already talking about the role of gender in agriculture, climate relation impact on agriculture and also this idea that we need to respect the soil and to make sure that a society is healthy."

He said this might be why some refer to him as "the father of Agroecology in Africa".

Context was important to Cabral as well as the understanding of the interaction between humans and nature, he said.

Other speakers included Dr Anselmo Matusse, who was the editor and translator of the book, as well as respondents Dr Noncedo Vutula, the Chief Research Officer at NMSPG and Nazeer Sonday, an organic farmer and chairperson of the Philippi Horticultural Food and Farming Campaign.

Attendees included civil society members working with EHS through the Critical Zones Africa research project.

The book project was made possible by funding from the Science for Africa Foundation (SFA) Developing Excellence in Leadership, Training and Science in Africa (DELTAS Africa II) programme for the Critical Zones Africa research project at EHS.

The book will be made open access online in October 2026.

Ma Hazel, a community activist and farmer from Mfuleni who runs Uphakanini Community Kitchen, emphasised the need to groom young farmers.

Key takeaways

Principal Investigator for the Critical Zones Africa project and founding director of EHS, Professor Lesley Green, said Cabral grew up understanding hunger.

"The context we are in right now is almost a replay of the context that Cabral was in. He studied soil science because he grew up in famine. In Cape Verde there were frequent droughts and the colonial authorities at the time paid very little attention to the conditions of the soil and the famine was so severe and hundreds of thousands of people died."

She said Cabral was so determined to build an African soil science that after he graduated, he went back to West Africa, and worked with farmers in Guinea.

"In that time, he visited 2 200 farms, so his science in this book comes from talking with people and learning alongside people. He understood that his own science was incomplete."

She emphasised two things from the three days of discussion.

"The one is the need for a different kind of soil science, African soil science. And the other is the need for a workers' movement, a people's movement, a farmers' movement across Africa to pick up the same challenge and respond to the big global experts who currently tell Africans about African soil, that it needs inputs that are very expensive and you need the inputs from them [international experts]."

She said Cabral placed value on people who worked the soil every day.

Dr Vutula said the book requires Cabral to be recognised as one of Africa's earliest political economists of Agrarian transformation.

Reflecting on the way it's written, she said:

"Cabral does not begin with ideology; he begins with soils, rainfall, vegetation and agroclimatic conditions. His methods resemble what we would today call systems thinking. Agricultural transformation is never reduced to a single intervention."

She said Cabral also anticipated modern transformation theories, explaining that he argued that productivity depended on interaction between ecology, institutions, agronomy and indigenous knowledge.

"By doing this, he anticipated by several decades what later became central themes within the agricultural innovation systems."