Guardians of Seed, Land and Life:

RWA is firmly rooted in struggles to protect local seeds and local knowledge against corporate capture. They fight for land, climate justice and food sovereignty and against all forms of patriarchy, working to build conscious women’s leadership and confidence to stand up and speak for themselves.

In 2020, RWA embarked on a seed journey across seven of its ten member countries – eSwatini, Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe – to audit which local seeds its members had in their possession. This initiative ran over nearly two and a half years, despite the Covid-19 pandemic.

One significant outcome of that journey was the identification of over 500 RWA seed guardians who play an important and often unrecognized role in preserving seed. Another outcome was the uncovering of local seeds that were on the verge of extinction due to extreme climate change – droughts, floods and cyclones – and aggressive corporate practices and government policies which did not favour rural small-scale farmers’ protection of local seeds.

The Southern African guardians have saved seeds for decades. Their mothers and grandmothers had saved seeds passed across generations to preserve a social practice that, besides having cultural significance, ensures food sovereignty. The guardianship of local seeds allows plants to thrive without toxic inputs and away from corporate control, contributing to defending biodiversity and overcoming environmental and social crises in a region devastated by the convergence of climate change and failed market-driven policies.

The Seed Guardians' exhibition

As a follow-up to the seed audit research project initiated in 2020, RWA proposed to three researchers to produce a documentary photography exhibition. This exhibition aims at giving expression to and recognition of RWA members as key protagonists of their own herstories and seed narratives. It offers an insight into the changing landscape (political, socioeconomic, cultural and environmental) of a region under-researched and stereotyped, shining a spotlight onto the women who hold, care and share seeds in harmony with the environment in sustainable ways.

This photo exhibition is a window to the lives and struggles of the seed guardians of the Rural Women’s Assembly (RWA). It documents their invaluable contribution to food and seed sovereignty and struggle to ensure the recognition of women small-scale farmers, peasants and producers in policy frameworks that protect the rights to seed, land and food.

Browse through the photos and stories in the digital exhibition

The seed guardians and the seeds themselves tell multiple and often overlapping stories: endurance and resilience; struggles for land; complex social relations and patriarchy in rural areas; gender-based violence; migration, labour patterns and social discord; climate change; rural food systems and work that provides, feeds and nurtures local livelihoods. In many ways, the seed embodies the struggle for freedom, autonomy and sovereignty of rural women, small-scale farmers and peasant producers. It is a testimony to the unseen daily work being done by RWA and its significant contribution to ensuring and enhancing biodiversity, social reproduction and rural economies.

The exhibition gives a concrete face to the seed guardian, where she comes from and how she sustains life, her family, her community and the planet. It seeks to depict not a static context nor a one-dimensional view, challenging the usual portrayal of a rural woman as helpless and poverty-stricken. The pride of the seed guardian is evident when she tells her story of how protecting the local seeds has enabled her to send her children to school, build her home and become economically self-reliant.

The images and texts celebrate the quiet and silent activism of the RWA seed guardians and the seeds they hold. Each seed protected, harvested and sown is not necessarily perceived by the guardian as some big political act against big agribusiness, but is a small stone in the boot that is trying to control the African countryside. Each individual act of the seed guardian becomes a collective wave of solidarity across the region.

The photo exhibition is a window to the lives and struggles of almost 600 seed guardians in seven countries. It has been conceived as a tool that contributes to the advocacy efforts of the Rural Women’s Assembly, based on the direct involvement of RWA members in all the stages of research fieldwork and design and management of the exhibition.

The exhibition supports RWA’s efforts to influence public policy in a political context in which the right to save seeds is denied, with the guardians constantly facing the risk of prosecution for infringing seed patents. The images and texts that make up the exhibition aim to show who the custodians of the food system are, highlighting the resistance to the corporate takeover of land, the enclosure of farmers-managed seeds and the loss of agrobiodiversity.

In summary, the photo-documentary exhibition has four objectives:

1. Make the contribution of the women seed guardians in Southern Africa to food sovereignty visible.
2. Provide counterhegemonic narratives to the view that large-scale, technology-driven and corporate-controlled seeds are the only guarantee for the reliable supply of food across the world.
3. Demonstrate that seed sovereignty rests with local seed guardians, who are mainly women small-scale farmers, peasants and producers, in Africa and throughout the Global South.

4. Engage with policy frameworks that protect the rights to seed, land and food, such as UNDROP (UN Declaration on the Rights of Peasants); UNDRIP (UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People) and civil society-driven campaigns around the Right to Food and the UN Binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations and Human Rights.

The photo exhibition opened in Geneva in October 2023 as part of the mobilizations around the UN Binding Treaty. The exhibition toured Scandinavian cities and is now (May 2024) at ISS, before travelling to other locations in Europe, Africa and the Americas. The opening of each installation includes a workshop in which local seed guardians and RWA researchers speak about the significance of seed guardianship at the local, regional and global levels.

The team in charge of the co-design and co-production of the exhibition are three activist-researchers: Dr Donna Andrews, a South African political economist and feminist theorist, currently a Senior Researcher at the Ethics Lab of the University of Cape Town, a former convenor of the RWA Feminist School and an ISS MA alumna;  Dr Suzall Timm, a South African criminologist focusing on regulation in the urban and rural informal economy, and a Lecturer at the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies of the University of Johannesburg; and Dr Daniel Chavez, a Uruguayan visual anthropologist and political economist based in the Netherlands, a Senior Researcher at the Transnational Institute and an ISS MA and PhD alumnus.