Imagination as Liberation

Travels in South Africa and a morning in Langa

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks in South Africa on a family trip with my husband and our two kids. We arrived in Cape town from a very rainy start to the year in Ireland, carrying winter coats we haven’t needed since. The light here has felt expansive from the start - mountains rising out of the city, long coastal drives, wildlife the kids have only ever seen in books.

More than anything, it has been time together. Away from the busyness of home. No school runs, no studio deadlines. Just the four of us experiencing somewhere new, getting lost occasionally, navigating unfamiliar roads and watching the landscape change.

Over these weeks we have seen some of the most jaw-dropping scenery - beauty at every turn, and we have also moved through areas of visible and at times excessive wealth sitting alongside areas of deep poverty. They sit side by side throughout the city and countryside and the divide between them is stark and deeply entrenched.

On our last day in Cape Town, we spent a morning with Uthando, an organisation that financially supports a broad range of community development projects focused on food security, education, healthcare, shelter, skills development and social services. Visits to the township are arranged through the organisation and require a donation, which goes directly toward the projects themselves.

Our first meeting was with two women in their seventies working in a corrugated shed attached to the back of one of their homes. They were sewing bags from recycled materials on a sewing machine that had been donated through Uthando. Fabric was folded and stacked along the walls, finished pieces hanging in the yard. They spoke with clear pride about attending a local sewing course and how it had led to this work. What began as a class had become regular income and, as they described it, something that gave them a renewed sense of joy and purpose.

Much of what we saw had been built from repurposed waste. Tyres forming walls, plastic and glass bottles packed into structure, fabric offcuts turned into products for sale, and a piece of land once used as a dump now planted with herbs and vegetables.

We walked through this garden with the young man who began clearing it with his mother years ago. The land had once been a dumping site, covered in rubbish and overrun with rats. He had lost his job during covid, and it was his mother who encouraged him to start working the ground. He had always gardened with her, and what began as a way to survive, gradually became something more stable, where he now produces and sells his own herbal tea.

Even now, fragments of broken glass remain in the soil, reminders of what the place once was. With support from the University of Cape Town, a simple but beautiful seating area has been built for visitors. As we sat and drank the herbal tea, hearing his story first hand and aware that the ground beneath us had once been a dumping site, it was deeply affecting to consider what persistence and belief had made possible there.

We then visited a Montessori school built from tyres, plastic bottles, glass bottles and cob, with one building already in use and another taking shape beside it, the funding directed primarily toward wages rather than materials. The building initiative is run by Mario, a former gang leader who chose a different direction when he became a father. The building itself is a thing of true beauty, constructed from materials that cost very little beyond hard-earned labour. Light filters through the glass bottles set into the walls, the ceilings high, discarded materials reworked into structure.

On a sign at the school it reads : Our Imagination is our Liberation. I kept thinking about the role of ideas and how often they are separated from what is considered practical. In Langa, ideas feel imperative, a sewing course becomes income, a cleared patch of ground becomes a garden, discarded bottles become walls that let in light and a space for learning.

The poverty in Langa is overwhelming, and many of the people in the programmes we visited come from extremely difficult family situations. These realities do not exist in isolation. They are part of the long-term effects of apartheid and the deep structural injustice inflicted on the Black community, consequences that continue to shape opportunity and access today. It is striking to witness the self-belief required to begin something when so little is available; to imagine a different outcome and attempt to build it, piece by piece. This is not a story of rescue, it’s a story of people finding a way forward by working with what is at hand and refusing to accept that circumstance is fixed.

As our time here draws to a close, I keep returning to that morning. It threads itself through the rest of the trip - through the landscapes, the light, the long drives. The scale of natural beauty here is extraordinary, but so too is the scale of inequality. And within that, the insistence on building something. Since that morning, I’ve found myself thinking about what I might have at home that could make a real difference to the people and projects we met. Rolls of Irish linen sitting unused in my studio that could be made into bags. Recipes from my brother and sister’s café, Bibi’s in Dublin, that could be shared and adapted.

What stays with me is not a single project, but the pattern that exists. A sewing course becoming income, a dumping site becoming a garden, shipping containers becoming a kitchen, tyres and glass bottles becoming a school, ideas becoming structures.

I am aware that creativity is often framed as a luxury and something you turn to once security is in place. In Langa, it is a means of survival, and sometimes a way of changing the direction of a life. The poverty is heavy, and the structural and racial divide remains deeply embedded. But so is the depth of self-belief required to begin with so little.

Uthando means “love” in isiZulu, a major language of South Africa. That morning, it was visible and felt - in hard work, in shared ideas and in the quiet persistence of people determined to build something better. When I return to Ireland to my studio and to my own work, I suspect I will carry this with me, both a renewed awareness of what creativity can hold when it is not optional and a reminder not to take it lightly.

If reading this makes you consider what you might be able to offer - time, ideas, resources - I’ve included a link here where you can contribute directly.