My name is Method Gundidza. I was born in a small farming village in Bikita, near the old Great Zimbabwe city ruins. When I reflect on the journey I have been on, I am filled with gratitude. Drawing on agroecology to nurture resilience in the face of climate shocks, I work with Elders to rekindle relationships with land, seed, spirit, and one another.

At the heart of this work is a deep understanding that the web of life is spun according to the lores and laws of Mother Earth. Special places, like the majestic bouldered mountains rising from the Bikita savannah, the cool dark forests, or our streams, rivers and springs, have always been sacred. Tragically, Indigenous Peoples’ reverence for these lands and waters was demonised by the church and colonialists. It has been further suppressed by industrial agriculture, which imposes hybrid seeds, spreads chemicals that kill the soil, pollutes the groundwater, silts up our rivers, and clears indigenous trees for large monocrop fields. We didn’t realise how precious our grandmothers’ seeds were when we carelessly discarded them, influenced by government agencies promoting hybrid maize as the miracle crop for southern Africa. Hybrid maize and other imported seeds failed year after year, causing hunger and despair to everyone who had come to rely on them.

This was the violated Bikita I returned to in 2015: a very different place from where I grew up. A heaviness had settled over the denuded mountains who no longer replied with joy-filled echoes when people called to each other across the valleys. Instead, the mountains’ voice had turned thunderous and roared at us when the rains came. Torrents of water carried enormous boulders down eroded slopes and we feared for our lives.

With a group of women farmers, we decided that robust indigenous crops – millet, sorghum, traditional maize – were the place to start restoring our cultural memory. These seeds remembered the soil and were adapted to the climate. They thrived in harsh conditions. One by one, I accompanied Bikita’s farmers in their rediscovery of traditional seeds that we had lost. Many seeds came from seed and food fairs in other regions of Zimbabwe and South Africa, Malawi, Zambia, and Kenya, where farmers came together to share their seeds, food, and knowledge.

The seeds we have revived are not only better for land and people, but some are also used to make a sacred beer that connects us with our ancestors. Brewing this beer once again opened the way for us and other communities in Zimbabwe and South Africa to revive rituals linked to the agricultural calendar, from seed blessing ceremonies and rituals asking for rain, to festivals of thanks for first fruits and bountiful harvests. Rituals take place in Sacred Natural Sites and include everybody. Elders, spirit mediums, traditional leaders, women farmers, youth, children: all are needed to play their unique parts in reweaving the baskets of life.

We ground this work in Earth Jurisprudence, a legal philosophy that recognises the Earth as a living community with rights. It is the lodestar of a growing continental movement to heal destroyed diversities and strengthen resilience to climate disruption.

We hold space for cultural memory to return, and for African worldviews to shape regenerative futures grounded in justice for human and more-than-human beings. Together with Earth Jurisprudence practitioners across the continent, we are reviving indigenous knowledge, practicing agroecology, growing traditional seeds to strengthen food sovereignty, and protecting Sacred Natural Sites: holistically enhancing resilience to the crises of our time.

This approach strengthens confidence in African ways of seeing and being that mirror the abundance and generosity so often witnessed in nature. From this perspective, it is right and just to share seeds, food, one’s hearth, and one’s home. There are customary laws that support these acts, which are the foundations of responsibility, justice, and respect that nourish biocultural diversity.

Once again, I see people coming together through traditional practices such as Jangano and Lilima, to share work in the fields, and to celebrate with nutritious home-grown food and home-brewed beer. Now, when I walk from one village to another, I feel the broader landscape healing around me. I feel my heart swell with love, and I am immensely grateful that life returned me to my roots

This story from Earth Jurisprudence Practitioner, Method Gundidza, about his work with the EarthLore Foundation, formed part of Rooted Magazine’s issue on weaving resilience and resistance: presenting insights from Indigenous strategies for cultural survival in Colombia, Palestine, Denendeh (Canada), Zimbabwe, Kenya and Mali. It was published in conjunction with the 3rd Nyéléni Global Forum, a landmark convergence of grassroots movements from around the world in September 2025 in Sri Lanka.