Our history starts in the recent past, in Nowinile Ngcengele's shack near Fort Beaufort's dusty football stadium. Despite her obvious poverty, her shack was neat inside with sitting room furniture and a glass-fronted display cupboard. The road alongside her plot is tarred but cattle and goats sometimes roam the verges and stray into the stadium. Nowinile had access to water from a standpipe in her yard. A prickly pear bush stood at the front of the plot. When we first visited in 2004 she was waiting for an RDP house which was built in 2006. Thousands of these structures have spread over the hills around the town.

As it is difficult to find deep historical material on the everyday use of prickly pear, we explore this through contemporary eyes by describing fruit sales and brewing in the eastern Cape in the early years of the twenty-first century. Our core arguments in this chapter are, firstly, that although the population has increasingly moved away from rural areas and agricultural pursuits, knowledge about opuntia is widespread in the Eastern Cape. Old rural skills have been adapted to new urban contexts and local strategies built around such skills and knowledge remain inventive. This spiny plant is a good coloniser and survivor, but it requires careful handling. Secondly, although prickly pear is no longer very important in the area, it remains a significant source of fruit for many people, and provides an income for poor African women.

Fort Beaufort is a town of about 70,000 people in the heart of the province. Its population is overwhelmingly African and most people live in the large township called Bhofolo by the locals (the Xhosa name for Fort Beaufort), which lies on its eastern outskirts. The town and its commonage are surrounded by white-owned farms and by a portion of the former Ciskei.

In March 2005 we accompanied one group of women through all phases of picking fruit and processing it into beer. Nowinile Ngcengele was our main contact. She was a lively and confident woman in her late seventies, who was happy to talk to us for hours about her life and prickly pear. She also organised demonstrations of prickly pear usage for us. She and the others pronounced itolofiya, the Xhosa word for both the plant and its fruit, as ‘trofia’, sometimes suppressing the ‘a’, a closer fit to the Afrikaans original.