You don't need to wait to grow new crops to get started in Biofuels. According to plantzafrica.com "Typha capensis is such an abundant plant in South Africa, many people regard it as a pest as it is known to spread very fast." Typha is a nuisance all over the African continent, causing flooding and drought, and breeding mosquitoes and other pests. There are millions of Hectares overrun with it. It is both a food plant and a fuel plant. It grows both on valuable land where you need to eradicate it, and on worthless land you can do nothing else with. If grown in clean water and soil, Typha can be a year round source of food. It has a nasty/useful of collecting pollutants, and not just any can be eaten. What isn't fit for human consumption is excellent biomass for ethanol or fuel gas production. All over Africa, it is causing trouble. It could be enriching you. Look into it, and the usually nearby Phragmites reed, which is just as suitable for fuel, but less suitable for food.

Has there been any attempt to use Typha capensis and were they successful?

I don't know of anything using Capensis. In the USA we have T Latifolia, T Angustifolia, and T Glauca mostly, and call them cattails. Typha is largely the same worldwide, varying in size, shape of leaves, salt tolerance (drastic variation), but not in structure. There are numerous articles about experiments with our cattails, and they are extremely promising, particularly in the area of ethanol. With the cellulosic ethanol processes coming out, we can expect even better results later. A German group called the Household Energy Project developed a charring device to convert cattails to charcoal, and from there you can always make "producer gas". If you are harvesting it for human consumption, the harvest is quite labor intensive. But you need not work so hard when harvesting it to feed to yeast or to a charring machine. Check it out on the web. Search for [cattail ethanol], ["cattail flour"], ["cattail recipes"]. There is a lot of solution to be had from a continent-wide problem. The one hazard with this is that the plant collects pollutants. It has a metallurgy department in its roots. It will coat itself with arsenic if it is present in the water (as in Bangladesh) and hoard any other toxin it can find. Not just any can be eaten. Most can be processed into fuel.