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The great mielie
Throughout most of the country, however, South African
cuisine relies on meat and mielies. Many South Africans, black and white,
would cheerfully go through their lives eating little else. Up to half the
arable land in South Africa is planted with maize, which was grown by
tribes across Southern African long before the colonists arrived. Jan van
Riebeeck imported some seed corn, but it didn't take off; it was the strains
grown by black communities that trek-farmers, looking for greener
pastures, and voortrekkers, pushing well beyond the Cape to avoid British
rule in the mid-1800s, took to their hearts and their palates.
Tradition counts: African food
Maize has long been the basis of African cuisine. Each community, whether Xhosa or Zulu, Sotho, Tswana or Swazi, holds to slight differences in making it and preferences in eating it, but
certain dishes have the approval of nearly all. Here are some of them:
fresh, "green" mealies, roasted and eaten
on the cob, sold by hawkers
almost everywhere, usually women, who set up their braziers on the
pavement; dried and broken maize kernels, or samp: samp and beans, or
umngqusho, is a classic African dish; dried maize kernels ground fine into
maize-meal or mielie-meal, used for everything from sour-milk porridge to
dumplings, crumbly phutu to fine-grained mieliepap. It is mixed with
sorghum and yeast for umqombothi, a popular African beer, or with flour and
water for mageu, a refreshing, slightly fermented drink.
Early African tribes planted millet and sorghum - and indeed, they still do.
Millet makes quite a nice traditional beer, as does sorghum (called amabele,
amazimba, luvhele), which can also be used for an excellent porridge.
Africans from early times also raised cattle, but very few of the beasts
ended up on the open wood fires of the braai.
There was game to hunt and insects to gather - termites, locusts, and
especially mopane worms, which
are caterpillars that live on mopane trees.
Dried, then fried, grilled, or cooked up in a stew, they were considered a
delicacy in the northern part of South Africa, among the Venda, Tsonga and
Pedi people, as well as in Botswana and Zimbabwe - and still are, served up
as hors d'oeuvres at restaurants and pubs in the city. In the north, the
caterpillars and other foods are cooked in peanut sauce; further south,
it's onions, tomatoes and a touch of chilli.
One can find dishes made with amadumbe - rather like sweet potatoes - where
African food is served. But the vegetables one finds most often in African
homes are morogo (any green leaves, including bean and
beetroot leaves), pumpkin, often sweetened or seasoned with cinnamon (a
taste shared with Afrikaner cooks), and beans of all sorts.
The meat can be goat or chicken and quite often is tripe, a delicacy here
as it is in France, and possibly a legacy of the Huguenots or, as likely,
the kind of meat
available to people whose finances didn't stretch to
fillet steak.
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