African cuisine and the mielie

Throughout most of the country, however, South African cuisine relies on meat and mielies (maize).

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 Africa 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" mielies, 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, fine-grained mieliepap (maize porridge) to phutu or krummelpap (crumbly maize porridge).

Maize 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, mopane worms 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).