Can Cooking Meat Really Help South Africa Reconcile Its Legacy of Apartheid?

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Can Cooking Meat Really Help South Africa Reconcile Its Legacy of Apartheid?

Braai day is supposed to bring South Africans together through cooking meat, but the feel-good ideology that the holiday espouses has drawn increasing critique.
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Photo by Masixole Feni

South Africans inherited a formidable to-do list when apartheid ended in 1994. Decades of state-sanctioned racism, following 300 years of colonial rule, have left deep physical, psychological, and emotional scars. The country's white minority owned most of the land. Black people had very little access to jobs, education, or basic services. And then there was the problem of national holidays.

Holidays, like statues, portray what countries aspire towards, and several former South African holidays (and statues) glorified racial oppression. Heritage Day, on September 24, is one of five new holidays adopted after apartheid, when South Africa's governing principles changed. The day encourages South Africans of all backgrounds to celebrate and share their heritage—a tough ask in a divided nation. A decade ago Heritage Day was informally rebranded Braai Day, an occasion devoted to cooking meat around fires. Grilling meat is something all South Africans purportedly take pride in and enjoy, but can it really bring people together?

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A better question, perhaps, is how this country of 53 million people might better reconcile its history. South Africa's complicated relationship with holidays—and with the past—is best illustrated by December 16, which once commemorated a horrific frontier skirmish. On that date in 1838, more than 10,000 black Zulu warriors attacked an encampment of 470 white Afrikaners, who'd been trekking east to claim new territory. The settlers had guns while their opponents did not, and the battle was over by noon, the blood of 3,000 Zulu soldiers seeping into a nearby river. The Calvinist Afrikaners had taken a religious vow before the raid, and interpreted their victory as a sign of divine protection. But holidays celebrating violent conquest were no longer appropriate after apartheid, and in the spirit of nation-building the date was proclaimed Reconciliation Day, a day for forgiving and moving on.

Heritage Day is another reupholstered South African holiday. Originally marking the death of King Shaka, the military leader who united the Zulu kingdom in the early 1800s, the date has been saddled with a trickier mandate: getting South Africans to embrace their roots. But the stratified racial legacies of apartheid are still widely present after two decades of democracy, and South Africans share heritage in fraught and complicated ways. Braai Day is an attempt to make the act of remembering more straightforward by focusing, as a tense family might at Christmas, on food.

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Photo by Matthew Ibbotson

Braai Day was dreamed up, 12 years ago, by a young Cape Town accountant named Jan Scannell. It has gained some traction since then, aided by massive marketing campaigns from supermarkets and breweries, and is now fairly well known in South Africa, though not universally celebrated. Scannell, 36, has subsequently quit his job in the finance sector and assumed the moniker Jan Braai, working as Ambassador and Founder of National Braai Day. (The closest English translation would be Jon Barbecue.) His intention for Braai Day, he told me by telephone, was to "create common ground" between South Africans. "When people braai they just have cool, normal conversations."

Scannell has become a minor celebrity, in part by conducting PR stunts like grilling boerewors sausage under the sea and renaming South African towns with braai puns (Parktown: Porktown; Woodmead: Wood & Meat). He has published three cookbooks, including, most recently, The Democratic Republic of Braai. ("It is your democratic right to eat properly braaied food.") His initiative has attracted some support, most notably from Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the anti-apartheid activist who dubbed South Africa the 'Rainbow Nation'. But Braai Day has also stirred controversy, while the sort of feel-good ideology it espouses—that South Africans would get along more easily if only they spent more time together—has drawn increasing critique.

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The week before Braai Day this year, students were protesting about tuition fees across the country. I could hear stomping and chanting from a university residence across the road late every night. The #FeesMustFall movement has channeled anger at the slow pace of reform in South Africa, calling for the 'decolonization' of a society that continues to preserve white privilege; its activists have little patience for indulging New South Africa's gentle founding myths. Many have rejected leaders like Archbishop Tutu and even Nelson Mandela for "selling out" the revolution. After the protests started last year, MTV cut a documentary titled 'The People versus the Rainbow Nation'.

I asked Scannell if the protests had made Braai Day feel different this year. "I take care not to get involved in any politics," he said. He had just returned from a promotional National Braai Tour, visiting seven heritage sites in seven days. Braai Day was three days away. "But it shows the need for nation-building projects. If I ever have to put my job description on a form, I write 'nation builder', because that's what I do."

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Photo by Masixole Feni

A grey blanket hung over Cape Town on the morning of September 24. The city is home to more than 3.74 million people, but Cape Town, once the most racially integrated place in South Africa, is a city within a city. Apartheid social engineering carved out white enclaves around Table Mountain, shunting people of color to the periphery. This pattern of concentric marginalization has remained strikingly intact. To conduct a Braai Day transect of sorts, I left home in the morning, tracing the bottom of District Six, a flattened inner-city suburb where 80,000 people were evicted during apartheid. Seeking distance, I drove to Mfuleni, a township 15 miles away, and met the photographer Masixole Feni. "Today is supposed to be about remembering your heritage and your culture," said Feni, who is black, as he climbed into the car. "Braai Day? That's just sugar coating it. Heritage is about more than cooking meat."

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But meat was being cooked in great abundance in Feni's neighborhood, an overcrowded settlement with shanties spilling onto the pavements. A row of aproned women presided near the minibus taxi rank, grilling sausages and chops over repurposed oil drums. A tiny middle-aged man dragged a wheelie-bin between them, delivering firewood he'd harvested from the scrublands beyond the township. Nonthuthuzelo Sondlo, 32, served us a giant cut of beef for R25 ($1.75)—the price of a latte in the city. "It's like this every day," she said nonchalantly. "I'm here seven days a week. Today doesn't feel any different."

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Photo by Masixole Feni

But in a refurbished shipping container nearby, Linda Gwebu, the proprietor of Linda's Braai Place, was expecting to be busier than normal. "People know to buy meat today. I ordered extra this week," said Gwebu, 44, while her kitchen staff piled chops on the service counter and tended fires beside the road. "Heritage day is for remembering where you come from," she added. "As an African you must know yourself. Many of us have westernized too much, and lost our roots."

Gwebu had joined the armed struggle against apartheid, enlisting in the new South African military after 1994. She'd opened her business in 2009, using money from her retirement package. In an impoverished township, her access to capital was striking. Just half a mile from Gwebu's establishment, in a row of moldering wooden stalls, the lowest tier of the township meat market was in operation: middle-aged women, bleary-eyed from woodsmoke, selling unrefridgerated offal for coins. Feni, the photographer, was still hungry, and purchased a foot-long segment of bolobolo (fried intestine) for R5 (35 US cents). "It's like pure fat," he said, handing me a dripping piece.

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Photo by Matthew Ibbotson

After eating some of the cheapest meat in South Africa for lunch, I drove back to the city and dined on expensive, curated meat for dinner. A trio of hip establishments—ASH Restaurant, Publik Wine Bar, and Frankie Fenner Meat Merchants—whose slogan is "Eat proper meat"—had organized a Heritage Day event dubbed 'Today's Tomorrow' on Bree Street, the heart of Cape Town's culinary scene. "I used to braai with my father," chef Ash Heeger, 27, told me during the week. "There's something nostalgic about sitting around a fire. We'll be serving food all evening. It's going to be super relaxed."

At her Heritage Day event, the smoked chicken wing starter, dressed in pecan vinegar and served with pickled celery and a blue cheese cream, was being grilled outside on two bespoke ceramic Big Green Eggs when we arrived. Well-dressed customers, all white, not unusual in the cloistered parts of Cape Town, crowded the stoop, drinking craft beer and local wine. Inside, haunches of beef hung in a temperature-controlled display case, illuminated by gallery-style lighting. A lamb, ethically sourced, had been roasting for two days, and was served with an array of reinterpreted South African staples: a buffalo yogurt beet salad, sweet corn in bone marrow, and parmesan cornmeal, or 'pap'.

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Photo by Jenny Willis

Tickets cost R300 ($22), hardly exorbitant for a sustainably sourced menu; many Cape Town restaurants are more expensive, and serve worse food. This can be difficult to square with statistics showing that one in two South Africans live below the national poverty line of R779 a month ($58).

"I know most South Africans would never buy meat here—not even my staff, and I pay them as well as I can," said Heeger, looking genuinely conflicted. "I believe in what we're doing but I wish this could be much more accessible. It's difficult in Cape Town."

Jan Braai, presumably, would have been encouraged by the Heritage Day fires in Mfuleni and on Bree Street. ("Once everyone braais on the same day, we'll realize we have something in common," he states in one of his YouTube clips.) But the divergence in how South Africans live, and eat, is difficult to gloss over in 2016, and ripe for radical censure. If South Africans are lighting braais for heritage, they're doing it separately. Overfull, I left the restaurant, handing my change to a car guard in a soiled reflective bib. I drove home to consider my vexed inheritance.