How Indian food helped in the fight against apartheid in South Africa

Late last year, on December 27, Mbongoni Ngema, a South African playwright and musician, died in a car crash. He was best known for musicals like Sarafina!, which dramatised the struggle against apartheid. But in 2002 Ngema made headlines in India for releasing a song accused of promoting racial hatred against South Africa’s Indian community.

The song was called AmaNdiya, meaning Indian in Zulu. Between 1860 and 1911, British colonial rulers brought over 150,000 indentured Indian labourers to work in South Africa’s sugar fields. The song claimed that their descendants were dispossessing people in Durban, the capital of KwaZulu-Natal province, and had made Zulu leaders their stooges. And that Indians were still coming to work in South Africa, but the reverse never happened.

It was meant to provoke and a furore duly ensured. Nelson Mandela had retired as the new South Africa’s first president by then, but he still brought his immense moral authority and reprimanded Ngema. I was in South Africa around then and remember Ngema issuing a half-hearted apology that was a variant on the usual “some of my best friends are…” defence against being racist. Ngema said he loved Indian food and always ordered it in restaurants. One line from AmaNdiya alleges Zulu leaders were bought by their love for roti and paaku (curry).

Around that same time I interviewed Zuleikha Mayat, the feisty Durban matriarch who led the team of ladies that compiled Indian Delights, the South African Indian cookbook that is one of the great documents of Indian food. I did not ask her about Ngema – it was a distasteful subject all around – or his surprising love of Indian food, but I imagine she would not have been surprised.

Mayat belonged to the Gujarati Muslim community, many of whose members ran all-purpose shops across South Africa. She grew up in Potchefstroom, a town dominated by white Afrikaners whose food was based on the bland diet of their Dutch forebears. Yet they grew to love the spices sold by her father. “Once you taste Indian spices, there’s no going back,” Mayat said. Customers kept asking her mother for Indian food. “Since she didn’t have time, she would send them to other Indian women, and slowly it developed into a business for them.”

Mayat passed away earlier this year, at almost 98 years. By chance, an image from Indian Delights trended on social media soon after. An Instagram account posted a screenshot of a recipe titled “Biryani for 800 people”. Its caption read: “Looking for something to do on a Sunday night?” The image, which had apparently circulated on Reddit earlier, got more than 325,000 likes. Commentators joked about the average size of Indian weddings or marvelled or shuddered at the quantities listed, like 20 kilos ghee and 20 litres oil, or 2 kilos red chilli powder and 2 kilos crushed red chillies.

Indian Delights was not credited in the post, but I recognised the image at once. There was the slightly odd illustration of a caparisoned elephant – not something likely to be found in Africa – but even more telling was the 32 kilos of masoor dal listed among the main ingredients (along with 50 kilos of rice and 200 kilos of mutton). Using dal in biryani is not unknown in India – Hyderabad’s qabooli biryani, for example, uses chana dal – but it is unusual. In South Africa, though, dal in biryani is the norm.

This might sound stodgy or likely to create khichdi, but in fact it works very well. The masoor is whole, so adds another textural element to the biryani: little flavour-soaked pellets alongside the rice and meat. It makes a portion of biryani even more of a whole meal, and is very filling, which is the point. Reading Indian Delights, and talking to Mayat, invoked a world where huge amounts of food were regularly cooked. The same page as the biryani recipe also had Soji Halwa for 300 people and Carrot Achar for 500 people.

Some of these were clearly for celebrations by a community whose relatively small size in a larger, not very friendly, country meant that everyone had to support, and feed, each other. Numbers quickly added up at these celebrations, with families coming from nearby towns. But as the requests to Mayat’s mother showed, people outside the Indian community also wanted its food, so some of the cooking became a business.

Community life

One example was Durban’s famous bunny chow, with a dryish bean or meat curry served inside half a hollowed loaf of bread. Its name most likely derived from bania, though Mayat told me with some irritation that people kept joking about rabbits in the curry. One explanation for the hollowed loaf was that different communities could not easily eat together in public during apartheid, so the hollowed loaf served as an edible container to take away the meal. The white interior of the loaf was called the virgin and served to sop up the gravy. Being able to eat it all by hand was also useful under a regime suspicious of people carrying knives.

Another popular Indian food was samoosas, as they are spelled in South Africa. These were small, triangular samosas with a thin crackly crust in the Gujarati style. Filled with beef, mutton, chicken, fish, prawns or various vegetable fillings, these were popular snacks with all communities. In the early 2000s, racially mixed spaces, for dining or shopping, were still not common in Johannesburg, but everyone converged on Oriental Plaza, a shopping complex full of Asian-origin traders who sold everything.

At its heart was the shop World of Samoosas. People of all communities queued up to buy its food, not least because samoosas had become part of the braai, the South African barbecue tradition of eating and celebrating together. While the grills heated and the meat marinated, samoosas were consumed in huge amounts to get the drinking started. As might be expected, the instructions for making samoosas in Indian Delights are detailed. It starts with two recipes for fillings: Master Mince No. 1 and No. 2 and then goes into five pages of photos and instructions on how to cut and shape the pastry, with further pages on actually making the dough.

Indian Delights was created by the Women’s Cultural Group of Durban, which started in 1954. Most of its members were well-off, educated women from the Gujarati Muslim community who felt constrained both by apartheid and conservative community traditions. Mayat was a founding member of the group and says they deliberately did not invite successful women professionals to join for fear this might intimidate their rather sheltered members. Instead, they invited such women to talk to their members, to help them realise their potential for change.

One such speaker, Hilda Kuper, an anthropologist, got their backs up when she noted, rather patronisingly, that South African Indians had produced no literary works of note. Mayat responded by pointing to lack of education and time to write, given the demands of raising families and helping with the business. But Kuper’s comments rankled and the Women’s Cultural Group started debating what they could do. Post Toasties was a popular cornflakes brand at that time and one lady suggested sending the makers a recipe for chewda, the savoury snack mix made with cornflakes, for them to print on the box. That way people could bring some Indian spice in their life.

Mayat felt that they could aspire to more. She told the group: “Leave the Post Toasties, let’s start a book.” A cookbook would showcase Indian culinary culture and document community traditions. Some were dubious, pointing out that all South African Indian women knew how to cook, so why would they buy a cookbook? But others argued that the increasing severity of apartheid was changing things. Some Indians had started emigrating or, as a measure of security, married their daughters outside South Africa. (Two of my father’s cousins married South African Indian women like this). A cookbook would connect their community across the diaspora.

Creating the first edition of Indian Delights was a saga in itself. It involved the ladies calling in favours from across the Gujarati trading community to finance, print and sell it. The first edition came out in 1961 and the recipes and anecdotes give a vivid picture of community life. A recipe for Serva (Shorba) Curry, for example, recalls times when meat was scarce, so a little meat was used with lots of vegetables and water to create a thick curry. The meat was given to men and children first, while women had the gravy. Instructions were included on how to cut up newspapers intricately to make attractive, disposable tablecloths.

Many recipes involved adaptations to the different, rather diminished, range of ingredients available in South Africa. Maize, known as mealies, was a staple grain rather than rice or wheat, so there were recipes for mealie moothias, mealie rotlas and biryani made with mealie rice (coarsely ground maize). Maize’s use was more common with the Tamil community, descendants of indentured labourers, who tended to be poorer than the Gujaratis. Indian Delights, for all its vast range of recipes, represents the more elite Gujarati community rather than other Indian communities.

Meeting point

Meanwhile, as predicted, the increasing severity of apartheid was affecting the Indian community. Black people were either exiled to the “homelands”, parts of South Africa that the apartheid government pretended were separate countries, or forced to live in crammed, infrastructure-deprived areas such as Soweto. White people retreated to affluent bubbles, protected by the security services and staffed by Black servants who travelled in and out every day. Other communities, such as Indians or the Cape Malays in Cape Town, lived in an uneasy limbo between the two. They were slightly more privileged than Blacks – sowing the seeds for the resentment that Ngema would evoke with AmaNdiya – but constrained in terms of rights and access to opportunities.

Still this marginal existence did mean that Indians could create spaces, like restaurants, where all communities, with some precautions, could meet each other. It was at an Indian restaurant, for example, that Mandela took a young woman named Winnie Madikizela for lunch on March 10, 1957. She later recalled what a difficult experience it was: “I had never eaten curry in my life before and I drank gallons of Coca-Cola because it was burning – this hot, hot food I have never tasted before.” This was probably at Kapitan’s, a Johannesburg restaurant Mandela was known to favour. In 1987, while he was still in prison, he heard that Madanjot Ranchod, the owner, was planning to close down and wrote to him: “During the last 27 years we have lost so many dear friends and noted buildings that I sometimes fear that by the time I return, the world itself will have disappeared.”

Mandela’s love for Indian food also came from clandestine meetings in South African Indian homes. Meeting there was easier than in strictly White or Black areas. When I met Fatima Meer, the anti-apartheid activist (and friend of Mayat’s), whose husband Ismael had been close to Mandela, she told me, “My husband taught Mandela how to eat biryani.” Albie Sachs, who became a judge on South Africa’s Constitutional Court, told me how there was always curry when activists met. The first time he went for such a meal, “I reacted like any White South African and wondered how I could drop in at such short notice.” But the others laughed and said that Indian aunties could always extend meals. Tricks like adding masoor dal to biryani must have helped.

Before the arrest that led to his long incarceration, Mandela had to face other trials in which Indian food also played a role. Anna Trapido’s Hunger for Freedom, a memoir of Mandela told through food, writes about the 1952 Defiance Campaign during which he was arrested along with 20 other activists. Adelaide Joseph, a Tamil origin activist with the Transvaal Indian Congress, found a way to exchange messages in very large stacks of rotis. She would send them to the prisoners and tell the warders: “Please ask them to send back what they don’t eat because we’ve got a dog and we’re poor.” The replies came in the returned rotis.

In 1957, Mandela and others were arrested for what would be called the Treason Trials, an intense effort to silence them. The trials were held in Pretoria, the capital city where few activists lived, so that they would have to undertake long commutes and have trouble finding food. Women activists, both with the Transvaal Indian Congress and the White Congress of Democrats, took turns to send food, but the defendants quickly came to prefer the Indian food days. Ahmed Kathrada, one of the defendants, recalled: “The White ladies made peanut butter sandwiches. I sound very ungrateful… but we had so much peanut butter in those days. So, so much peanut butter.”

The Indian food was far more substantial and tasty. One Transvaal Indian Congress activist, Mrs Thayanayagee Pillay, was particularly dedicated and good at cooking. She would get up at 4.30 in the morning to start cooking so that the food would be ready to send to Pretoria. Her husband died during the trials and she only took three days off to mourn, making sure other people would do the cooking. The defendants sent her a special letter of appreciation and a sari in the black, gold and green colours of the African National Congress. In 1991, when Mandela was released after his long incarceration, he soon called Mrs Pillay and she rushed to meet him, dressed in that sari and carrying a Tupperware container of fish curry.

Stories like this helped cement the place of Indian food in South Africa, long after the end of apartheid. But things are changing now. A new generation of chefs is experimenting with the great produce the country has always had, from fruit and vegetables in the lush Western Cape area, grass-raised beef from the interiors, and a bounty of seafood from the cold waters of the southern Indian and Atlantic oceans that meet at the tip of Africa. Wolfgat, a small restaurant in the old fishing village of Paternoster on the west coast, north of Cape Town, was voted best in the world in the World Restaurant Awards in 2019.

Indians have also faded as the focus of xenophobic anger. These days it is more likely to be directed against African immigrants from other parts of the continent, attracted by South Africa’s relative prosperity. Downtown areas in the big cities are full of Ethiopians, Nigerians, Somalians and other nationalities – who have also brought their food. Ngema’s successors are as likely to abuse them, while still appreciating their food.

Even the bunny chow’s position as South Africa’s most famous bread based dish has been challenged by the Gatsby, a giant sandwich from Cape Town made of a baguette stuffed with meats, chips and sauce. It was invented by Rashaad Pandy, who is of South Asian origin, so some subcontinental influence remains, at least in the atchar put on it. Indian Delights, of course, has a massive section on atchar, 28 pages long, with recipes like City of Durban Achar and Sour Figs Pickle (made with a native South African plant).

There is also a South African Delight Achar, which the recipe says can be made with “unpeeled quinces, hard cling peaches, pomegranate seeds, cherries, hard grapes, green pears or apples…” and any other fruits or vegetables that the pickler might want to try. The recipe notes: “In submitting this recipe we give thanks to God for endowing our country so richly with the great variety of fruit and vegetable.” Whatever problems South Africa’s Indians might have faced from opponents of all kinds, the recipes collected by Mayat and her team in Indian Delights remain a testimonial to their faith in their country.

Vikram Doctor is a writer based in Goa. His email address is vikdocatwork@gmail.com.