Stories and Food

We spend the whole of today visiting people that our contact from the University of Witwatersrand knows and listening to their stories whilst eating their food.

We started at the home of some Cape Malaysians who were descended from slaves brought to Johannesburg from Malaysia.  They showed us newspaper clippings and photographs from the apartheid era and told us of their personal experiences of apartheid.  Prior to this visit, I believed that apartheid was a simple Whites:Non-Whites segregationist policy and that all Non-Whites felt the same about the system.  However, from the talk we were given, I learnt that the system was organised into a much more complicated system placing races in a very strict ordering.  Whites were at the top of the system, followed by Indians and Coloured peoples, with Blacks being placed at the bottom of the system.  This was designed to follow the policy of 'divide and conquer' that was the British policy during our colonial era.  The revolution against apartheid was also not instantaneous.  The middle classes, as with any country, at any time, under any system, prefer to maintain the status quo.  We were told that the middle class youth were the first to take part in the revolt, staging protests and placard demonstrations, usually again the will of their parents.  Their parents only joined in the revolution after the police tried to break up a meeting between pupils at a middle class school violently, leading to an increase in the community anger and the realisation that, although they were the middle class, apartheid was still considerably discriminatory against them.
This talk was followed by traditional food enjoyed by the Cape Malaysians, who had mixed their own flavours from Malaysia, with dishes from their communities in South Africa.

In the second house, we visited someone who went to school and took part in protests with our contact.  She told a story of how they were posting flyers promoting revolution with a coloured friend who was European in appearance.  On the last poster they were caught red-handed by the police yet, due to how their friend looked, the believed her to be White, so did not arrest them in case they offended a person who they thought was White.

We also visited a takeaway where we were learnt how to make only what I can describe as half a loaf of bread, with the inside removed, stuffed with chips, meat and sauces.  The removed bread is then squashed back in to make a cube of bread, which is then eaten.  Later, we visited a house who taught us to do bead-work, before heading to a house where the owner had prepared a three-course dinner.  She told us how she had met Nelson Mandela twice and, although they were a year apart, he remembered her and deliberately sought her out on the second occasion.

I could write quite a lot more, but most of the stories were quite anecdotal and I cannot really do them justice here.

Better be off now - got to let all this food digest over a movie.