Johannesburg - The last place you should expect to find Nompumelelo Mqweba is in a Sandton cafe.
She isn’t eating anything though, just having coffee and using the free wi-fi. The menu would hardly suit her, because Mqweba is an advocate of African cuisine like pap, ujeqe and imbuya, not the pizzas, pastas and burgers that proliferate in South Africa.
Mqweba is aiming to build national pride in our home-grown food, but pinning down exactly how she’s going to do that is difficult, because she’s got so much on her plate.
There’s her effort to persuade farmers to reinstate traditional crops and farming methods; a push to encourage more women to enrol in cookery schools and work up to be head chefs; cookery demonstrations; a food blog and a column in The Mercury; and a sponsor to find for her annual food fair.
Her newest project will let us taste some of her creations as she teams up with chef Kosta Kosmas to feature some African dishes at his soon-to-open Metro Restaurant in Bryanston.
Mqweba grew up surrounded by food, because her grandmother ran a cafeteria in Howick and had an orchard growing all sorts of fruit that she used in her dishes.
“My first burn was on her coal stove,” Mqweba remembers. “She was the first person who taught me how to make ujeqe, the steamed Zulu bread.”
Later, the family lived in Durban and her father, a ship’s cook, came home bearing food from “anywhere and everywhere”, she says. “But with such good cooks at home I was scared to cook because everyone used to critique - you could have put more salt there or it needs more chilli,” she remembers.
Later she cooked for friends and family, but worked in textiles and then in recruitment.
“I was doing well but I wasn’t happy and I decided I wanted to take my cooking seriously so I resigned, took my package and went to a cookery school.”
The school ran a restaurant and she also worked at another restaurant in her spare time to gain more experience.
Once she qualified she drove to the five-star Zimbali Lodge and got a job that hadn’t actually existed. She drove in, walked straight to the kitchen and got herself introduced to the executive chef, she says. “I decided it was where I wanted to work because I wanted the best.”
Even then she realised that South Africa does little to promote its traditional foods. “At cookery school we didn’t cover African cuisine, we didn’t cover anything I grew up eating.
“Ethiopian and Senegalese and north African food is called cuisine, but here at the bottom of Africa it’s something you might find stuck in a corner. Why are we not taught African methods of cooking using African crops and learning the culture behind it? There needs to be a mind-shift.”
Our historical records haven’t been well preserved, and the traditional passing of farming and cooking knowledge from one generation to the next was destroyed by the forced movement of people during apartheid, she says.
Farming methods have become commercial and dictated by Western tastes, so indigenous crops that could have survived the recent droughts have been lost and farmers took a battering as a result, she believes.
“People tell me they can’t find the food they see me cooking on my blog, and it’s because the farmers grow what the market wants,” she says. “The old crops are still there, but grown just for themselves. I’m working with farmers and I cook the foods and present them in a way that’s suitable for restaurants.”
Mqweba has been inspired by attending the Ballymaloe Organic Farm and Cookery School in Ireland, where Darina Allen’s efforts are turning Ireland’s former food inferiority complex into a pride in its national dishes.
Done properly, South Africa could market itself as a culinary tourism destination, Mqweba believes, not just as a safari spot with fabulous wines.
“We are busy cooking everyone’s food except for whatever is originally from this country, and the moment we do that we have the potential for culinary tourism.
“We’re always talking about couscous but we have our own version in phuthu (maize meal). Why can’t we serve phuthu and kale with peanuts in a restaurant?”
Her company, Africa Meets Europe, is working with the Central Johannesburg College to mentor its cookery students by involving them in its cooking demonstrations, and trying to find them internships.
She wants to see more women rise through the industry, but says kitchens are fairly hostile places that tend to be chauvinistic and racist.
“Women are second-class citizens and black women are third-class,” she says. “People don’t like to hear about women going into leadership positions - it irritates the hell out of them.”
Not enough people in South Africa are listening to her campaign, but foreigners certainly are. Mqweba was invited to cook at a Taste of Chicago festival because Durban is a sister city to Chicago.
“I made pap with tomato relish and ostrich meat, and in the end our stand had the longest queue of people wanting to try it,” she says. She also cooked at the South Africa Season in Paris in 2013, presenting South African cuisine at a series of lunches and dinners.
Now she’s about to train the chefs in the Metro Restaurant so they can produce a few of her dishes when it opens.
The chefs probably eat these dishes already at home, she says, but she’ll show them the flourishes that elevate them to restaurant standard in taste and presentation.
She’s had offers to open restaurants in partnership with other chefs, but turns down those opportunities so she can try to feed minds rather than stomachs.
“If I was to run a restaurant I wouldn’t have time to do all this. I’d be in the kitchen every night cooking.”
See more at www.africameetseurope.co.za
Sunday Independent