Mandela’s Life in Food and Drink

Vikram Doctor  ET
Saturday December 07, 2013, 07:18 AM

In October 1990, soon after leaving prison, the 72-year-old Nelson Mandela travelled to India to receive the Bharat Ratna. He was the second non-Indian citizen (after Khan Abdul Ghaffer Khan) to receive it and this was his first Asian country he visited after release.

 The Times of India reported that at the Rashtrapati Bhavan reception a journalist saw him snacking on vadas and asked if he liked Indian food: ““Oh yes,” Dr.Mandela replied with a smile and remarked “we can have a long discussion on this.”

He could, and not just on Indian food. Some national leaders are known for ascetic diets or indifference to food. Mahatma Gandhi was famously frugal in his tastes, while Anya von Bremzen, in her wonderful new memoir of Soviet cooking dubs Vladimir Lenin “Mr. Stale Bread and Weak Tea” for his lack of interest in food. But Mandela was a boxer, a well-built man, who from jail on Robben Island in 1970 would write to his wife Winnie: “You know darling there is one respect in which I dwarf all my contemporaries or at least about which I can confidently claim to be second to none – healthy appetite.”

Talking of Mandela’s interest in food might seem rather mundane at a time when the world mourns this symbol of freedom and reconciliation. Yet it was for the simple, mundane things of life he was fighting – for good food for everyone in the bounteous country he lived in, for the ability to eat it with one’s family without fear of arrests or deportation, for being able to have a meal in any house or restaurant with friends whatever their race. There was much more too, of course, but Mandela was no ideologue and for him the material things of life were what mattered most.

It shows in his autobiography, Long Walk to Freedom, where he remembers his childhood in the green hills of the Eastern Cape, wandering with other boys “to gather wild honey and fruits and edible roots, to drink the warm, sweet milk straight from the udder of the cow.” He didn’t romanticize this life – he knew they lived on milk, maize, sorghum (jowar), beans and pumpkins “because the people could not afford anything richer” yet he never forget how good such simple food could taste. He loved the sour milk of his Xhosa community so much it once almost gave him away. He was hiding with a white friend in Johannesburg and left a glass of milk on the windowsill to ferment, like we leave dahi out at night. Then he overheard two black men outside wondering what such an obviously black food was doing outside a flat in a white neighbourhood: “I left for a different hide-out the next night.”

Mandela was always ready to try the foods of the other communities in South Africa, and Indian food soon was a favourite. There were several reasons for this, starting with the fact that Indians enjoyed slightly more freedoms than the blacks and so could provide vital spaces for the struggle in its early years. And with spaces came food, as Albie Sachs, an activist who would become a famous judge, told me. He once went for a meeting in an Indian house and was told to stay for supper: “I reacted like any white South African and wondered how I could drop in at such short notice.” But his friends laughed and said the Indian aunty making the food was used to it: her curries were easily extendible to more guests and could be kept warm, or reheated with no loss of taste, as meetings dragged on forever.

There are several recipes for curries in Anna Trapido’s Hunger for Freedom which describes itself as a gastro-political history of Mandela’s life. It is a wonderfully obsessive book, tracking down the foods of his life, and the people who cooked them. This often makes it a tribute to the women of the struggle who played a two-fold role, both sustaining it from behind the scenes, yet often stepping to its forefront. Amina Pahad, for example, whose son Essop became a minister in the new South African government, is remembered here for the chicken curry she always provided at the shortest of notices, but also for how, as Mandela wrote, she “put aside her apron and went to jail for her beliefs. If I had once questioned the willingness of the Indian community to protest against oppression, I no longer could.”

Indian restaurants were another space where different communities met, and one played a personal role in Mandela’s life. In was to one of them in 1957 that he took a beautiful young woman called Winnie Madizikela for a first lunch. It was chicken curry, mutton curry and rotis, and she had never eaten anything so spicy in her life: “I would take one spoon, swallow and drink Coca-Cola, then attempt another. By the time we finished eating, I had tears in my eyes and was sneezing.” She had wanted to impress this upcoming lawyer and activist and now felt it had been a disaster. But, in fact, as Trapido writes, he was charmed by her inexperience and asked her to marry him the same day.

Indian food became even more important as the apartheid government started prosecuting the activists in the Treason Trials from 1957-60 in order to shut them down. Local families took one week in turn to supply the activists with food, and Ahmed Kathrada, one of Mandela’s closest comrades, recalled that “the accused looked forward to the Indian weeks because they cooked substantial food: curries and rice and so forth The white ladies made peanut butter sandwiches.” One lady, Mrs. Thayanayagee Pillay, was such a dedicated and good cook that Mandela and the others wrote her a joint letter of appreciation and gave her a sari in the ANC’s black, green and gold colours. Years later when Mandela came out of jail he called Mrs Pillay again and she rushed to meet him, wearing that sari and carrying fish curry!

Indian food was also useful when the activists were actually in jail. Adelaide Joseph, a Transvaal Indian Congress activist would bring them Indian food, including rotis with messages tucked between. And she told the policemen to ask them to send uneaten food back since they were poor and had a dog to feed. The return messages were in the rotis for the dog! Such easy flows of food and information ended when the prisoners were exiled from the mainland, to the prison on Robben Island. The intent was to isolate them so effectively that they would be forgotten and the struggle wither in their absence.

It was the true achievement of Mandela and his comrades that far from letting this happen, they turned it around. In the isolation of Robben Island they were forced to put aside all divisions and find a united strength to resist the regime. The rebellions were often small, yet cumulative, and as in prisons across the world, it often started with food because that is the one thing jailers cannot entirely deny if they want their prisoners to live. The food was often bad and it was also differentiated by community, yet the prisoners found ways to pool them, to be inventive and improve them and at the extreme, to stage hunger strikes that usually forced the jailers to give in.

Indian food played its role here too. Mandela’s lawyer was Dullah Omar, a South African Indian who would later become Minister for Justice. When he went to meet Mandela his wife Farida sent samoosas and fruit with him, and always the jailers sent it back. But just once they overlooked it and Mandela was delighted to eat his first banana in 15 years. Indian priests went to cater to the spiritual needs of the Indian prisoners and one of them managed to smuggle chillies, the only spices the men ever got. They also brought sweets and special foods for festivals and as one prisoner recalled when Eid or Diwali came “everybody was suddenly converted to Hinduism or Islam.” But with Mandela, he added, the interest was real “and he did use to attend all types of services… (it was) not just about the food.”

As the apartheid regime came under increasing pressure it realised it had to treat Mandela differently. He was shifted back to the mainland, to conditions more like house arrest. Some of the most evocative food descriptions in Long Walk to Freedom come from here as, aided by a warder who was a good cook, Mandela learned to enjoy food again. Finally he was freed and it was time to lead the new country – and reconcile it with the old. One of the things he did as President was to invite the wives of all the old apartheid leaders to meet the anti-apartheid women activists. Amina Cachalia, one of the leading Indian activists recalls everyone was intimidated: “Most of our women didn’t have too much to say to the other women.” But Mandela spread his charm and, equally important, poured lots of sweet sherry and Cachalia remembers it all ended with everyone at ease (and perhaps a bit tipsy). Perhaps only Mandela might have thought of such an event – and pulled it off with the help of good food and drink.