African Cooking

Introduction: One Man Reads the Many Faces of Africa - Section 1 of 1 (1 )

This is a very personal book by a very personable man. He is African - born there and bred there - and proud of it, and his pride in his continent and his love for it show through his writing. He is also white, and some may say that that shows through too, but he is no white supremacist and although South Africa was his birthplace he has no stomach for the apartheid approach to human society. He loves people, he loves food, and he is equally at home with the desert people of the Kalahari, the forest people of Southeast Asia, the sophisticated people who inhabit the world's greatest restaurants - and with all the food that goes with them.

He is, of course, only one man, and let it be said at once that this is only one man's view of a part of Africa - very special, very personal and, of course, far from comprehensive. There is simply too much to African cooking for any one man to know it all. Indeed, the place is so big so variegated that this is only one of several books in the FOODS OF THE WORLD series to take up the cuisine of Africa. The Mediterranean coastal countries are dealt with elsewhere, and other volumes acknowledge the important culinary debts owed by Latin America, the Caribbean islands and the United States to the people from black Africa who crossed the Atlantic in slave ships. So if it is asked, "How can you cover Africa in one volume?" the answer is that you cannot; it has taken several.

If it were a matter of whose cooking was first, then perhaps this book should lead all others in the field of regional cooking. For it was evidently in Africa that man began his checkered career on earth, and probably in Africa that he first mastered fire - an achievement that the author regards as "the most inspired and greatest of all ideas ever to issue from the mind of man," and that anybody must regard as the crucial first step toward cooking, toward survival, toward civilization.

Africa today has about a fifth of the world's land surface but only about a tenth of the world's population (including a few million Europeans), and some of the world's most splendid scenery. Most of it was never a paradise: afflicted by hunger, disease and tribal wars, its aboriginal peoples were almost always a society on the run. They could never afford to settle down and enjoy the generations of simply staying put that are essential to the development of sophisticated cuisines, and so their systems of cooking remained simple. Their customs - including the culinary ones - and indeed their total cultures had to be handed down by word of mouth. For while they did not lack for languages, speaking some 800 different ones among them, they had no way of leaving written records for their descendants to profit from. Only a few tantalizing clues remain to such peoples' deep and talented past, like the beautiful rock paintings that have survived in a Sahara that once was as green as Eden.

Wherever the outside world of the Arab and the European intruded on Africa, it was for violent purposes of plunder. Raiders, traders and invaders simply helped themselves - to slaves, to ivory and to the helpless continent itself, which they carved into colonial domains in disregard of natural or tribal boundaries. They taught the Africans little (except, perhaps, new dimensions of hatred) and learned little from them. And in this century, as their empires have dissolved, their legacy has been a proliferation of angry nations ill-equipped to endure. In many ways, they have left the "Dark Continent" darker than they found it.

The Africa of this book has had its share of all this. It is immense in itself, stretching all the way from Ethiopia through the sub-Saharan lands of West, East and Portuguese Africa down to the Cape of Good Hope. It is also extremely diverse, but as the author points out, it has interesting common denominators of soil and minerals, of animal and vegetable life, if not of cuisine. For example many of the same animals that are encountered up in Ethiopia, like the greater kudu, are found again thousands of miles south in the Transvaal, on the far side of the great equatorial zone, where they feed on the same kinds of shrubs. The lion and elephant preside over the wildlife and the great, stark baobab tree, looking "like a carrot planted upside down," stands guard over the landscapes - and provides food - from one end of this Africa to the other.

Since Laurens van der Post knows his continent like a book, it is fitting that he has written this one. Thirteenth child in a family of Dutch and Heguenot descent, he succeeded to a large ancestral farm called Mountain of the Hyenas in the Orange Free State, and his background in the south of Africa runs back 300 years. As a British army officer in World War II he helped return Emperor Haile Selassie to the throne in Ethiopia, blowing up a number of Italian trucks in the process, and his credentials in that country are good. As for the lands in between he likes to say, "I think I have covered more thousands of miles of Africa on my own two flat feet than any other man," and he has found no one to dispute it.

Like every other volume in this series, Colonel van der Post's presents the author's own, personalized view of the subject. His own experiences, opinions and interpretations are here; he does not purport to be, and has not been encouraged to try to be, all things to all Africans. As you read the book you will share in the adventures of a wise and good man who has spent more than six decades getting to know Africa, and who in his seventh decade insists there is great hope for it.