I spent the last four months surrounded by tourists in the Transkei eating roughly 80kg of mielie pap at a rate of 1kg of pap per day. I ate the pap for breakfast. I ate the pap for lunch. I ate the pap for dinner. It was delicious. It was nutritious. I wouldn’t swop it for anything in the world.
Of all the addictions on offer in the Kei, pap is by far the most abundant and readily available. Boxer Superstores have it, Spar has it, each and every spaza shop has it. Should you have a mielie grinder under the back seat all you have to do is stop next to the road to get it, depending of course on the time of year and the level of veg ubuntu practised by the grower in question. April is best. Some money in your wallet recommended.
In the morning, I ate the pap in a blikbord using the biggest spoon in the kitchen, sitting at the table with the best view. None of the tourists bothered me while I ate my pap. They kept their distance, slurping Fruit Loops, stealing glances at the South African staring into the distance stuffing his face with what looked like couscous. It was the closest they’ve ever been to pap and I could tell by the look on their faces that they didn’t know what to make of it.
On one occasion a Dutch lady mentioned from across the table how much it reminded her of polenta – a moosh enjoyed by the Italians.
“That looks a lot like like polenta,” she said.
“This is not polenta, my dear, this is pap,” I assured her, looking up from my pap for a moment.
“Pap is made from the mielie, or umbona. It’s the lifeblood this whole country runs on. Without pap there is no sous. Without pap there is no amasi. It’s the yellow in our flag; the white in our smiles. Now if you’ll excuse me I’d like to get back to my pap.”
Unsure how to handle all this, the Dutch lady stood up and left the table. I felt bad for a bit but after more pap I felt better.
Believe it or not, pap in the morning was, and is, like a drug to me. Maybe it’s the sugar, maybe it’s the fact that White Star™ maize grows genetically engineered mielies (it says so on the pack), but when I sit down with that blikbord in the morning everything in the universe makes sense.
I think we can all do with some pap in the morning.
With enough pap in their stomachs the pupils of the Eastern Cape will be able to flee the mud structures collapsing around them.
With some more pap on the menu maybe Juju can afford to finish his house and move out of the middle-class slum of his white protégé agent Ovaria.
With another mouth to feed I know for a fact the Zuma household can use a 10kg bag White Star™ in the pantry.
Pap is our common denominator. From Musina to Mossel Bay we’re all swimming in a steaming pool of pap. Shaped like an Olympic torch the umbona is a shining light in our land and the pap it produces the golden thread that ties us together.
Pap it up South Africa – it’s what makes us work.
In the spirit of togetherness and for the greater good I’m posting my krummelpap recipe below (coming soon via the Pap App for BlackBerry). Read it slowly and with care. I’m giving you pearls here.
Krummelpap:
Like Mystique from X-Men pap can take on many different forms. There’s slap pap for the novice, stywe pap for the fisherman and krummelpap/phutu pap for the connoisseur. Made with the minimum amount of water, krummelpap can be enjoyed on a dune in the Namib or the surface of the moon. To make krummelpap you need patience and a pot. Put the pot in a fire or on a stove. Add the littlest amount of water. Bring the water to the boil, take the water off and add the mieliemeel so it forms a mound resembling Kilimanjaro from the sky. Put the lid back and leave that mini mountain for half an hour. Come back after half an hour and take the lid off. At this point you can’t take any nonsense from the pap. Take a houtlepel and manhandle the pap. Don’t go ape shit, just turn the pap over, making sure what was in the middle is on the outside and vice versa. Add some water, put the lid back and forget about the pap. Come back after another half hour, take the lid off and have the pap.
@Enough Said
I will do some more investigating. While I did read similar stories in a number of articles by different authors, it’s not inconceivable that wrong facts from one got copied by all the others.
Apparently Dan Wylie is a lecturer in English, so I wonder how academically rigorous his historical analysis is.
@Oldfox
Dan Wylie’s book is thoroughly researched and referenced. He has read the scholarly works of the top fundies on Zulu history and goes back to source to check accuracy.
John Wright (University Kwa-Zulu Natal History Dept) who has done more work on early Zulu history than anyone else read Wylie’s manuscript for his book I quoted from. Wylie also relied on other experts in Zulu history as well as manuscripts, documents etc.
We can quote from Dan Wylie’s book with confidence until new information comes available.
Oldfox
No thanks – I have no desire to wade throught the amount of mythical junk reading I would have to do to get the facts. But I refer you to “The Life and Times of Daniel Lindley” and his description of how confusing it was for the missionaries to put up a mission station near a kraal, only to find out that 6 months or 1 year later that the Zulus tribe had moved overnight on to fresh grazing because the local grazing was exhausted. He arrived in Zululand a few years after the death of Shaka in the days of Dingaan. If that is not nomadic pastoralist – then what is it?
And there are numerous writings about how the blacks migrated from the Cameroon area of the West Coast to the Congo, and from the Niger Congo Delta to Southern Africa over a period of 3000 – 2000 years (ref: “Africa Since 1800″ published by Cambridge University Press)
And how did Shaka “unite the clans”? By killing them? Both the first ANC president John Dube, and the 4th ANC president were survivors of tribes wiped out by Shaka.
Oldfox
For as long as the blacks migrated South the land could not be exhausted. I suspect they migrated to fresh grazing after they had harvested the grain crops. But once they could migrate no further, then the overgrazing and land erosion started. The Xhosa, for example could not go back – the Zulu were migrating behind them, nor go forward into the land taken by the whites who were there before them – which was why there were 9 frontier wars between the whites and the Xhosa.
AFTER that came colonisation, which also meant the ending of the tribal wars and the curing, by colonial doctors, of diseases like maleria, blackwater fever, yellow fever, sleeping sickness et al.(for free what’s more – no American pharmaceutical company patents!)
THAT is when the population explosion started, plus the erosion of the land with overgrazing by a settled, no longer migratory, population.
I don’t think maize replacing sorghum had anything to do with it.
One of the biggest fallacies is “whites took the best land”. Whites in both South Africa and Zimbabwe left the blacks on the land they found them on, which was not necessarily where they had lived for long, but where they had migrated to before the whites came.
But they did not know how to farm cattle without migrating to fresh pastures all the time.
In America, Australia , New Zealand and other parts of the world blacks were moved off “the best land” NOT in SA or Rhodesia.
The Transkei Homeland is still where the Xhosa were living when the whites came. Zululand is still where the Zulus were living when the whites came.
Once AGAIN American history has been imposed on Southern Africa!
Oldfox
The reason WHY Shaka started the Mfecane, the killing of the neighbouring tribes, is that the Shaka had stopped his Zulu tribe migrating, and had formed a permanent kraal – and therefore needed more grazing land for cattle.
So they drove the neighbouring tribes off the land which Shaka wanted for grazing his cattle.
Which is the same reason that the English Aristocracy had for ‘
“enclosing the commons” and driving the serfs off the communal land.
Africa was still feudal at the time the whites arrived. And the reason Africa was behind the rest of the world in development is that it was cut off from other civilisations by the Sahara Desert and the Atlantic Oceans, so did not have interaction with new ideas and other cultures.
The rest of the world learned gunpowder from the Chinese, paper from the papyrus of the Eyptians, maize and tobacco from America etc etc etc