An awful eyeful of offal

Andile Ndlovu recalls how, as a child, he resisted his family’s traditional food — and the shape of his body

BEFORE I even knew what vegetarianism or veganism or flexitarianism were, I had already developed a weird relationship with food.

My younger brother and I lived with our maternal grandmother in the Durban township of Newtown A, while my mother did her teacher training. She lived in Ntuzuma and my father in the notorious township of KwaMashu K.

No, we weren’t down and out — my mom could afford to send me to a former Model C school, North Crest Primary in the suburbs of Durban, and I had 50c pocket money to supplement my lunch tin. The pocket money usually went up in increments of 50c every year, although between grades three and seven it remained stagnant at R2.

There were, however, nights when things just didn’t make sense. When we were out of milk for our corn flakes, my gran would boil water and use powdered milk to make the cereal soggy, just the way my brother and I enjoyed it.

Some nights there was no mealie meal to make uphuthu and amasi, sour milk, which remains my favourite “dish” — despite my exposure to and obsession with celeb chef Lorraine Pascale’s chicken tikka masala with couscous (which my mother and older sister thought was really fluffy uphuthu!), frozen

In my head, my pen pal was white and also six and didn’t have to put up with fishpaste on her sandwiches

yoghurt and smoked salmon with scrambled eggs.

But it was the days when my grandmother would excitedly return home from a morning at the Warwick Junction market, carrying bags with sweet potato and amadumbe, taro and various fruits, that have always stuck with me. It was also around then, aged six, that I realised I had pet peeves when it came to food, which really rankled my gran.

She would come back, kick off her kitten heels, put on an apron and begin working on cleaning her tripe in a large bucket — which was also a sink for our dirty dishes.

Seeing it lying there in all its rubbery dullness and stench, as if whatever cow it had come from had suffered from gastric cancer, I would dread supper.

Perhaps watching its washing wasn’t as traumatic as having to bear the cooking of it. Even at that age, I wondered, are we eating this because we can’t afford better? Are they pretending to love it so I will try it too?

I never did. Sometimes I would lather my chunky piece of white bread with peanut butter and eat quietly, while my gran and brother indulged in the tripe and uphuthu, occasionally giving me looks.

Some days I would be on the verge of tears as soon as I knew we were having chicken gizzards and chicken feet, or canned pilchards, or cow tongue, or the likes.

When I felt sorry for myself, I’d imagine writing to my pen pal and telling her my woes. In my head, she was white and also six and didn’t have to put up with fishpaste on her sandwiches, and would sympathise.

I would tell her: “It’s very hard for me, my lunch tin and dinner plate are always full of misery. Even if I try to replace it with Diddle Daddle caramel popcorn, the happiness stays for only a few minutes.” All rather puerile. By 2000, I was in grade seven and living with both my parents and brother, and my daily pocket money was R5, which was enough to buy a steak-and-kidney pie.

But by then I had started feeling very self-conscious. TV commercials in the morning, before the Backstage rerun, were about sauna belts that would help melt away belly fat and cellulite from the thighs. There were weight-loss pills too, and when I deciphered that men were not meant to have cellulite but rather rock-hard abdominals, my piggy bank savings got serious.

I was going to save up for a bottle of 60 weight-loss pills, which would last me two months — enough time to save up for another bottle, I thought. I blamed my weight for my inability to sustain a spot in the school’s cricket A side. It became an obsession.

I would happily eat my mom’s cabbage and mince with rice, or her sugar beans and ujeqe, steamed bread, or her spinach and uphuthu with a side of beef sausage, only to feel guilty minutes later. I didn’t know what bulimia was, and never had the desire to run off to the loo either, but I felt dirty.

My father, who wasn’t always a hands-on parent, would take my brother and me to town. He bought me my first CD — KB’s Beautiful Vibrations , which I loved — yet all I wanted was to find a pharmacy so I could spend my hard-earned rands on pills.

The pills stayed under my bed and had to be taken half an hour before breakfast. I assumed by the time the food entered my tummy, the pills would be ready to engulf the carbs like a rugby player in a scrum, and wrestle the calories back out of my body. But my cunning plan lasted a mere three days. When my mother caught me, the conversation was awkward and brief. I’m fat and I hate it, I told her, after she had read the label and asked what business I had ingesting such. You will wash those down the drain, and that will be the end of it, she scolded. It was body dysmorphic disorder and I had to ignore it so it would go away, she said.

I’m old enough now to know what to eat and what not to eat, and I try to exercise as often as possible.

An ex demanded I read Paulo Coelho’s The Zahir, for various reasons, he said. We all believe that the main aim in life is to follow a plan, says the book. We never ask if that plan is ours or if it was created by another person. We accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas and it is more than we can possibly cope with, it says.

Despite it all, I have never been able to shake the feeling that I want to have bulging thighs and washboard abs and firm glutes, that I also want to display them on Instagram like so many others. Maybe that is all I must aspire to be, because at least one aspect of my life would finally be on track. And then maybe I can finally find genuine love and a salary I feel entitled to. Then maybe life will finally make sense. LS