What’s in a mielie?
More contested heritage than you might think
When someone shouts “It’s my culture”, you’d better back off. Many of us argue in this way when we’re challenged about some practice or other, firmly putting a full stop to any debate. The tactic is used to defend a practice some groups disapprove of, a noted South African example being polygamy. On the other hand, heritage is sometimes imposed on a subject people, as Steve Biko pointed out: “In a country like ours [blacks] are forced to celebrate holidays like Paul Kruger’s day. Heroes’ day, Republic day etcetera, all of which are occasions during which the humiliation of defeat is at once revived.”
In a country as fractured as SA, tradition brings painful memories for many. Since 1994, fears have been expressed by formerly dominant groups that it is they who are now being imposed upon.
It’s not just the meat
There are very few things we South Africans agree belong to us all, but perhaps one of them is pap.
A staple food of black South Africans, it has gradually made its way into almost every household, except perhaps that of the Oppenheimers of old. Somehow one can’t imagine old Harry digging into a dish of white maize with chakalaka on top.
But these days Harry’s grandkids, if they’re still in the Beloved Country, might well be doing what their grandpa never did. Anyone who has a braai knows it’s not just the meat, it’s also the pap.
And yellow maize is used to feed livestock on an industrial scale — so consumers of chicken, beef and other meats are also consumers of pap twice removed. Pap en vleis is our heritage, even if the vegetarians among us will forego the vleis.
But maize means different things to different sectors of South African society. So just how South African is mealie meal?
It’s complicated.
Tortillas rule, OK?
We have to go back a little further to answer the question, to when maize wasn’t even on the continent.
It was first harvested about 10,000 years ago. Most scientists and archaeologists agree it comes from Oaxaca in Mexico, where it was prepared in a variety of ways, such as in tortillas and tacos. Columbus took maize grains back to Spain from Latin America, and by the mid-16th century it was widespread in Europe, though deemed fit only for animals or the poorest of peasants. It slowly made its way into more diets, and in Italy mashed corn was transformed into polenta.
Scholars tend to agree that it was the Portuguese who introduced maize to their colonies in Africa, where it transformed political economies, gender relations, settlement patterns and storage, distribution and food-processing technologies. Maize became the cause of population booms wherever it travelled.
Jan van Riebeeck did not report seeing maize when he arrived at the Cape in 1652, but by 1658 “he recommended the sowing of maize brought from West Africa’s Guinea Coast to the first generation of Dutch farmers”, according to James McCann in his book Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000.
Sotho-Tswana farmers were growing maize in the Thabazimbi area of what is now Limpopo in the 17th century, and 18th-century travellers to SA reported seeing maize as part of the Xhosa diet. Maize was farmed in the eastern Cape by the time whites settled there in the early 19th century.
Later, in the 1850s, Africans in what is now KwaZulu-Natal grew enough maize to export to Cape Town, and in the 1870s tenant farmers sold their produce on the diamond fields in Kimberley, before political developments deprived them of land to farm on. One observer at the time noted: “The native grew a very large proportion of the mealie crop and would grow much more if they had better facilities for marketing it.”
The maize triangle — Free State, Mpumalanga and North West — came into being after farming moved inland from the eastern Cape. It now produces about 80% of SA’s maize.
Until the early 20th century, sorghum and millet, indigenous to Africa, were the dominant crops in southern Africa. But the development of mining after 1886 brought maize into the centre of food production. It is the most widely distributed food plant in the world, and it is also the most studied plant species on the planet.
Mining and big business
The Oppenheimers might not have eaten pap themselves, but they depended on it as an essential input in the extraction of gold. Mealie meal was used to feed miners going down into the bowels of the earth to mine gold, for which they were paid a pittance. Mine owners used mealie meal because it was the cheapest form of nutrition.
By 1890 the mining industry employed 100,000 men. Deep-level mining, begun in 1897, meant that costs had to be minimised, especially after the workforce trebled. By 1912 the industry employed 325,000 men, most of them Africans from the southern African region.
The six dominant companies kept costs down by accommodating migrants in compounds, barricaded in tribally divided sections, feeding them in-house — and mealie meal was a key part of the diet.
In later years, pass laws and influx control helped keep the migrant workers captive. But how to keep these confined captives more or less happy? The elegant solution was to give the mineworkers the cheap, locally made umqombothi, a corn-based beer.
The black experience
The Native Land Act of 1913 killed off the African peasantry, all those producers of maize and other foodstuffs who had been supplying the mining industry before Union. But it was not just the miners who were eating pap. In the reserves — the homelands — families grew maize, which developed into the staple of the African diet.
Its consumption is steeped in humility, the consumer often sitting on the floor, scooping the porridge off plastic plates — an image much glimpsed in SA. Pap is often supplemented with potatoes, pumpkin, samp or green vegetables, especially spinach. Meat is a luxury, and consumed on fewer occasions.
Pap was experienced as part of the humiliation of an apartheid diet, according to one account: “Even somebody will never see that I am poor or I not eat, because I am always happy, I am always smiling. People not gonna say, this man eat pap without maybe a fish or whatever.”
On Robben Island, black inmates were given mealie meal while Indians and coloured prisoners were served bread and jam.
But the taste for pap remains. It has survived the transition to democracy, and is still consumed by the majority of black people. Shisanyama restaurants catering to a black middle-class with a taste for braaied meat and pap have moved to the suburbs.
The Afrikaner taste for pap en vleis
Although it was the staple food of the black masses, linguistics reflect an older hierarchy: the word pap means porridge in Dutch, and in SA an ear of maize is a mielie, the powdered form is mealie-meal, and the porridge mealie-pap.
It is difficult to establish how pap entered the diet of the Afrikaner, but the poor white problem studied by the Carnegie Commission in the 1920s and 1930s found that many Afrikaners had been impoverished by the development of capitalist agriculture. The proletarianisation of up to 300,000 Afrikaners was a grave problem for Boer leaders, who were terrified when whites mixed with blacks in urban slums.
It is possible that this was when maize became part of the Afrikaner diet. In one history textbook, eyewitnesses describe the living conditions of poor whites: “A hovel was seen in the corner made by two corrugated iron fences … Here a mother and her five children lived.” “The kitchen would be outside in the open, where there would be a pot of mealie-meal porridge for breakfast, lunch and supper.”
Buzz South Africa lists 10 criteria to identify Afrikaners, one of which is: “You are an Afrikaner if your breakfast mainly features some kind of porridge called putu pap or stywe pap. This is normally taken together with boerewors.”
Maize retailer Geelmeel declares on its website: “Maize meal porridge has been part of our Afrikaans culture for a long time. This unique flour product is combined with Afrikaans songs, poems, and other Afrikaans adages.”
Clearly, Afrikaners regard maize as a part of their culture — though there might be dissenters.
Heritage matters
An even more elegant solution to keep costs down was for mining monopolies to branch out into the farming and refining of corn and sugar, thereby developing capitalist agriculture.
In the 1960s dams and irrigation schemes provided the conditions for crops to be grown where they had not been grown before. Maize began to be cultivated on an industrial scale in parts of the Free State and Transvaal, with government subsidies enabling the process.
Maize became the most important field crop in
SA, and up to 12Mt are produced annually.
It is the most important source of carbohydrates for human and animal consumption in the Southern African Customs Union.
So, a complicated history indeed, with sometimes humiliating episodes rendered sublime by new connotations and contexts.
Any heritage is almost always from elsewhere, something from outside made one’s own, and pap/maize is one of these.
Heritage is a fiercely contested thing, not at all an agreed set of traditions passed down unchangingly from one generation to the next, and even within families there are struggles to introduce new elements and leave out old ones. The dispute over the Afrikaans section of SA’s national anthem is one such struggle in the
Rainbow family.
Heritage is the invention of tradition, the reinvention of past practices and an attempt to fix and codify a practice, often to establish an identity. The braai has become an element of the Rainbow Nation, something all South Africans can partake of in their attempt to reinvent the nation.
Heritage is also liable to be used for commercial ends. For example, when Chevrolet wanted to increase sales of its cars in SA in 1974, it launched a now-famous radio jingle celebrating the connection between “braaivleis, rugby, sunny skies and Chevrolet”.
Heritage is often the result of arbitrary and whimsical developments, accidents and even distortion. The Australian accent has been put down to the overconsumption of alcohol, drunken talk becoming normalised, and a debate has raged about the origins of curry. It has been settled as being Indian, but a key ingredient, chilli powder, is, like pap, from South America. Northern Italy looks down on the south, saying when they aren’t eating polenta, their diet of pasta makes them lazy and stupid.
So next time someone shouts “It’s my culture”, tell them it’s yours too. Or not.
Sotho-Tswana farmers were growing maize in the Thabazimbi area of what is now Limpopo in the 17th century