Food played role in Nelson Mandela's incarceration / struggle

By Marius Bosch REUTERS July 18, 2008

JOHANNESBURG – Food featured prominently in Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid, from using cooking pots to smuggle messages during his 27-year imprisonment to his first dinner of chicken curry as a free man.

A new book on the life of Mandela, who turned 90 on Friday, says South Africa's first black president calls people to the dinner table saying: 'Let's go to battle'.

Author Anna Trapido describes the book 'Hunger for Freedom' as a 'gastro-political history with recipes'.

The book describes how Mandela and his fellow prisoners at South Africa's Robben Island prison off Cape Town, where he spent 18 years, tried to make do with meagre rations of maize porridge while white prison warders gorged on crayfish.

In later years, the prisoners were allowed to move more freely and they collected seafood themselves to supplement their prison food.

But prisoners also used food as a weapon, holding hunger strikes to press for improved conditions.

Mandela and his comrades smuggled messages to non-political inmates in cooking pots, telling them of recent news and of decisions taken by the ANC prison leadership.

Mandela became a keen gardener, growing vegetables in several South African prisons to supplement the bland diet.

'A garden is one of the few things in prison that one could control ... Being a custodian of this patch of earth offered a small taste of freedom,' he said in his autobiography.

Trapido says that in Mandela's early activist days lunches were often used to mask political meetings.

He and other activists met at private homes, ostensibly for lunch but in reality they were plotting the future strategy of the African National Congress – now South Africa's ruling party.

INDIAN LUNCHES

Many of those lunches featured Indian food, for which Mandela developed a taste while working as a lawyer in the 1950s.

His first dinner after being freed by the white government in February 1990 was chicken curry.

Trapido says when Mandela became president in 1994, his instructions were that the household comptroller of presidential residences needed to be someone who could cook biryani – a South Asian dish prepared with rice, spices and meat or vegetables.

Even after he retired in 1999, the comptroller continued to send biryani from Cape Town to Mandela's house in Johannesburg.

But Mandela's cook for many years, Xoliswa Ndoyyiya, said in the book that he prefers traditional African food.

'Madiba (Mandela's clan name) is always happiest with traditional food. If you don't give it to him, he will call you and ask: 'What's wrong? Why are you not feeding me well?'

Once while staying in London's luxurious Dorchester Hotel on an official trip, Mandela grew tired of the food and asked for a staff member flying from South Africa to bring along a tub of 'umphokoqo' – a traditional dish of South Africa's Xhosa tribe, made with maize porridge and sour milk.