Category: Business

A foodie revolution’s cooking in West Africa

At first glance, Republic, a revolution-themed bar in one of Accra’s busiest nightlife districts, could be any of the Ghanaian capital’s hotspots. Artsy residents, office workers and expats sit on plastic chairs in front of its wooden façade as dusk turns to night, ordering caipirihnas or snacks such as thick-cut chips and bowls of soup.

But look a little closer and all is not as it seems. The caipirihnas are made from akpeteshie – a traditional Ghanaian palm spirit also known fondly as Kill Me Quick, the chips are deep fried cassava, and the soup is called Fire Go Burn You – a particularly spicy incarnation of Ghanaian pepper soup.

Republic has an ethos of using local ingredients, championing traditional Ghanaian brews and ingredients but serving them up with a twist, and its owners say they are part of a foodie revolution beginning in the region, marking a new dawn in attitudes to eating.

“We are trying to create a new atmosphere here, and to rejuvenate our sense of identity,” said Kofi Owusu-Ansah (39) who founded Republic with his brother Raja last year. “If you look at our spirits, you will find not one single import – the base for all our cocktails is local-made sugar cane spirit akpeteshie”.

The "infamous frozen harmartan" served at Republic. (Pic: Republic/Facebook)
The “infamous frozen harmartan” served at Republic. (Pic: Republic/Facebook)

“We want to empower local industry and local brands,” Owusu-Ansah added. “It’s kind of a revolution the way I see it. No one in Ghana has ever experimented with these kind of cocktails using our Ghanaian spirits, even though all the ingredients are here. But now people are beginning to turn away from depending on whatever comes from the west, and making our own thing.”

There are no shortage of delicious ingredients to use. With fresh fish from the Atlantic, abundant and varied crops and a long heritage of spicy, well-seasoned food, some believe West African countries such as Ghana have the potential to be destinations for foodies from around the globe. But years of negative publicity and a failure to make local delicacies accessible to the outside world have skewed perceptions of the region.

“Nobody associates Africa as a continent with good food,” said Tuleka Prah, whose Berlin-based project My African Food Map documents food highlights from across the continent.

“People associate Africa first of all as a continent without food. If they do realise there is food there, they never think of it as good food – but as food that doesn’t taste nice, is difficult to make, stands around for hours, and is rudimentary and functional food,” Prah added.

“In Berlin, where I live, for example, there are lots of posters saying ‘Bread for Africa,’ accompanied by a photo of a hungry child and a piece of bread. The idea is that all Africans need is food to fill them up.”

A woman sells food from Ghana at a market in Berlin. (AFP)
A woman sells food from Ghana at a market in Berlin. (AFP)

Frustration at the way African food has been presented to the outside world has prompted a new debate.

“I’m a foodie and a wine writer, and I wanted to create a space where we can talk about anything and everything to do with African food and wine,” said Bukola Afolayan from the influential Africa Is a Country blog, whose new series Africa is a Kitchen looks at cooking across the continent. “It’s not just about taste and design, but also about chemistry, politics and economics.”

“I’ve noticed a change in attitudes recently. For example the big boys Accra and Lagos have always drunk champagne to show off, not because of an appreciation for it. But now I have noticed wine clubs opening up in Nigeria. And whereas it used to be bad wine that was imported to West Africa, there is more of a discernment now, with better wines from South Africa, Portugal and Spain.”

In western Ghana, upmarket beach resort Lou Moon is set on a tranquil bay sheltered from the rough waves of the Atlantic. But it’s the hotel’s food that is the big draw, with chef Yvonnic Ganlonon, who trained in gastronomic French cooking in Benin, using vegetables grown in the resort’s own garden and fish caught daily by local fishermen to offer exquisite food at London prices.

“I think people who come here appreciate the care and passion we take over our food. I love using the natural ingredients we grow here – cabbage, squash, carrots – everything is from our own garden,” said Ganlonon. “I come from a family of chefs, going back to my grandfather who is a master and teacher. My signature dishes are avocado and salmon velote, squash gratin, and a dessert of mango coulis and chantilly cream.”

But although Ghanaians have been going to places like Republic and Lou Moon in search of good food, diners around the world have been eating West African-inspired dishes without realising it.

“A lot of my inspiration comes from my mum, and the Ghanaian food my mother cooked for us growing up,” said Francis Ageypong, head chef at Christopher’s restaurant in Covent Garden, London. “I like food with flavour and I think that shows in my cooking.”

“I’ve noticed a lot of Africans entering the catering industry now – they are starting to see it as a career, instead of a go-between job, and realising how happy you can make people with really good food.”

How to make kelewele (spicy fried plantain)

Ingredients

4-6 ripe plantains cut into bite-sized cubes

1-2 teaspoons Cayenne pepper

½ teaspoon peeled grated fresh ginger root

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons warm water

Vegetable oil to fry

Chopped peanuts to garnish (optional)

Directions

1 Grind together grated ginger root, pepper, and salt and mix them in the water. Leave to stand for 10 minutes.

2 Place the plantain cubes into a bowl and toss together with the water and spice mixture

3 Heat about 2cm of oil in a deep pan of oil until it is hot

4 Add plantains, ensuring they are not touching or they will stick together – fry in several batches if necessary.

5 Cook until golden brown, turning once, then drain on absorbent paper. Sprinkle with chopped peanuts if desired.

6 Leave to cool for 3 minutes, then serve hot!

Afua Hirsch for the Guardian Africa Network.

Fashion to dye for

Christie Brown is a Ghanaian-based luxury women’s fashion label aimed at the contemporary African woman. It was founded in March 2008 by creative director Aisha Obuobi and named after her grandmother Christie Brown, a talented seamstress.

Obuobi’s creations extend from bespoke gowns to statement pieces to accessories, all inspired by African culture and art.

They’ve featured on the runways of Africa Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week, and in the pages of Vogue Italia, Harper’s Bazaar, Black Hair and Glamour.

Obuobi worked with tie-dye and batik for her latest collection, Resort 2013. It’s flirtatious, whimsical and part of a collaboration with Grace of Grazia Fabrics, who has built a 20-year-old batik/tie-dye business.

Click on an image below to view the collection.

[nggallery id=resort-2013]

Robert Mugabe fashion range a hit in Zimbabwe

Robert Mugabe is renowned for many things, but his starchy dress sense and Savile Row suits are considered the lesser of his crimes. And yet “dictator chic” has found a niche among young people in Zimbabwe.

Wearing a beret, T-shirt or golf shirt bearing the signature “RG Mugabe” is not only a fashion statement but an act of rebellion in major cities where denigrating “Uncle Bob” or “the old man” has almost become de rigueur.

The newest item in the collection is a cap emblazoned “1924”, the year of Mugabe’s birth – suggesting that, far from being a liability, the 89-year-old’s status as Africa’s oldest leader is a point of pride.

Under the brand House of Gushungo - Mugabe's clan name - the 88-year-old president's signature is splayed in silver studs across caps, T-shirts, coffee mugs and berets. Some items show his birth year, 1924, in Roman numerals. (AFP)
Under the brand House of Gushungo – Mugabe’s clan name – the 89-year-old president’s signature is splayed in silver studs across caps, T-shirts, coffee mugs and berets. Some items show his birth year, 1924, in Roman numerals. (AFP)

This improbable successor to Che Guevara or Barack Obama in cool iconography is the work of House of Gushungo. “It’s a bit daring,” says Jason Moyo, a journalist at the Mail & Guardian newspaper who last year visited Yedu Nesu, the company behind Gushungo. “It’s rebellious: everyone in the cities is supposed to be against Mugabe. People don’t expect urban young professionals to support him.”

The design is hardly spectacular, Moyo adds, but the Mugabe signature appeals to a particular group, typically around 30 and running their own business, who feel they are doing just fine under his 33-year rule.

House of Gushungo sales have been slowly rising over the past three years. The T-shirts, starting at $10, umbrellas and other regalia were a big hit at Mugabe’s Zanu-PF party’s last conference. Saint Mahaka, the label’s designer, told the BBC: “The young guys are into fashion. They talk about label, label, label … he [Mugabe] is already a brand himself. We decided, there is Versace, there is Polo, there is Tommy Hilfiger, people are putting on these labels, but don’t know who they are and what the story is. We know President Mugabe’s story, we know who he is.”

But Gushungo may be a victim of its own success. Zanu-PF reportedly wants to cash in on the brand and the justice minister is seeking to patent the RG Mugabe signature. In another stunt aimed at wooing young voters born long after his liberation struggle, a new video shows Mugabe, accompanied by a hip-hop beat, putting a phone to his ear and asking: “What’s up?” – Guardian News and Media 2013

Recovering from my own financial crisis

In 2007, I landed my first ever job as an accounts clerk at a printing company. I hated it. It paid the minimum wage and cost me more than I earned just to travel to and from work, but I was proud of the fact that I was employed.

After I got my first payslip, my ever-cautious dad began to badger me: “Ntoks, you should bring your salary slip and bank statement so we can go through it on a Saturday afternoon. I’ll help you manage your finances.”

Hell no! I kept my books away from him because they were badly kept ones which would reveal some questionable wastage – a McDonald’s treat for my friends, an extravagant dinner date, the occasional pair of shoes, and, uhm, splurges on a certain illegal green substance. (You’d be amazed at how active dealers’ bank accounts are.)

A few months later, African Bank offered me R5 000 of credit to be paid back over three years. At R150 a month, the installments were invitingly low. At the time I earned a salary of R3 000 so I was ecstatic about being approved for credit. I felt like a real adult but ironically I ignored the common sense that supposedly comes with growing up.

There I was in downtown Jo’burg in Gandhi Square, licking a R2.50 ice cream, when an over-eager credit sales person from the bank approached me, like a dealer on Oxford Road, and told me he could change my life. I was sold. I took the loan even though I did not need it – I was merely R200 short to top up my bus tag, and all I had to do to sort this out was call my mom.

I paid off my first debt in less than the stipulated three years, before I turned 21. By this time, in 2008, South African banks were over-extending themselves and loaning to people who earned even less than I did. Newspapers ran reports of how bad debts were eroding the South African economy, and the impact of the global economic downturn on our country.

Our economy was sucker punched into a recession, but our banks managed to remain resilient. This made me optimistic. And like a junkie, I went back to credit after being clean for only a couple of months, confident that I could control myself.

But the global financial crisis of 2007-2008, considered one of the worst ones since the Great Depression by economists, had different plans for me. Prices suddenly skyrocketed and I couldn’t afford what I used to. To make matters worse, in 2008 I made the bad decision to move out of home a month before securing an assistant business producer job at CNBC Africa. By then I was broke and pregnant. African Bank came to my rescue, with more than they offered me the last time! I paid rent, bought food, saved for transport, bought work outfits and booked a couple of doctors’ appointments. I even sent some of this money to my grandmother.

This is where the blur and the binge began. First it was one loan, then two then three then four, all from one bank and all with different repayment amounts. I signed up with Capitec Bank who introduced itself as my savior, but I ended up owning them more than I did African Bank. FNB, too, “helped” with the overdraft facility on my cheque card but it took just a few months for them to cut me off.

I survived on the overdraft facility for months - an extra R5 000 here, another R3 000 there - kidding myself that this was the solution. (Flickr/Images Money)
I survived on the overdraft facility for months – an extra R5 000 here, another R3 000 there – kidding myself that this was the solution. (Flickr/Images Money)

It finally dawned on me that I was deep in debt. It took a while for the depression to kick in. I am a business writer by profession; I report on economic issues and tell the world about bad business decisions and deals. I should’ve been smarter, and taken my own advice. At times, paranoia got the better of me. I was worried my financial situation would impact on my professional career and business reporters would gang up on me to say: “Ntokozo, we don’t need you to comment on this, you have bad credit, girl. Goodbye.”

I lay awake at night, eating chocolate chip cookies in bed and watching bad American reality TV shows like Money Chase, where people in huge financial trouble do crazy things to win money to pay off their debts.

This was the worst experience of my life, but it did teach me one valuable lesson: cash is indeed king. The banks usually neglect you once you become a liability to them; the friendly salesperson who helped sign you up for a loan quickly becomes your worst nightmare.

I am now slowly trying to control and erase my debt. I owe a lot of money to one bank, but rather one than three. I’m even being offered discounts on payments now (but I’ve learned this could be just another gimmick.)

My advice to other South Africans being tempted to spend money they don’t have is, simply: don’t. Save your money instead. I would never have said this five years ago, but putting away R100 instead of buying a pizza has made a big difference in my life.

Ntokozo Khumalo is a business writer, reporter, and producer. She is also the director of Hot Content Media. Connect with her on Twitter

No place quite like Bulawayo

It’s been four years since I last lived in Zimbabwe, four long years during which I strolled along the Mediterranean beaches in Algiers, ate Middle Eastern food, danced to Rai music and, like the rest of the world, observed the country of my birth from the other side of the looking glass. We are a country not exactly famous for positive headlines and I admit that I too have been sucked into negativity. Perhaps that explains the little pang of regret I feel as the bus crosses the Limpopo river and approaches the Beitbridge border post.

The differences are almost immediate when you enter Zimbabwean territory. The lights, for one, seem dimmer this side, the buildings older, the flag that stands at the entrance of the border post seems to be reminding itself of better days when its edges were less tattered. For a moment I wonder why I am going back when it seems so many are ignoring crocodiles, electric fences and the oh-so-insignificant fact that they don’t have passports to go in the opposite direction. But it is time: the bus stops and we descend to begin the appeasement of the bureaucratic god that lies in wait at every border post.

It hits me almost as soon as I step out into the crisp morning air. Perhaps it’s the freshness of the air, the excited buzz of passengers as they contemplate that their journey is almost at its end. I don’t know what it is but almost at once I feel glad to have arrived back home. It’s an amazing feeling to walk into a passport office and have the crest on your passport match the one on the Ministry of Home Affairs logo, to not have to explain where you are going and how long you are going to stay there. It’s an even greater feeling to hear the hawkers selling Buddie airtime, their voices insistent, belying the fact that they’ve probably been up all night.

The bureaucratic god is appeased with a cursory glance at my passport. He bangs a stamp on it and we board the bus again, waiting to depart. After a five-hour delay at customs, which I am assured is not that bad a wait, we are on our way. The people around me have become livelier. The relative calm is punctuated by occasional snoring. Some men behind me are talking about a man in Makokoba who has taken his mother for his lover. The woman next to me shows me photos of her children. She is working so that she can buy a house for her family. She likes living in South Africa, she says, but she misses home terribly. She asks me what I do.  I lie and say I am a student at Wits. I have discovered that is the best way to avoid barrages of questions about the Middle East, Islam and why on earth I would go and study there in the first place. (When I was offered a scholarship to study French and computer science there four years ago, my main thought back then had been that the journey would involve a plane.)

Five long hours later the bus finally arrives in the former capital of the Ndebele Kingdom, a city built by a king fleeing the murderous wrath of another king and named after the slaughter that occurred there so many decades before I was an idea in God’s mind. None of that is evident as I look out the window. All I see are scenes that had once been part of my every day, scenes I had taken for granted as I went on my way to school or to church. The tree-lined avenues of Bulawayo that will come October burst into a purple glory matched by few other cities; the vendors selling airtime at the robots; the kombis dodging through traffic, filled almost to bursting point with people on their way to work. Life had continued while I was away but for the most part the city is the same as it was when I left it.

Street life in Bulawayo. (Flickr/Julien Lagarde)

And it seems the headlines have not touched Bulawayo’s heart; forget them all. There is nothing like being where you know you will always belong. There is nothing like being able to speak in your mother tongue without having to resort to English-accented French or stuttering Arabic. Even my English can return to its default setting – here a traffic light is a robot, any soft drink is Coca-Cola, all toothpastes are Colgate and names like Priority are as commonplace as Matthew and Jacob. Here I can walk down the street with absolutely no fear of being stopped to show my ID, a practice that annoyed me in Algeria as much as it did in South Africa. And even when the Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority demonstrates its loose definition of the word ‘supply’, it can be a calming thing to sit in the candle light and talk about anything and everything under the sun.

And some things never change. The windis (kombi conductors) still hang half their bodies out of their vehicles; they stand at taxi ranks screaming at the top of their lungs for passengers. The old ladies still sit in the flea markets waiting to convince customers that their vegetables are the freshest and the cheapest. Youth still loiter on the streets during the day, dressed to the nines in the latest offerings of the Jo’burg and New York fashion world.

I come to realise that people have lived out their lives through a water supply crisis, an infamous economic collapse and a notorious Government of National Unity. The sun has risen and set on the townships and suburbs of Bulawayo all these years and people have gone about their days with smiles still reaching the sides of their faces, enduring the harsh, dark realities with bittersweet stoicism.

From afar the news headlines may have been accurate but they never told the full story. I realise that you can never be right whilst standing on the other side of the looking glass; you have to step through as I did and realise, as I did, that there is no place like home.

Bongani Ncube-Zikhali is a writer, poet, youth activist and a fan of Dr Sheldon Cooper. He is passionate about the written word and has been published in two anthologies by Amabooks. In 2010 he was awarded the Dr Yvonne Vera Award by the Zimbabwean Intwasa Arts Festival. He currently lives in Paris where he is studying computer science.