UberEats offers easy access to traditional African food our mothers used to make back in the day
My mother loves to tell the story of how — as a first-time mum more than 50 years ago — she tried her best, within the limitations of my father’s teacher salary and the confines of our semi-urban village, to do everything by the baby book when she had me.
She tried to put me, once I was old enough for solids, on a “modern” diet that many African mothers believed was better for their babies than the more traditional fare back in the 1970s, even though the items were usually pricey.
This included Pronutro infant cereal, store-bought pureed apples, bananas and carrots in a jar. But I was having none of the fancy “English” stuff, to my mum’s mortification. Give me isitshwala (pap) soaked in chicken gravy, however, and I would lap it up within minutes.
So began my lifelong love affair with African food. The problem is it’s not easy to get hold of when one lives in northern Johannesburg. At least, not until fairly recently.
I mean “real” African food. Like fresh “hardbody” chicken which I used to drive 50 km to a butchery on the outskirts of the city to buy. Because the bland-tasting factory-reared variety from the Pick n Pay, Shoprite, Checkers or Spar sometimes just didn’t cut it.
Even their “free range” chickens have nowhere near the same flavour you will get in their leaner, hardier cousins that are allowed to roam free and peck at whatever they want in rural areas. The meat is tougher and needs boiling before you fry it, but it is worth the extra effort.
And then one day, some five years ago, while scrolling through Uber Eats and trying to decide, without much enthusiasm, whether to order pizza, Chicken Licken or Nandos for lunch, I bumped into an outlet advertising “traditional African food like your mother used to cook in the township”.
The menu offering blew my mind; pap or dombolo (homemade dumplings) with hardbody chicken, pork trotters, tripe or even amacimbi (mopani worms, one of my all-time favourites). They even sold real amasi (fermented milk) — the deliciously thick, creamy version I used to enjoy with pap during my childhood, not the watery supermarket stuff that comes in plastic bottles.
I had found culinary nirvana.
With just a few clicks on my Uber Eats app, I could order for delivery within half an hour whatever my craving dictated, be it the “Highfiridzi” dish from the Tsa restaurant in Fourways which comprises pap, beef stew and kale and draws its name from Highfields township in Harare, Zimbabwe. Or goat meat stew with jollof rice from Naija Lems in Bryanston if I’m hankering for a taste of West Africa.
When Uber Eats first launched in collaboration with 75 restaurants in Johannesburg in September 2016 — its debut on the African continent — its offering was fairly high brow, including the likes of Casalotti’s Pizza, Momo Baohaus and Paul’s Homemade Ice Cream.
Later, as the concept caught fire, the company expanded to fast foods, and Joburgers could now have order chicken from KFC and Nandos, seafood from Oceans Basket, burgers from Burger King and sushi delivered to the comfort of their homes instead of braving the foodcourts in shopping malls often teeming with shoppers.
But Gen-Xers like me, still needed to take a drive to Alexandra, Thembisa or Soweto for a taste of the homemade dumplings with amasi or inkobe (a mixture of corn kernels, ground nuts, monkey nuts and beans slow cooked often over a fire) that were a feature of our 1980s childhood.
And then eventually, to its credit, Uber Eats realised there was a huge market in townships and even suburbia waiting to be tapped by bringing traditional African foods to those consumers’ doorstep.
A common thread among those of us who love African food, is that we don’t like cooking it. I am still traumatised by teenage memories of washing smelly tripe repeatedly under my mother’s watchful eyes to get all the soil out. And the odour that would linger in the house for hours after cooking it. But eating it, made it worthwhile.
And now years later, Uber Eats was allowing me to indulge in dombolo (dumplings) with pork trotters without slaving over a stove for hours.
It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, like many consumers I have a love-hate relationship with Uber Eats — stemming from late deliveries, a nasty bout of food poisoning one time after ordering a meal that had probably not been prepared in the most hygienic surroundings. And some of the mark-ups and delivery costs that come with ordering ready-made food from the app are a downright rip-off.
But to my mind, that is a small price to pay for that plate of pap, ibhobola (pumpkin leaves fried with tomatoes and onions) and amacimbi that one must simply indulge in on a Sunday afternoon sometimes.