By Robert Kriger
On Mandela Day, 18 July 2018, Renata Coetzee’s celebrated book – A Feast From Nature – was relaunched to bring wider attention to her contribution towards building national and international awareness of the culinary heritage of various cultural groups in South Africa. In collaboration with the DST-NRF Centre of Excellence in Food Security, consultant Truida Prekel and African Sun Media, the University of Pretoria’s Department of Consumer and Food Sciences presented a four-course dinner with recipes inspired by Coetzee’s decades of research on indigenous food.
The following talk, “Cultures and Cuisines: A Peek at Our Early History”, was delivered by Robert Kriger at the event.
Paging through ‘A Feast From Nature’, I recognised several of the plants and animals that I had known, or touched, and smelt some of the flowering plants in my early childhood when I lived with my grandparents on the Moravian Mission station, Mamre. Situated on the West Coast, Mamre was established in 1808 and is celebrating the 200th anniversary of its church building this year.
So, I decided to conduct my own small oral history project and called my mother, Sylvia Vlotman, who will be 90 years on Tuesday, July 24, who lives alone in a small cottage in Mamre and who had, herself, spent her early childhood there in the 1930s in the care of her grandfather, Papé, whom I knew for seventeen years!
“Could she recollect any of the veldkos (plant foods), game, or herbal- or plant-based medicines which had been used in Mamre in the 1930s?”, I asked. As she recounted those memories she would add some comment about the person who had dispensed medicine, or who had come by to share the latest “kill”. The first thing she mentioned was kamfer water which she hated. As it was always at hand in the medicine cupboard, Papé gave one a tablespoonful for whatever condition one may have had. Then there was the (wonder) stert-salf, made of