If anything can be described as true pan-African cuisine, it's the dishes prepared by Jane Nshuti. The Cape Town chef incorporates all her experiences as a refugee across the continent into her recipes, preferably vegetarian.
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00:00If there's one thing that can be described as true Pan-African cuisine, it is exactly
00:08what Jane Nshiti cooks.
00:10We've got some jello fries with okra chips, I'll call them.
00:19Jane incorporates all her experiences as a refugee across the continent into her preferably
00:25vegetarian recipes.
00:29She does this despite the fact that African food tends to be meat-heavy.
00:33Does that make her the African vegan chef?
00:37I actually don't like it when people call me a vegan chef because I gravitate more towards
00:47a plant-based African chef, maybe.
00:51If you look back, our ancestors only ate meat on special occasions, but now in the modern
00:58society, meat has become almost a thing to show that you are in a good standing in the
01:06society.
01:07And one of the things that I have been trying to also educate people is that we need to
01:12go back to actually our ancestral ways because the way we are living, it's not African.
01:21Jane is a successful chef and cookbook author in Cape Town, South Africa.
01:26Let's see how she uses recipes to tell her incredible story of survival, which as a child
01:32took her from Rwanda, further and further south to the Cape.
01:39When we go to a refugee camp, we were given a tent by UNHCL and they also were giving
01:49food.
01:50The only problem is that we were not okay with the food.
01:55For me, it was strange food, it was a bit of an acquired taste.
01:59I had never tasted things like lentils.
02:02We used to cook outside with the wood and sometimes it will rain and the wood will just
02:10not light up.
02:13Just getting food ready was a mission.
02:19So this is amaranth, it has always been a staple back home.
02:23How much is it?
02:24Twenty five.
02:25Twenty five, okay.
02:28This is how Jane's food journey began.
02:30As a nine-year-old, she and her family fled the genocide in Rwanda, across the border
02:35into the Democratic Republic of Congo.
02:40We left Kigali, mom died after like a two-week period and on our way to DLC, my father died
02:50so we were left four of us.
02:53I was the last of the four children, my oldest sister was 17.
02:59So yeah, we found ourselves by ourselves in a foreign country basically.
03:09She was an orphan in a foreign land and had to eat foreign food.
03:13Was that what made her cook?
03:16Combining new tastes with the ones she remembered from home?
03:21I encounter skumawiki in Kenya, we have it all the time at home.
03:26So this is green bananas, we cook it the way you would cook potatoes, mashed, we eat it
03:33fried, we eat it boiled.
03:39Already in the refugee camp, vegetables meant a better life for Jane.
03:43She used the little money her sister earned to buy vegetables and resell them.
03:48Finally, after two years, she left the camp with a complete stranger.
03:55My uncle was in Kenya, he had a friend who was also a truck driver and he asked his friend,
04:04when you go in DLC, please look for my sister's children and bring me the two smaller ones.
04:12Months later, she was finally reunited with her cousins and uncle in Kenya.
04:20Adjusting was hard, I couldn't speak a word of Swahili, I just only knew how to speak
04:28Nyaruanda.
04:29So I couldn't communicate enough to be able to be out there with other kids, playing.
04:37So I ended up finding myself once again in the kitchen with my other cousin.
04:44Jane travelled with her uncle's family through Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Malawi before
04:50settling in Cape Town.
04:51It was only in her 30s when she opened her restaurant.
04:55What did she discover?
04:58I realised that Africa is really underrepresented and especially the food that I grew up eating.
05:05And that's when I realised that I no longer want to make pizza and all these other foreign
05:12foods.
05:13I want to highlight African ingredients.
05:17That's when I decided, you know what, I'm going to make it my life mission to document
05:22as much African ingredients as possible and not only document them but also develop variety
05:30and options for them.
05:35This tape is really used for a lot of Ethiopian foods like injera, we make brownies using
05:41this, we make porridge.
05:45Everything seemed to have turned out well for Jane.
05:47So why did she give up her restaurant when her son was born?
05:51I became extremely sick during my pregnancy but when I had my baby I realised that I wanted
05:58to do things differently.
06:01So I wanted to promote African ingredients and so on.
06:05That's when she turned her incredible story of survival into a book.
06:10An educational but storytelling African recipe based book.
06:16So it has brought a lot of healing.
06:22Jane continues to cater for select functions where she showcases food from across Africa.
06:30But thanks to her book, the secrets of these pan-African delicacies are now revealed.
06:36Their tale of comfort, hardship, family loss but above all the celebration of life.