How this former refugee is cooking up a pan-African storm

DW (English)

If there is anything that can be described as true pan-African cuisine, it is what Jane Nshuti cooks, as she incorporates all her experiences as a refugee across the continent into her preferably vegetarian recipes.

Transcript

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.

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