THE AFRICAN SCRAMBLE ISSUE

I was asked to produce a photo-essay on food culture among the white community in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city. Photography is all about access, and for this assignment, getting access was going to be a challenge because I’m not a regular at most of the spots that I had planned to shoot in.

One of my earliest memories of buna has nothing to do with its taste or smell but with a blurry view of Addis Abeba, a car window scene I had been transfixed with for many early mornings on my drives to school.

In a scene from Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions, Nhamo, a peasant boy in colonial Zimbabwe, gloats to his younger sister about the prospect of being whisked away to his educated uncle’s home, where he will no longer eat with his bare hands, but now advance to eating with a knife and fork.

Food as an engine of care is quite a common idea but food as self romance might be an invention of Ruth. Ruth is co-editor of this issue with me. She’s also a collaborator on our upcoming food show.

Who knew foraging could be funny? Alexis did. Her TikTok is absolutely alive with joy, catch phrases, tunes, jokes and mushrooms.

Which came first, colonialism or capitulation? Whichever it was, we got some good (food) from it. We being the many parts of the continent which were colonized—many to the point of complete swallow.

Warri. Port Harcourt. Liverpool. Lagos. Mississauga. I learned how to make some decisions late because joy is having someone else decide your happiness for you, right? Till you hit thirty-six and realize you’re your own to do with you as you please.

The tonality of my language stares at me through the taste of my grandmother’s favorite snack. Àádùn is a corn snack that showed up often at Christmastime when grandfather returned home from the farm with the proceeds of his harvest.

Michael Elégbèdé is a Nigerian-born fine-dining chef based in Lagos. He left for the United States at 13 and, after 13 years there, he bought a one-way ticket back home. He currently owns and operates ÌTÀN Test Kitchen in Ikoyi, Lagos.

That winter evening, while I was walking down Peckham Rye Market Street in London at shoulder-bump squeeze- past pace, a man screamed “Shaki” at me. It was in one of those brisk sections of the market where South-Asians sell a variety of fresh meat and you don’t need to strain to hear Yoruba words…

There is something romantic about the way Black folks talk about our food. The sense memories of intergenerational recipes are such that these recollections are often more powerful than the dishes themselves.

There are three rungs of privilege: there are those who don’t cook; those who perform some cooking; and finally those who cook because the first two rungs aren’t really cooking.