THE SUN DESCENDS SLOWLY BEHIND INTABA KA NTSIKANA, a green-cloaked mountainous landscape overlooking the Amathole District in the Eastern Cape, while cows and goats graze on an unattended vegetable patch a few houses away. We re at Lipato Shogole's home, seated on his late rakgadi's (aunt's) porch, where he passes around an enamel plate piled with snacks and refills our drinks, occasionally prodding at a fire crowded with pots spluttering gravy, bitter wild greens and potatoes charring on the coals.
“I had to slaughter a chicken for my guests, of course,” he says, smiling. Earlier in the day he paid a visit to local chicken farmer Alfred Sidima Ngqawana to make a selection from ooDlaki, or frizzle-feathered chickens, so called because of their characteristic fluffed up “dlakadlaka” feathers. Lipato left with three of the birds, two of which he is keeping as pets and, more conveniently, for supplying him with eggs.
Lipato's food story begins much like many of ours; his interest in food was established early in his childhood in Motherwell, Gqeberha, when his mother first allowed him to use the stove to prepare food after school. “Mme taught me how to make perfectly fluffy rice and steam veggies instead of boiling them, and soon I was baking bread.” He would eventually cook most of the family meals. Because one of his siblings had a chronic health condition, the family had to make drastic dietary changes, exchanging salt and sugar for natural substitutes, and eating food
