“I decided I was going to use food to make a difference. “When I got to the top 36, I had to ask myself what my motivation to keep going in the competition was,” she says. At the time, she was working as a dental technician and trying out recipes on her family. While Abigail says she’s always had an affinity for cooking, her food journey started in earnest in 2014, when she was a contestant on MasterChef South Africa, finishing in the final six. We need to change these expectations of what a township is and break down the artificial borders created by the apartheid government. “People have immediate perceptions from media representations - poverty, high crime levels, unsophisticated food. “I’m not the biggest fan of the term ‘township’,” she says. It’s in such a community that Abigail produces gourmet riffs on traditional cuisine - breaking down sociocultural barriers in the process. Even now, 26 years after the end of apartheid, these areas are still almost exclusively populated by disenfranchised people of colour and are rarely featured in tourism brochures. The government appropriated desirable land from black and brown people, shunting them into townships - underdeveloped, low-income residential areas often composed of corrugated metal shanty houses. It altered its physical and cultural landscape. It’s hard to overstate the effects the policy of racial segregation had on South Africa. At her restaurant, 4Roomed eKasi Culture, on the outskirts of Cape Town, she’s breathing new life into the food of her upbringing while grappling with the culinary legacy of apartheid. This article was adapted from National Geographic Traveller (UK).Ībigail Mbalo is leading a quiet revolution.
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