Empty Nostalgia
Zanta Nkumane writes on The Savanna, a London chain that caters to (some) South African migrants. Illustration by Joy Yamusangie.
Good morning and welcome to Vittles! In today’s essay, Zanta Nkumane explores the sanitised version of South Africa sold by The Savanna (a London-based chain that stocks South African products) and the complicated feelings that it inspires among Black migrants.
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When I was at boarding school in Eswatini, the food was something you survived. The rice came in stingy portions, never enough to fill our stomachs; the stews were grainy, so thin you could see the bottom of the bowl. Everything tasted faintly metallic, as though the pots were bleeding their aluminium coating into the food. I ate quickly, swallowing more air than food, my body learning that being full was a privilege reserved for school holidays.
The night before the end of term – both when I was at boarding school, and later, when I was at university in Cape Town – my grandmother would call to ask what I wanted to eat. My requests were always the same: dombolo, hard-body chicken (freshly slaughtered, heavily salted and boiled to fall-off-the-bone perfection) and wild spinach (if in season), and sijeza (or sidvudvu), a dish of pumpkin and mealie beaten together with milk until it is the thick consistency of porridge. These dishes required considerable effort and preparation time. They made up for the neglect I experienced at school.
When I moved to the UK years later, this was the food I cooked to try to soothe the pangs of homesickness. But my attempts were characterless, nothing like the dishes I was trying to replicate. It wasn’t just that I wasn’t not a good cook (although I’m not), but also that I was looking for something more than flavour. I was cooking to summon the people and things that I missed: my aunt’s stews that always began with heaped spoonfuls of yellow Rajah curry powder, Sunday missions to Soweto or Midrand with friends to buy braai meat at a shisanyama, the inevitable stop at a service station for steak and kidney pie after a night out. Small, almost inconsequential rituals that became central to my longing once I left.
Then I found The Savanna. The first one I came across was in Liverpool Street Station – across from Boots, sandwiched between a Pure and a Holland & Barrett. Founded in 2005, The Savanna is a shop that specialises in South African groceries, snacks and freshly prepared meat products like biltong and boerewors. Of the ten or so other branches scattered across London, most are in train stations – Victoria, King’s Cross, Paddington and London Bridge – tucked neatly into commuter corridors. At first, the locations seemed incongruous to me: a South African food store amid the rush of London’s train stations. But the more I think about it, the more their placement feels apt. These are the places you pass through when you’re between worlds, neither at home nor quite away from it – a feeling that mirrors the in-between nature of diasporic life.
The shops themselves are bright and orderly, gleaming even. They do not immediately announce themselves as ‘South African’, and at first glance could be mistaken for any other shop selling snacks. But if you peruse, you’ll find shelves filled with Mrs Ball’s chutney and Ouma rusks, and fridges stacked with Castle Lager and Hunter’s Dry. I normally go in for biltong – a small indulgence I reward myself with when I commute to London. Coming from a meat-centric food culture back in Johannesburg, biltong taps into something truly carnivorous in me. Growing up, it was the snack we always bought for family road trips, passing it around the car in paper bags. Perhaps that’s why it fits so easily into my life now.
On one level, The Savanna is simply a food store catering to South African migrants and people like me, who are familiar with South African products. (I am from Eswatini, but South Africa has long functioned as both neighbour and centre in my life. I studied in Cape Town, lived in Johannesburg, and have family and friends there.) It sells the taste of home – or at least a version of it – to anyone who can afford to spend £9 on a packet of dried meat. But on another level, it’s something stranger: a miniature South Africa, carefully staged for export. When I’m in one of the shops, seeing the shelves of products I’d see in a supermarket back home does provide a comforting familiarity in a city that is not my own. But as soon as I leave, I remember that it’s less the food I eat in South Africa that I miss, but rather the intangible universe of memories that surrounds it.
The Savanna, on the other hand, offers a kind of empty nostalgia. Its shelves are arranged to mimic a culture or place without carrying any of its weight. It trades in the aesthetics of belonging while remaining hollow. Each visit feels like standing between two kitchens: one I remember and one that sells a curated version of that memory back to me. But still, I go back – sometimes for the biltong, sometimes just in hope of hearing someone say ‘eish’ in passing.
As US anthropologist Amy Cox Hall argues, this type of food nostalgia isn’t neutral – it’s produced, curated and marketed. It transforms the complexity of national histories into consumable feelings, selling versions of culinary cultures in which the pain of the past is replaced by an illusion of belonging. In the South African context, this nostalgia smooths over histories of colonial dispossession; the racialised control of land; and the way that Black ingredients and dishes were considered low-status, snubbed in mainstream markets and rarely exported. The uncomfortable legacies of labour, class and race are then reimagined as heritage by those with the power to curate what a nation remembers of itself.
‘The Savanna, on the other hand, offers a kind of empty nostalgia. Its shelves are arranged to mimic a culture or place without carrying any of its weight’
Of course, no diaspora food store is truly ‘authentic’. These shops inevitably offer a distilled, export-friendly version of a nation, closer to a tourism board brochure than a lived archive. They rely more on recognition than being exhaustive, selling foods that travel or sell well. In this sense, The Savanna is doing what diaspora stores everywhere do. But the stakes are high here: South Africa’s food history is so deeply racialised, any act of curation is also an act of political memory.
The Savanna’s tidy displays of imported goods construct a South Africa without dissonance, attempting to sustain the post-apartheid ‘Rainbow Nation’ rebranding even while white South Africans own 65% of the nation’s wealth, despite accounting for just 9% of the population. The Savanna soothes its customers by erasing the prickly truths of South African food culture and reassuring them that what was once broken can perhaps be made whole again – even if only on the plate.
Many foods now marketed as quintessentially South African carry longer, more obscure histories. Biltong is often sold as an Afrikaner delicacy, but the practice of preserving meat through salting and air-drying predates colonial settlement, with indigenous Khoisan techniques later adopted and reframed by settlers. Colonial and apartheid policies also reshaped which foods were considered respectable or valuable. Indigenous grains such as sorghum and millet – once central to Southern African diets – were marginalised, as colonial agriculture promoted wheat and later maize as superior options. Foods like mogodu, amanqina and chicken feet, sometimes stigmatised as ‘poverty food’, emerged from systems that forced culinary ingenuity under limitation.
Such foods are, for the most part, not sold in The Savanna. In its efforts to construct a national cuisine, there’s an obvious skewing towards the foods of white South Africans, who make up around 86% of the 227,000 South Africans in the UK (a skew that is presumably related to the differing economic prospects of Black and white South Africans). When I tell Cape Town-based food anthropologist Anna Trapido about this aspect of The Savanna, she’s not surprised. ‘At first glance, they have that really creepy “when-we” type nostalgia for a faux “good old days” that were only good for certain sections of society,’ she says. Until very recently, she explains, the only people with the money to start international businesses were white, resulting in ‘predominantly white food genres … reflected in communities away from the motherland’. (Unsurprisingly, Lisa Gardshol, the founder of The Savanna, is white.)
‘Because much Black South African cuisine lives in technique rather than in ingredient, it can be hard to package and sell commercially’
Trapido does offer another potential explanation for the absence of Black South African food from diaspora shops: because much Black South African cuisine lives in technique rather than in ingredient, it can be hard to package and sell commercially. Fermentation, timing and local knowledge are harder to commodify than branded condiments or dried meats. That said, the absence is still noticeable. There is a small, almost-afterthought shelf with samp, amabele and maize meal in the Liverpool Street Savanna. Foods and staples that are common in South African supermarkets or informal markets, such as amasi, morogo and dried offal, are largely absent from the store.
A significant portion of Black food culture in South Africa (and across the world) has been delineated by the limits imposed on Black people. Under apartheid, access to food was deliberately restricted, forcing Black families to make meals from whatever the system allowed them to have: offcuts, starches, bones, innards. Our contemporary cuisine was born from scarcity, necessitating culinary innovation to make food stretch and feed large families for less. Our kitchens can be considered political archives, telling the story of who had access to what they needed and who didn’t.
In my own life, that history is subtly threaded through the meals my grandmother made for me. Though we were middle class and she had more latitude than most, she was also feeding a large family, so her cooking was always about creating fullness and making simple things feel generous.
The neatly apolitical foodscape conjured by the pristine aisles of The Savanna does not convey any of this history. As someone who seldom makes it back home, The Savanna becomes a small bridge to the flavours and rituals I left behind. Memories live in the body, and taste is one of the most immediate ways to reconnect and feel grounded. I also continue to go because a glimpse of home – even a partial one – still brings solace. But I remain all too aware that this comforting version of my homeland that The Savanna offers seldom resembles the one that made me.
Credits
Zanta Nkumane is a Swazi writer and journalist.
Joy Yamusangie is a visual artist from the UK. Yamusangie’s work exists both within dream and reality, and involves creating fictional characters and worlds that provide insight into the artist’s real life. They experiment with a range of processes such as drawing, painting and printmaking to produce mixed media pieces.
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Further Reading
‘Hospitality is Not Conditional’ by Sharanya Deepak
‘When Food Doesn’t Taste Like Home’ by Doha Kahlout (trans by Katharine Halls)
‘The Spaza Shop Poisonings’ by Tsitsi Bhobo and Winile Ximba