Anton van Vollenhoven: Of course, different groups might eat different things, but usually when we have braai, that means red meat, which is preferred to other meat. You can add various vegetables, but those vegetables are also grilled over the fire.
Bao Tram: What are the highlights of Heritage Day? What do South Africans usually do on that day? Anton van Vollenhoven: Most heritage sites in the country probably have specific events on that day, where people can come together and enjoy that heritage site or that museum. But they will add something. People can enjoy that, and usually there will be groups playing music to make the day more enjoyable for everyone. But this year is different because of the pandemic.
How has that affected Heritage Day? Anton van Vollenhoven: It was quite a challenge this year. Luckily, Heritage Day came when we were on a level 2 lockdown, which meant families, at least, could get together. So people who wanted to braai could get together to braai. What the people did who gathered at the monument, which is a very large site, what they did was they had four or five different…let's call them functions. They exceeded the number of people allowed I can't remember the exact number now , but they split up into different functions.
So on a very large site you might have had 2 to 4 thousand people, but they split into 5 or 6 or 7 different functions. For instance, at the foot of the monument, they had an antique fair, so people who liked antiques would have been at the antique fair.
They also had a food festival. So some people would have gone to the food festival. They also would have had an education festival, so some people would have been at that one. That was how they split up the people to avoid exceeding the crowd size limit.
This year we were lucky. Anton van Vollenhoven: Goodbye to all you listeners. Jan Scannell is a year-old former accountant with a dream: To establish a national holiday in South Africa like July 4 called Braai Day. Braai is a South African barbecue of meat or vegetables over wood embers, never charcoal or gas. Back in the years when Scannell was still climbing the corporate ladder, he used to braai on the weekends, inviting friends over for the classic South African picnic. But then he had a revelation at age 25 after accepting a coveted post in his firm's office in Manhattan, when the prospect of leaving his friends, his country, and his grill, filled him with panic.
South Africa already has an independence day. But it's a sober day of reflection on the end of apartheid — more "never again" than "pass the ketchup. Every year, more South Africans got onboard. And now eight years after launching his campaign, Scannell has a TV show in its third season and a best-selling braai cookbook.
In a press conference video, he stands in his trademark white apron next to Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the official patron of Braai Day. But only one word for this wonderful institution — braai.
And it has fantastic potential to bind us together," Tutu says in the video. That the country even has 11 official languages might discourage hopes of finding one tradition in common. But as Scannell and I walk though the meat aisle in a Cape Town supermarket, we find something emblematic of the South African braai — boerewors, a sausage with coarsely ground pork and beef and spices.
Then you've got spices and the knowledge of how to use them from the East, stuff like coriander, nutmeg, cloves and then in Africa it was very typical to cook all your food on a fire. So boerewors is, it's probably the best analogy, foodwise, of the rainbow nation. Half an hour later, on a windy promontory in Cape Town called Maidens Cove, a small group that includes his photographer and television show director is gathered around a fire, drinking beer and waiting for the logs to burn down to coals.
Using wood is the only sine qua non of the braai.
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