Mzoli's: it is what it is

Yesterday some friends took me to Guguletu, one of the black townships in the Cape Flats. There is a famous-ish restaurant called Mzoli’s, where you pick out your meat and they braai it for you. The meat comes with samp and beans and mealie pap, which looks like overwhipped institutional mashed potatoes. For about $20, here was our spread:


Note that there are no utensils, which was interesting.

The food was amazing.

The owner was lovely and solicitous.

The music was loud and good, and the people danced at their tables, in the streets, and in line for food.

After lunch, we went around the corner to a shabeen, an unlicensed tavern. It also seemed to be a hair salon, which was a little confusing. There was a big rugby match on—the SA Springboks played the New Zealand All-Blacks, a longstanding rivalry. We/they won! And I had another moment where I wondered what my life would be like here. Is Jaque Fourie the new Tom Brady? Could coach Peter de Villiers ever take the place of Bill Belichick in my heart? Just as with Belichick, De Villiers’s press conferences are an awkward tour de force. He mumbles in thickly accented English and it’s generally accepted that no one can understand him. He smiles the entire time, though, which does distinguish him from BB. He also wears a ridiculous formal jacket, which I suppose is the South African equivalent of the hoodie.

When I tell South Africans that I flew from London on the same plane as the victorious post-World Cup Springboks, they curse me for not knowing who they were. Now I’m cursing myself for wondering “which local soccer team is sitting in business class.” Alas.

In December, there will be a movie about the 1995 World Cup, in which the Springboks played the All-Blacks in South Africa. It’s really the story of Mandela and how he used the traditional Afrikaner rugby as a tool of unification. John Carlin, a British journalist, wrote the book on which the movie is based. It was surprisingly powerful. Read it.