The double-sided cookie that accused South Africa’s lying politicians | History

A stop at Wembley Bakery in the Cape Town suburb of Belgravia is best done on an empty stomach, as it was only designated for “people of color” during apartheid. That means a seemingly endless array of freshly baked cakes, tarts, cookies, and donuts.

There are many sweets that are familiar to international travelers, such as red velvet cupcakes, jam rolls, and custard donuts. However, some can only be found in certain areas of Cape Town. The fragrant Koestar is sprinkled with desiccated coconut, the Herzogie is topped with meringue, and the flashy pink and brown Zwigebrieggi are available.

Unlike the man named after JBM Herzog, the Afrikaner nationalist who first seized power 100 years ago, Herzoggi is a bite-sized flavour. Crispy biscuit shells are filled with thick apricot jam, topped with delicately spiced coconut meringue, and finally baked in the oven. The cookies were invented by Herzog’s white female supporters in the 1920s and continued to be baked at National Party events for decades afterward, the party that would implement apartheid in 1948.

But Herzoggi will also find support from different segments of the population.

“Mr. Herzog made two promises,” explains chef Cass Abrahams, legendary Islamic cookbook author and radio personality. He was responsible for bringing the centuries-old cuisine of his tribe to a wider audience starting in the 1970s. “He gave women the right to vote and said hy sal die slawe dieselfde as die wittes maak (make slaves equal to white people).” Her choice of words is no coincidence. Almost two centuries after the abolition of slavery, the Abrahamic and Cape Malay communities (descendants of enslaved Muslims from Indonesia and elsewhere) have not forgotten their history of bondage.

“The women of Cape Malay were very excited about Mr. Herzog’s promise,” Abrahams continues. “So they baked their own spicy version of Herzoggi… for a while.”

After the events of 1930, when Herzog reneged on his second promise to disenfranchise women of color, women of color went back to the oven and baked an ironic version of Herzoggi. Or a double-sided cookie that lacks the delicacy and sophistication of the original – intentionally so. “The women roasted both, set them side by side, and told the children stories about General Herzog,” Aberhams said.

Both versions are still burned and are a familiar sight at Cape Malay tea parties, weddings and funerals, “especially on Eid,” Abrahams added. At his Wembley bakery, on average he sells around 1,500 classic Herzogies and his 800 Zwigebrietsi a week.

recipe for disaster

In the 1920s, South African politics revolved around the so-called “Native Question,” a viable solution to the inconvenient and uncontroversial truth for the white minority that colored people far outnumbered those with light skin. Everything depended on coming up with a plan. The Union of South Africa was only founded in 1910, and the Anglo-Boer War ended in 1902. Thanks to a hastily agreed hodgepodge constitution, each state had different voting rules. While men of all races could vote in the Cape (providing they met the property and literacy franchise qualifications), only white men could vote in the other three provinces (Transvaal, Natal, and Orange Free State). did it.

Prime Minister Jan Smuts refused to address “native questions”, preferring, as biographer Richard Stein puts it, to “kick the can down” in the hope that the questions would be answered on their own. Smuts’ rival, Herzog, on the other hand, had very clear ideas about how to solve the “Indigenous problem,” and racism and disenfranchisement were central to these ideas.

After 1919, Herzog worked hard as opposition leader to win the votes of people of color. In his seminal history of colored politics in South Africa, Gavin Lewis writes that his “new deal for colored people” was simple. [Hertzog’s] This policy meant that people of color shared legal privileges over white workers and were exempt from restrictions that applied to Africans. ”

Thanks in part to this pledge, Herzog was able to oust Smuts in the 1924 election in coalition with the predominantly English-speaking but equally racist Labor Party.

As a side note, Jan Smuts also had a cookie named after him. This is a pastry shell filled with jam, much like a British “maid of honor.” Peter Felsman, one of South Africa’s leading culinary historians, said: “Jan Smuts was an overtly political response from Smuts’ supporters: “They’ve got cookies and we’ve got them.” I need a cookie,”’ he said, adding: Personally, I prefer Jan Smuts cookies. Not just because my family was Smuts supporters. But I haven’t seen it, let alone eaten it, for years. ”

One step forward, three steps back

At the same time, the women’s suffrage movement was gaining momentum in South Africa. After World War I, most Western countries granted women the right to vote, but South Africa was slow to gain the right to vote. After all, that Congress included men like T.C. Visser, who argued that it is a scientific fact that the development of the female brain ceases at a stage beyond which the male brain progresses. .

But by the end of the 1920s, attitudes had changed and men like Visser were in the minority. Herzog agreed that women should be given the right to vote. And when he announced plans to give both white women and colored women the right to vote in the Cape in order to “make slaves equal to whites,” Herzogies began to pop out of the Cape Malay oven.

This enthusiasm ignored the fact that Herzog was a politician and a racist. To know his true feelings on this issue, one need only look at the statement of the party’s Transvaal branch, which declared in 1928: ” (“The woman does not want to vote for *****, which is a racist term for black people.”)

After Herzog’s landslide victory in the 1929 election, he realized that he could achieve his goals without the support of voters of color. The 1929 election was fueled by Herzog’s racist intimidation tactics, which preyed on white fears that black men would take jobs and rape women, leading to the election of “schwartgewahr” or “negro danger.” The election went down in history and was a remarkable success. It didn’t take long for his true nature to be revealed. Apartheid may have only been enforced in his 1948, but many of its foundations were laid by Herzog in his 1920s and his 30s.

South Africa is the only country where allowing women the right to vote could actually set back democracy. But that’s exactly what Herzog accomplished with her 1930 Women’s Franchise Act. By granting an unqualified federal franchise to white women over the age of 21, Herzog reduced the vote of people of color in the electorate from her 12.3 percent of the electorate to her 6.7 percent overnight. Furthermore, the minority black vote was effectively cut in half by the law.

Historian Mohammed Adhikari explains:[The Act] …represented a change in direction on Herzog’s side. Throughout the late 1920s, he tried to induce voters of color to support the National Party with the promise of a “New Deal” that would give them economic and political equality rather than social equality with whites. This act is just the latest development in a decades-long trend of erosion of civil rights for people of color. ”

Enraged, the women of color went back to the oven and baked twigebrietsi, or double-sided cookies.

Fundamentally, Zwigebriegge is the same as Herzoggie. However, instead of meringue topping, it is decorated with half pink, half brown sugar icing. Abrahams said it was a visual representation of “a white man with a black heart who broke his promise.”

Cookbook author and TV chef Fatima Sydow, who gave an interview to Al Jazeera before her untimely death in December, took the topping even more literally. “My aunt always told me that pink and brown icing for her meant that the laws that supported apartheid group areas meant that suburbs, beaches, schools, workplaces, trains, and buses were closed off for certain racial groups.” It was specified.

Mr Abrahams said there was no doubt that it was an “act of defiance”. Sydow agreed. “My people couldn’t express themselves loudly because they would get arrested. So they let their baking do the talking.”

kitchen politics

Twegevliezi is the most obvious example of Cape Malay women’s empowerment through cooking, but the theme goes back to its very origins in colonial South Africa. The first slave was brought to the Cape from Batavia (Jakarta) in 1653. This was just a year after the Dutch East India Company established a permanent refreshment station in Cape Town. Malay women quickly became known for their prowess in the kitchen, and 20th century food historian C. Lewis Leipold wrote that “slaves with this type of culinary knowledge were much more expensive than other domestic chattels.” It was traded on price,” he wrote.

Gabeba Baderon, associate professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Pennsylvania State University, writes in About Muslims: From Slavery to Post-Apartheid: Owners and slaves fought. Ultimately, enslaved people came to shape South African cuisine in unexpectedly powerful ways. ”

“What makes the Herzoggi and Ziegebriegje special is that the peoples of the East, where our slave ancestors came from, don’t eat sweet baked goods,” Abrahams added. Even now, there are many people on the Indonesian islands who do not have ovens. Our amazing baked goods are directly influenced by Europeans. But we made them our own. ”

Cape Malay cooks became famous for what Leipold called “their free, almost heroic use of spices,” and over the centuries countless Cape Malay dishes were featured in kitchens across the country. It is now cooked.

Starting in the mid-20th century, several white authors published Cape Malay cookbooks based on interviews with Cape Malay cooks.

But Abrahams told Al Jazeera that “every recipe was missing at least one key ingredient” because the authors’ Muslim informants refused to reveal all their secrets. “It all comes down to the power they have in their food, the empowerment,” she says. “That’s why they didn’t share the recipe.”

Abrahams, who published her first cookbook in 1995, was one of South Africa’s first Muslim cookbook authors. “I got a lot of backlash,” she recalls with a laugh. “People would say, ‘Why would we share our secrets with ‘witnesses’ (white people)?'” But I told them, no, this is everyone’s food. Since then, later generations of Islamic cooks, like Sydow and her sister, have found it easier to reveal the secrets of her Malay cooking in cookbooks, TV shows and even her YouTube. I realized that.

However, with a few exceptions, the stories of the Herzoggi and Tuegevryche peoples have not been written down. Baderon writes: “This secret history, which tells the memory of political betrayal, is invisible to the uneducated eye. Even cookbooks written by Muslims do not reveal its secrets. Instead, this story It is spread orally in Islamic societies.”

Abrahams added with a laugh that some stories are too dangerous to write down. “One woman said her grandmother used to call Twegebriezy ‘Mary Ann’… after Cape Town’s most famous prostitute!”

All kidding aside, Sydow says Twegebrjezie was, and still is, a highly political institution. “Sometimes people ask me to make them a ‘drigebrjetsie’ (three-faced cake),” she said, referring to South Africa’s ongoing political troubles. “But I want to focus on the positives.”

Nick Dull is a co-author Defaced ballots: The elections that shaped South Africa.