TG it’s braai day

THE braai (Afrikaans for barbecue) is a cornerstone of social life in South Africa. It typically involves a marathon session of drinking, eating dead creatures cooked over coals, and enjoying the sunny climate. But the beloved braai is at the centre of controversy over the rebranding of a September 24th bank holiday. It was once celebrated by Zulus as King Shaka Day. It was declared a new holiday, Heritage Day, under Nelson Mandela’s government in a compromise meant to include all South Africa’s diverse cultures, rather than just one tribe. But it is now proving divisive.

The holiday falls in the southern hemisphere’s spring, offering a chance for the first braai of the season. However a campaign to remake September 24th as “National Braai Day” has touched an unexpectedly deep nerve. A champion of the rebranding is a white man who goes by the moniker Jan Braai, and who likens Braai Day to America’s Thanksgiving. He sees the holiday as a unifier— South Africans of all backgrounds putting aside their differences and gathering around fires to grill in harmony. The official patron is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who declared with a characteristic giggle that, “the braai, like rugby and sunny skies, is in our DNA!”

To some South Africans, the rebranding is oblivious of the past. One columnist, T.O. Molefe, describes Braai Day as the “white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy’s day of sponsored forgetting.” The debate flares up yearly, as the weather turns warm and braais are dusted off. It is much ado about an activity South Africans of all backgrounds will be doing anyway this Heritage Day. But therein lies the problem: in a country still largely racially segregated, the vast majority of people braai with their own ilk.