What is my heritage but a braai?

This dispatch comes from Chile – where he himself is on a work trip, and I’m minding his bags – specifically from the port city of Valparaiso, which spills down steep hills into the Pacific.

However, as it’s Chile’s National Day nothing is open: no museums, no shops, not even the rickety funiculars that make these slopes manageable.

“What do you all do traditionally on National Day?” I ask a local, who is gamely taking us on a food tour, even though most eateries are closed. “Um… see family? Barbecue?” And I laugh, because this week in South Africa the answer will be much the same.

Heritage Day of a mutt

On Heritage Day, what are those of us with the heritage of a mutt to do except braai? I’m from British stock, a rooinek, a Benoni bunny.

I grew up with Woolworths pick-n-mix, Chappie facts, flipflops, and vague whispers of swart gevaar. I knew traffic lights as robots, petrol stations as garages (and that I’d be killed if my dad saw me filling my bike tyres with air there), corner shops as cafes, and gobstoppers by names that I didn’t realise were global racial slurs because South Africa had its own racial slurs, thank you.

The Mzansi I knew

I knew TV was in English on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and alternate Sundays, and we never missed Little House on the Prairie, The Cosby Show and Shaka Zulu.

On Tuesdays, we watched Misdaad in Miami, with the original English soundtrack in simulcast on Radio 2000, and maybe Heidi or Pippi Langkous in Afrikaans, oblivious that one was Japanese manga, the other Swedish feminism.

I knew koeksisters, Kreepy-Kraulys and shongololos; I knew corrugated iron roofs, mine dumps and Durban; I knew drive-ins, Johnny Clegg and Delia Sainsbury; I knew NikNaks, Top Deck and Bophuthatswana, and once there was a real leopard in a neighbour’s outside loo.

I knew the best records had “Imported” stickers on them, while cheap cassettes might prove to be Springbok Radio cover versions.

I knew South Africa wasn’t allowed to play sports internationally because “they” were scared we’d win everything.

Such is my heritage

I knew so much, overtly, obliquely, much of it as questionable as Chappie facts. Such is my heritage.

But something everyone did was cook with fire, whether by choice or necessity.

So braai on, my South Africans, braai on, because here, at least, we can all come together, in our heritage of flames.