This post has recently been shared by the South African farming magazine, Landbouweekblad – the Afrikaans version of the Farmers’ Weekly magazine. Enjoy reading (again) about the Amadiba community’s traditional foodways.

The youth leadership collective of the non-governmental organisation Sustaining the Wild Coast has just released the book, Roots of Resilience: Amadiba Food for Health and Wellbeing. The recipe book seeks to document traditional knowledge from the Amadiba community in Mpondoland, Eastern Cape regarding wild foods and indigenous crops, including stories from elders about how these are used and prepared. It also provides a few examples of how young people are modernising traditional dishes.

The Amadiba community, on the Wild Coast of South Africa, has become known for resisting mining, underwater seismic blasting and other extractive development projects. The people of Amadiba insist on the value of their indigenous knowledge and traditional lifestyle, which they argue these projects would destroy, along with regional biodiversity, in the name of short-term profits. The gathering and growing of food is central to the autonomy and traditional lifestyle the Amadiba wish to protect.

As Mxolisi Ngongoma writes in the introduction, “Indigenous food systems offer a wealth of knowledge about nutrition, sustainability, and resilience.… communities in Mpondoland possess a vast knowledge base about plants, animals, and their uses, passed down through generations.” The book includes wild plants used in medicinal teas, as well as wild fruits and greens, with some of their health and nutritional benefits. It also contains recipes for traditional beer (umqombothi) made with sorghum or maize, soups, porridges and vegetables such as calabash (iselwa) and taro root (amadumbe). The youth who wrote the book, as well as the elders they interviewed, share stories and memories involving the foods, and how they are being affected by climate change.

This book came out of a larger project, ‘Celebrating and documenting the traditional foods of the Amadiba community,’ supported by the Culinary Historians of New York, the Seed and Knowledge Initiative (SKI) and the Bio-economy Chair. A key part of the project involved a traditional food festival, organised by the Imbo of Mpondo Women in February 2024, to celebrate ancient foods as a source of nutrition and good health. At the festival, participants brought traditional ingredients to display, as well as prepared dishes to taste. Hundreds of people attended and celebrated their heritage, enjoying speeches, demonstrations, traditional food, song and dance.

The recipe book and food festival grew out of the need for reciprocity as part of a decolonial approach to my ongoing research on traditional and indigenous food systems. Supporting community-led efforts to revive traditional food systems —including the ingredients, practices, knowledges and cultural values that underpin them — helps to ensure immediate impacts for the research, and also gives something back to communities that have shared their time and knowledge with me.

The festival and recipe book have helped to facilitate intergenerational knowledge transmission, with elders passing on traditional food knowledge to young people through stories and demonstrations. Colonialism violently disrupted traditional channels through which elders taught young people and prevented the kind of experiential and embodied learning that was central to traditional food systems.

As Goldman Environmental Prize winner Sinegugu Zukulu states in the preface, the recipe book seeks to encourage young people to stay connected with traditional ingredients, as well as traditional food knowledge and practices. The authors hope that the book will inspire other communities to reconnect with, document and share their own traditional recipes.

Cover photo: Amadiba food festival, February 2024. Photo credit: Lungelo Mtwa