UNAJUA KUPIKA SOMBE?
CONNECTING CONGOLESE KITCHENS TO SOUTH AFRICA

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        Unajua kupika sombe? Do you know how to prepare cassava leaves? My cousin asks. I watched sternly as she chopped onions, green peppers and aubergines, ground peanuts and joined them in a pot of boiling sombe, just as my mother had done many a times before, just as her mother before her. The wonder of memory had been summoned. The smell of sombe had consumed the kitchen and the living room beyond it, whisking us back home again, allowing us to recreate home here, in South Africa. This contribution to the archive consists of drawn and written ethnographic observations of rituals of home-making through food carried within Congolese Kitchens in South Africa. It places focus on the preparation and consumption of cassava leaves and how the ‘everyday’ small moments emerging from its preparation and consumption make and recreate territory, safety and familiarity. This work insists on the reading of memory, lived experience, and the everyday place making rituals of those of us considered marginal as architecture through the ability of these to influence and affect space. Where memory, ritual and lived experience are read as pivotal place-making tools in this contribution




Gloria Pavita is a reader, writer and storyteller of an often unseen everyday; one inhabited by people who aren't warranted the platform to write or speak of themselves.