The ACC is excited to introduce Sarah Duff to the Brown Bag series. She will be discussing a history of Johannesburg’s foodways as they relate to migration.
Presentation:
‘From Naartjies to Nando’s: The Making of Johannesburg’s Foodways’
The history of Johannesburg’s foodways is, as in the case of most cities, entangled with histories of migration. As historians of both food and of migration have demonstrated, not only does migration shape the ways in which groups of people think about their identities in relation to food (and often how nations define themselves through food), but immigrants are often disproportionately involved in food industries. While historians of Africa have begun to turn their attention to histories of food, this remains a relatively new area of study for the region, and, more specifically, for South Africa. This essay begins to address this lacuna by considering how migration shaped how Johannesburg’s diverse population ate, bought, and thought about food.
About Sarah Duff:
Sarah Emily Duff is Researcher at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research at the University of the Witwatersrand. Primarily an historian of childhood and sexuality, she is the author of Changing Childhoods in the Cape Colony: Dutch Reformed Church Evangelicalism and Colonial Childhood, 1860-1895 (Palgrave, 2015). She is funded by a five-year Research Career Advancement Fellowship from the National Research Foundation and is currently at work on a project which traces the history of sex education in twentieth-century South Africa.