I do ponder the meaning of life.
I also ponder considerably less important things.
Like food.
More specifically, who was brave enough to eat certain things first?
I have mentioned this before, but the egg remains high on my list.
At some point, someone looked at a chicken and decided that the next thing to come out of that chicken's back end was worth investigating as lunch.
That alone was brave.
But then what?
Did they eat it raw?
Did somebody eventually crack one open, look at the strange clear stuff and the yellow blob in the middle and think, let’s put that in a pan?
Who decided to drop the whole thing into boiling water?
And somewhere along the line somebody must have overcooked one, undercooked one, dropped one into hot fat and eventually arrived at the rather impressive selection we have today.
Which brings me to fire.
Because somewhere in our very distant past, our ancestors worked out how to control fire. Initially, presumably, everyone was delighted because it provided warmth, light and a fairly convincing argument to anything lurking outside the cave to stay there.
And then one of our foremothers — let’s assume the forefathers were off hunting and plundering — must have looked at it and thought:
You know what? Let’s slap dinner on there and see what happens.
Not a dinosaur fillet, sadly. Humans and dinosaurs missed one another by millions of years, which ruins a perfectly good story.
But meat met fire. And things were never quite the same again.
We know humans were controlling fire at least hundreds of thousands of years ago, probably considerably earlier, and archaeological evidence suggests that cooking food over heat has an extraordinarily long history. So while we don’t know who first looked at a raw piece of something and thought this could do with a bit of flame, somebody did.
And then, because apparently cooked meat wasn’t enough, we started seasoning it.
This fascinates me too.
Who first tasted salt and thought, that needs to go on my dinner?
And pepper?
Garlic? Herbs? Spices?
Humans have been deliberately adding flavour to food for thousands of years. Archaeologists have even found evidence of spices being used in prehistoric cooking — not because they added much nutritional value, but seemingly because food tasted better with them.
So apparently this needs something is a very, very old complaint.
Salt became especially important because it didn’t just improve flavour; it helped preserve food. Spices became so prized that enormous trading networks developed around them. Fortunes were made, voyages undertaken and countries colonised in the pursuit of them.
Which, rather neatly, eventually brings the Dutch into our story.
And South Africa.
So when did cooking over a fire become a braai?
Nobody woke up one morning at the Cape and invented meat over flames.
People had been cooking over open fires in southern Africa long before the Dutch arrived in 1652. Indigenous peoples had their own methods of preparing meat and other foods, and over the centuries those traditions mixed with Dutch, Malay, Indonesian, French, German, Indian and many other influences.
The word braai comes from Afrikaans — ultimately from the Dutch braden, meaning to roast.
But somewhere along the way, we South Africans took cooking over a fire and turned it into something considerably bigger than supper.
Because a braai isn’t really a meal, is it?
It’s a plan.
“Come for a braai.”
Four words that could mean anything from lunch to see-you-at-midnight.
There will be a fire.
There will be at least one person who believes only they understand that fire.
Another person will poke it despite having received no authority whatsoever to do so.
Someone will ask when we’re eating.
“Soon.”
We all know this is a lie.
There will be opinions on wood versus charcoal, how often steak should be turned, whether chicken belongs on a braai and precisely when the wors should go on.
And somehow nobody minds waiting.
Because we’re not really standing around waiting for dinner.
The standing around is part of the braai.
And perhaps that’s the bit that hasn’t changed much since those first humans gathered around a fire.
Then we went and gave it a day.
Heritage Day is 24 September, but over the years it has also become widely associated with Braai Day.
The National Braai Day initiative deliberately used something many South Africans already had in common — gathering around a fire — as a way of celebrating our different cultures together. Archbishop Desmond Tutu became its patron in 2007 and famously embraced the idea of the braai as something that crosses South Africa’s cultural divides.
But let’s be fair.
South Africans hardly needed an official invitation to light a fire.
We’d been managing perfectly well on our own.
Because here, braaing isn’t reserved for Heritage Day.
It’s birthdays, rugby, Christmas holidays, weekends, camping trips, Sunday afternoons, somebody coming over, somebody leaving, loadshedding, good weather, bad weather and occasionally absolutely no reason whatsoever.
We have ovens.
We have stoves.
We have air fryers.
Yet give a South African half an excuse and somebody will be outside setting fire to wood.
So, why do we braai?
Perhaps because somewhere between discovering fire and discovering six different ways to cook an egg, humans also discovered something else.
Food tastes better when people gather around it.
The fire gives us somewhere to stand.
The cooking gives us something to fuss over.
And the waiting gives us time to talk.
Thousands of years later, we’ve added braai tongs, marinades, garlic bread, potato salad and very strong opinions about wors.
But the basic idea hasn’t changed all that much.
Fire. Food. People.
Although I still want to know about that first egg.