Yemisi Aribisala writing in the Chronic:
More hereThere is a sense of justice and spirit of resignation in paying for excess luggage because of cookbooks, even if my pocket hurts badly. And there are some books that I will never again leave behind. This resolve is crammed full of reasons collated with hindsight. I did not come to the Western Cape, South Africa, expecting to search in vain for books on my kind of food. Did not expect to search the shelves of bookshops in the flesh, and online, desperate to find what we eat from Mauritania to Guinea. No West African food. No plantain roti, pepper soup, banku, kenkey, no adayi-like gbegiri, no cassava leaves pesto. Food that I’ve been dying to cook, tweak, eat, imagine. The fact that one cannot buy one black African cookbook in a mainstream Western Cape bookshop with hundreds of cookbooks stunned me. In the end, I wanted to stand in the middle of Exclusive Books and yell: “Do you people know you have to fly over us to get to Nigella!”
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