Every chef has an ingredient they turn to time and again. For Yottam Ottolenghi, it’s za’atar or harissa, Nigella Lawson’s is, rather more simply, salt. And for Xoliswa Ndoyiya, personal chef to former president Nelson Mandela, it’s love. As is clear from the title of her new book, Made With Love.
How does a girl go from cooking alongside her mother in Queenstown to serving the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Princess Diana and Naomi Campbell at presidential dinners? With a sprinkle of luck, dollops of daring, and a great big dash of passion.
That, at least, was the case for Xoliswa Ndoyiya. “My first food influence was definitely my grandmother. She was a domestic worker, and every evening she’d bring home food from the place where she worked and tell me all about it,” she recalls. Her mother kindled those flames of interest, until Xoliswa’s curiosity around ingredients burst into a full-hearted love of watching people eat and enjoy her food. “That’s the very best part of cooking – when I’ve made someone happy, I’m happy, too. I love watching their faces and seeing their plates come back clean.”
She also loves the process of cooking, mixing different ingredients, watching them all come together. That’s what drove her to experiment with different cuisines … although her favourite dishes to cook will always be the food that reminds her of home – like oxtail, samp and beans and tripe, she became equally adept at whipping up chopped liver and gefilte fish when she got her first job, working for a Jewish family in Joburg. This is where she started to hone her kitchen skills, first at a class teaching Jewish cuisine, then at the Coronation Hotel in downtown Joburg, where she cooked for the residents of an old age home housed within the hotel.
It was around this time that a friend from Queenstown, also a chef, invited her to meet up. “I was told that she couldn’t get away from work, so she’d send a driver to fetch me,” Xoliswa says. Instead, the ‘driver’, who met her outside ANC headquarters at Shell House, invited her inside, where he led her into a boardroom filled with men wearing black and white suits. “They gave me a chair, asked me to sit down and started asking me all sorts of questions about where I come from and what kind of cooking I enjoy. Then, they asked what I would do if I were offered a job cooking for an icon.” Xoliswa was quite candid about the fact that she wasn’t on the hunt for a job just then, but she also made it clear that if the offer was a good one, she’d consider. She also made it known that, no matter what went on in her kitchen, nothing would be able to take her attention from her pots and pans – a useful skill in a kitchen that would come to be dominated by the tastes of celebrities.
The next step saw Xoliswa driven to Madiba’s house – where she really did meet with her Queenstown friend. She also saw the great man for the first time. “I was shaking so much, I couldn’t move!” she remembers. In true fashion, he moved to set her mind at ease. “Do you know this man?” he asked, pointing to himself. When she answered yes, he asked her where she knew him from. “From newspapers and TV,” Xoliswa answered. “Then you know me, you know that you can relax,” he told me.
And relax she did – because Nelson Mandela’s household was one where she was very quickly made to feel at home. “Although he was our leader and our boss, he was also like our father. He saw us as his children: We may have helped him, but he helped us, too.” Xoliswa tells a story which shows the regard Tata held for his staff. “When he wanted his grandchildren to come and live with him, he first asked us if that would be alright. Of course we would never have denied him, especially since he had not been able to watch his own children grow up, but Tata said that our job was to look after him, not his family, so he wanted to make sure we didn’t mind.”
She says she learnt three things from the father of democracy in South Africa – to share with people, to care about people and, mostly, to respect people.
Xoliswa cooked Madiba’s favourite foods for 22 years, once, even flying from Queenstown to Johannesburg to have his uphutu amasi – sour milk and pap – packaged and smuggled into the UK, where he was visiting at the time, until he passed away in 2013. But, missing him and the ethos he taught her, she was absolutely delighted when the Nelson Mandela Foundation asked her to head up Insights Restaurant, the eatery at Sanctuary Mandela. “I was so excited to see how his former home had become this beautiful hotel,” Xoliswa says, “and I am so very happy to be back in this kitchen, where my journey with Tata started. Nothing makes my heart happier than to greet the people who come here: I always say, ‘Welcome home’, because that’s what it is.”
Meals and moments
Xoliswa remembers that one of the first things Nelson Mandela said to her was “I believe you’re a great cook. Can you cook my home food?” When she answered ‘yes’, he told her she’d got the job as his personal chef. The first meal she cooked for him was roast chicken with orange sauce, basmati rice and roasted vegetables. “He didn’t eat the rice, but he later told me that it had nothing to do with the way I cooked it – he just didn’t like rice.”
Text: LISA WITEPSKI
