Pap Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Pap is a porridge or stiff porridge made by cooking maize meal in water and working it into a paste. Across South Africa and the wider region it is eaten as a daily staple: cooked firm, it holds together as a mass you can shape by hand; cooked loose, it becomes a breakfast porridge. Plain and unadorned, it has long formed the base of the region's diet.

The maize at its heart is originally a crop of the Americas. It did not exist in Africa; it first crossed over when Portuguese trading ships carried it into the Old World during the age of exploration. Maize appears in the South African record in 1655, and before that not a single grain grew in this land. It was in the eighteenth century that the Nguni peoples took maize up as a staple, displacing the sorghum and millets they had eaten until then. The maize-based pap of today, therefore, can have taken shape only after that time at the earliest.

The cooking itself, however, working meal into a paste in water, is far older in this land. Grinding indigenous grains such as sorghum, finger millet and pearl millet and boiling them into a stiff porridge was part of everyday southern African life long before maize arrived. When maize spread, people simply applied this old porridge-making to the new grain. The pot and the handwork carried over; only the grain inside was exchanged. In today's pap, what is old is the craft of the porridge, and the maize it now works is the newcomer.

The understanding that pap is an ancient staple, eaten by the indigenous peoples of southern Africa since before the colonial era, is widely held. As a national staple bound up with the life of the people, it is easily taken for a tradition handed down from remote antiquity.

But that understanding cannot stand. Maize, the main ingredient of pap, is a crop of the New World, and it existed nowhere on this continent until Portuguese trade brought it in. Since it first enters the South African record in 1655 and becomes an Nguni staple only in the eighteenth century, maize pap simply could not have reached any table in the pre-colonial period before that. The language of an ancient staple dresses the dish in a lineage older than the facts allow; it is a later understanding, not history.

This is not, however, a claim that the tradition of porridge itself is new. Boiling sorghum and millets into a worked paste continued from before maize arrived, and that is genuinely old. But it was not maize pap; it was a forerunner porridge of other grains. What is old is the craft of the porridge, and the maize pap now on the table is a comparatively recent dish, one born when a new grain was poured into that old craft.