Braai Period BOrigin theory CVerified

A braai is a South African social gathering built around an open wood or charcoal fire, with beef and boerewors (fresh sausage) cooking over it and people drawn in around the flames. The meat at its center has long been available in this land. Khoisan pastoralists brought livestock here some two thousand years ago, and by the seventeenth century Dutch settlers had added their own open-fire roasting. Cooking meat over an outdoor fire was itself an old and deeply rooted craft in southern Africa.

For that reason, the question worth asking about this dish is not when people first grilled meat here. Open-fire cooking outdoors had been part of the land for a very long time. The question is when that practice acquired a single name, braai or braaivleis, and rose into a shared national style of sociability.

The trace of the word appears at the end of the nineteenth century. In 1891, E.J. Dijkman's Di Suid-Afrikaanse Kook-, Koek-, Resepteboek, the first Afrikaans cookbook, uses the word gebraaide (roasted meat). The word braai belongs to the same family as Dutch braden, to roast. But what existed at that point was a name for grilled meat, not the social ritual that would later come to stand for the country.

Braai took hold as a shared style in the 1930s. It first spread across the country as fundraising gatherings, the braaivleisaand, and then, around the 1938 centenary of the Great Trek, it bound itself tightly to a rising Afrikaner nationalism and took shape as national culture. From there the braai widened into a social occasion shared across South Africa, drawing in the tables of Boer and English-speaking South Africans, Khoisan and Cape Malay alike.

The story most often told about the braai is that it descends from the open fires, earth ovens, and spit-roasting of the Khoisan, southern Africa's first inhabitants, and continues unbroken from them as an indigenous tradition. Repeated in tourism and food media, it has circulated widely as an appealing origin tale wrapped in ancient pedigree.

It is true that cooking meat over an outdoor fire is old. Khoisan pastoralists introduced livestock some two thousand years ago, and their open-fire cooking does form part of the deep layer of southern African food. But carrying that antiquity straight over to the origin of the braai as a national tradition dissolves two separate things into one. The age of a cooking method and the making of a culture that has a name, a style, and a social occasion are not the same thing.

Unathi Funde's master's thesis Manning the Braai (University of Pretoria, 2024) is the only scholarly history to take the braai as its subject, and it traces how this tradition settled culturally through fundraising activity in the 1930s and knotted itself to Afrikaner nationalism. The historian Johan Fourie likewise places the birth of the braai in that period. The braai as name, style, and social ritual was not an unbroken continuation from indigenous antiquity but a new tradition shaped in the twentieth century, around the 1938 centenary of the Great Trek.

The claim of continuity from a Khoisan origin, then, touches something real in the deep layer of open-fire cooking, but insofar as it is told as the origin of the braai, it lacks support. The antiquity of the braai is the antiquity of the fire that cooks the meat, not the antiquity of the national occasion itself.