Braam Kruger’s new book of recipes pays tribute to the exotic communities whose food is sold on the city streets Matthew Krouse Braam Kruger lives in a dream state – in Observatory, Johannesburg. He reminds one of a plaster gnome who dwells under a large mushroom, along with the fairies at the bottom of the garden. And his reality is not far off. He lives in a quaint, olde worlde mansion brimming with decadent overload: porcelain, glass, stuffed animals, skins, beaded curtains and flashing Christmas lights. It’s in environments like this that Kruger has spun the mythology of his life. He’s built a career out of his alter ego, the aging white chef Kitchenboy. It’s a name that, by its usage in the realm of good food, contradicts the idea that the male servants of colonial Africa were good-for-nothing. Instead, Kruger rightfully claims, the kitchenboys were the master chefs of old. In his new cookery book Provocative Cuisine (Zebra Press), he looks forward to a time when African food will come into its own. Kitchenboy, Kruger writes, believes that African cuisine is “the last of the great cuisines of the world waiting to be discovered and explored”. This is the way he introduces a recipe for Guinea fowl in peanut soup. In his food writing – firstly for De Kat magazine and later for Playboy and Business Day, he has developed the well-drawn character of a fisherman and Casanova, shacked up with his luscious blonde “Junglegirl”, surrounded by a gang of eccentric art world nutters. The frivolity is construed to mask the basic facts: Kruger is one of the country’s most experienced fine artists and a highly regarded chef. “Being a far East Rand boykie, growing up in Nigel, had a lot to do with the way I configure taste, which I think drives everything you do,” Kruger says on a day when he’s chosen to wear shimmering pink bell bottoms and a flowing black stole. His unusually long nails are painted pillar-box red. “I got expelled from Horskool John Vorster twice. My daddy was influential and got me back both times. I used to wank on Titian’s nude. To me it was not really art.” No shit, as they say. In tribute to the good times Titian gave him, Kruger has rendered the master’s Venus time and again. His favorite is a 1,5m drawing of the reclining nude clutching a vibrator, gracing his dining room wall.
Kruger was born in 1950 in Boksburg “in the white hospital”, he says. His father was an engineer and his mother was the kind of wife “who can’t really cook. She hates me saying this. Everything is bad except her souskluitjies.” In the boerekos section of Provocative Cuisine you’ll find the recipe for Ou Bes se Souskluitjies. It’s an Afrikaner milk-based desert that, in the recipe’s preamble, Kitchenboy claims his mother did so well that she used it to seduce his late father. So much for tradition. Kruger says he doesn’t actually think that there’s such a thing as a South African cuisine: “I’ve often been asked by visiting journalists, ‘what’s this big thing about a new South African cooking?’ I don’t think there’s anything like that. Afrikaans cooking I consider as really just bad English food. There was Dutch cooking and there was Malay cooking.
“There weren’t any Afrikaans cook books by the time of the great trek, when the Afrikaners really separated from the Cape Dutch area. You can sommer just say: ‘Howzit Mr Beeton …’ “Even potjiekos was invented in the mid-1970s. There may have been three legged pots, but the Afrikaners were introduced to mielie pap by the Xhosa who got it from the Portuguese. The word mielie comes from the Portuguese milo. The three-legged pot is still called the Dutch oven, it was used in bredies and so on. But potjiekos as we know it now was a fad that was started by a stupid fucking dominee in Paarl. And that was after the fad of Mongolian braais!” Ja nee. He certainly has a way with words. “I am really interested in a fusion of all the cultures we are. And we see it,” Kruger claims. “We see it living in Yeoville – we see a West African contingent coming in through the street market. You can buy plantains in the streets of Yeoville, you can buy packets of fufu …” Yeoville today seems far away from Kruger’s East Rand childhood, where he grew up with Tretchikoff’s Blou Meid above the fireplace. With the fuss being made of him in the art class, there was no doubt where he was headed. “From 1969 to 1975 I was studying art at Pretoria Technikon,” he recalls. “A year in between I worked for Pact [Performing Arts Council of the Transvaal], painting sets, which was fantastic because it made me lose my fear of size. “Coming from the East Rand I also had to make amends with my past and what I thought art was. It took me a while to de-educate myself and to come to terms with that again. So, in my work, if I say it’s about values I say it’s about good and bad taste. I think that they can co-exist. “Even as Kitchenboy I’ve got this slogan: Kitchenboy has come to save the world from bad taste. And it’s exactly the opposite. I think that the most garish food is the most beautiful.” Cut back to the fabulous Seventies, when Kruger says he was “painting new realism and at the same time trying to get behind what the ideal attitude would be to make art. I like to make a painting sometimes look like there are 10 different guys who’ve worked on it. “Battiss once saw a lot of work of mine just before an exhibition and he said: ‘I see you’re having a group show.'” Suddenly, with Kruger’s last joke a whole reality clicks into place. His talent, of course, was formed in the decades when Walter Battiss was a domineering figure on the local art scene. On a shelf beside Kruger’s mantelpiece there is a small, framed photo in black-and-white of a chubby, fresh-faced Braam painting a stark naked Walter, sitting regally with legs asunder in an armchair. This was sometime in the mid-Seventies, when Kruger was living in a Sunnyside flat in Pretoria, earning a living as a full-time painter. Here he formulated a system of commerce, uniquely his own: “I’ve always been independent and that somehow links to the cooking. I would do a couple of paintings and invite buyers over for dinner. The idea was to lure them there with good food.” An unsubstantiated claim Kruger makes is that he fed his guests on pigeons, caught by scattering seeds outside his windows. Later, in the early Eighties, he moved to Johannesburg where he shared a flat in Joubert Park with the artist Simon Stone. But it was to take some years before a younger set would begin to notice Kruger’s work. In 1984, he hung his groundbreaking exhibition of paintings of Batman downtown in Gallant House, a venue run by art entrepreneur Robert Weinek. “Batman,” Kruger claims, “was one of the first things I drew as a kid.” The Batman series was dark, sombre and somewhat apolitical. It was a far cry from the lively work that Kruger would land up doing later that decade – slightly frivolous with a satirical, anti-apartheid edge. Plenty of people know Kruger’s images, the most memorable of which is probably his Dan Mugabe as St Sebastian, a portrait of his revolutionary-looking gardener with arrows protruding from his torso and chest. An image of this work enjoys pride of place in Provocative Cuisine, now recycled as the image to illustrate the African condiment Chakalaka Du. He claims that he hasn’t constructed his satirical images on purpose. Talking of the bad Eighties, Kruger claims he “tried not to be a consciously political painter in the sense that if you do anything – whether it’s money or sex – the naughtiness is going to come first and the art is going to come second.”
In the early Nineties Kruger largely abandoned his art production to concentrate on food. He opened his Kitchenboy restaurant in Troyeville, which swiftly gained a reputation for good food and “casual” service. Its philosophy was that, for carefully prepared food, you have to wait. “It was at the time of that fuckin’ maniac period of the Johannesburg Biennale when everybody was arse-creeping everybody. I didn’t want to get trapped.
“Doing a lot of food criticism at the time, I thought it would be a nice punch bag for restaurants – I thought I could show by example.” At the time, though, his restaurant got some pretty bad press when Kruger was accused of taking issue with patrons who took issue with his staff. “I wasn’t rude to everybody, I was only rude to kak people,” he grumbles. Today, the Kitchenboy restaurant is closed. Meanwhile, Kruger writes a column for Business Day and presents food on Radio 702, while flogging the last of his branded condiments to outlets that will sell them, given the fact that they aren’t kosher and are produced without preservatives. Now he is considering returning to painting – the original art form for which he is so well known. His latest foray into book production pays tribute to the eating habits of the various communities that make up the country. The Portuguese, the Chinese, the Africans, the Afrikaners, the Indians and the Jews. It’s a handy guide to dealing with the exotic ingredients that one finds these days, with increasing abundance, on the city streets.