It is only when the planeload of heavyweight guests and judges takes off from Johannesburg, destination Hoedspruit, that I begin to get an idea of the significance of the game lodge cookery contest we are headed for. Launched three years ago as part of Southern Cross School’s fund-raising campaign, the Laborie African Bush Banquet is clearly more than just some local potjie cook-out.
There are about 50 journalists and a panel of 10 judges. I soon discover I’m with a formidable collection of foodies before whose discriminating taste buds even the Naked Chef would cover himself.
Chairing the judges is marketing guru Dr Ivan May. Panellists include Lannice Snyman, who recently ditched the restaurants awards annual Eat Out which she ran for 18 years; feisty TV consumer journalist Isabel Jones; and Annette Kesler, editor of the popular website Showcook.
There are also Myrna Robins, Cape Argus food editor and cookery book writer; Lyndall Popper, SAfm food critic; Anna Montale, Food and Home cookery editor; Jos Baker, author of Top 100 Restaurants; and Tamsin Snyman, who is a judge in the SA BBQ championships.
The Southern Cross School is on a wildlife estate called Raptor’s View, on the edge of Hoedspruit. With its thatched roofs and ochre and terracotta walls, it looks more like a game lodge than a school.
The school buildings surround the central courtyard where the 27 banquet tables have been set up under the tamboti and leadwood and maroela trees. The place has the feel of a boma.
All the established game lodges are on display, as well as the hot newies: Londolozi, Sabi Sabi, Royal Malewane, Motswari, Tanda Tula and Singita Lebombo, which was voted the Best Hotel in the World by British Tatler magazine this year.
I discover that the contest is not only about the food at this three-course meal. There are also prizes for best service, best waiter, best table and best kitchen.
Kitchens play a vital role. They have to be rigged up in the grounds of the school, with cooks using only the natural resources they would have in the bush. They are provided with a pit fire with coals, extra wood and plenty of ice. They can bring gas if they want to.
Tamboti gets this year’s best kitchen award. It has taken the banquet’s theme — traditional hip — seriously and come up with a colourful shebeen kitchen, complete with paraffin lamps, enamel plates and radio blaring.
Snyman is impressed by the fact that the kitchens are a radical improvement on those of previous years. ‘They’re representative of the lodges themselves, so the cooks are putting in far more effort,” she remarks.
Where the lodges really go bananas is on their table decorations. The attention to detail is impressive, and they’re all very different. Ulusaba opts for stylish: a designer-khaki theme, with high chairs covered in game-drive fabric, and hot water bottles strapped on with game rangers’ belts.
Sabi Sabi goes for maximum impact: a grass baobab tree centrepiece decorated with beads, on a striking table made from a tree washed down in the floods. Thornybush puts its patriotic heart on its crockery: plates and bowls covered with the labels of South African icons such as Lion matches.
In an attempt at the unusual, a few trip over their own enthusiasm. I’m not sure what to make of birds’ nests at each place setting. Fake dung beetles crawling over the tablecloth? Bare cabbage heads plonked in the middle of the table? Nuptial-style arum lilies pinned to the backs of the chairs?
The table that really blows the judges away in the silver category is on a different stretch of turf altogether. WIN Trails is a small safari company and Alan McSmith, who owns it with his wife Sarah, is a guide who has been taking clients tracking on foot for 17 years, working from mobile camps, sleeping under the stars under canvas and washing under bucket showers.
McSmith is an elephant obsessive, so naturally his team has dedicated their table to elephant conservation. Their striking centrepiece is a cluster of elephant tusks – in plaster of paris and papier mâché – that symbolise the ivory pyre burnt in Kenya in 1989.
Even the table mats each have a message:
‘Take the breath of the new dawn and make it part of you.”
‘Listen. Or your tongue will make you deaf.”
‘A man’s heart away from nature becomes hard.”
McSmith never expected to win. He tells me: ‘It was daunting, to say the least, a small family company like ours competing with some of the top lodges in the Lowveld, whose tables were extremely elaborate and beautiful.”
But he was touched by the number of people who stopped at his table to talk about elephants. ‘Between 1979 and 1989, over 60 000 were poached — 17 a day. Then after the tusks were burned, the price for ivory dropped from US$200 per kilogram to US$45. But it’s critical to maintain awareness because a resurgence of ivory demand is always a threat.”
None of the other tables has such a specific message. Nor are they all going for a bush look. As the organisers keep pointing out, this is a ‘banquet in the bush”, not a bush banquet. This means the boundaries are wider. With that as the premise, it is not surprising Royal Malewane wins best table in the gold category.
Royal Malewane’s renowned chef, John Jackson, has created a fabulous Moroccan harem set-up. His carved wooden table is low and heavy, and guests sit on antique sofas, cosily intimate on big fat cushions.
With twinkling brass lamps, great clusters of red roses and gorgeously tinted glassware, the effect is irresistibly seductive. No wonder, as the evening wears on, this is the table that gets the noisiest.
Of course, the guests are partly what make this banquet so successful. Each table costs R10 000, and most of the 270 diners are the well-heeled sort who play as hard as they work. They come from all over the country.
Paul Harris and GT Ferreira have come straight from a First Rand bosberaad at Thornybush. They are guests of the lodge’s Jennifer Fox, who looks as good as her table, in mod black and white ethnic beads which win her the best dressed lady prize.
‘I didn’t realise it was such a swanky event,” Ferreira tells me. ‘We hadn’t planned to come, but we’ve been so overawed by the way they put it all together that I want to bring my wife next year.”
He says he’s heard talk about making it bigger and taking it to Gauteng. ‘I think it would be very sad to take it away from here. It would lose some of its flavour.”
Protea’s Arthur Gillis is also here, up from Cape Town. He’s at the Singita Lebombo table with the guys from Southern Sun and Sun International, all guests of Tourvest. The hoteliers have donated generous prizes for the auction and are now trying to outdrum each other, urged on by the Drum Café.
Gillis is so impressed by the evening he tells me he wants his new lodge, Tinga, to take part next year. But he questions the fact that there’s so little bush food on the various menus. ‘Isn’t bush food what people come to the bush to eat? Do they really want to eat stuffed crayfish and seared tuna?”
Yes, according to Sue Godding, who with Heidi Smith launched the banquet originally. ‘When they’re paying anything up to R8 000 a night, they want crayfish and prawns, and the occasional bit of venison. The lodges in the silver category might do more bush food, because it’s less expensive and more in keeping with the bush. But generally not the top lodges, and this banquet is about what the lodges serve daily.”
As a judge in the silver category, I can testify to the considerable use of local meat: ostrich, impala, springbok, quail. Their names sometimes appear on the menu in elaborate-sounding dishes that don’t always measure up to the flamboyant description, which elicits scathing comment from this extraordinarily critical judging panel.
The three-course meal made by Shiluvari, a lodge somewhere in the northern reaches of the Limpopo district, stands out. What first catches both our eyes and our taste buds is the delicious sweet potato and avocado soup, served with a sweetcorn Venda pot bread, which arrives in a little Venda pot. The next two courses are an equally tasty and unusual fusion of Afro and Euro.
This is the first time the Shiluvari team — Poppie Ramashia, Betty Hlungwani and Clare Wilkie Girardin — have entered, and they’re ecstatic when their win is announced. ‘It’s a win for the whole region,” says Ramashia.
There’s a tie in the gold category, between Tanda Tula and Singita Lebombo. Annette Kesler is on the gold panel and she tells me: ‘You would never imagine they could produce that marvellous food in those field kitchens. Tanda Tula’s springbok with red figs, rosemary and a honey vinaigrette was a brilliant combination, and Singita did wonderful things with local ingredients, cleverly incorporating the Laborie wines of the sponsors.”
The evening ends up raising almost half a million rand for the high school building, bursaries and outreach programme. The auction brings in R200 000, at least half of it netted by wildlife art. Sue Dickinson’s leopard watercolour fetches R55 000, and Lin Barrie’s oil of wild dogs fetches R42 000.
When he announces the winners, Ivan May raves about the far-reaching effects of the dinner: ‘This is a totally unique concept whose purpose is multidimensional. While the funds that go into school projects will ultimately empower the whole local community, the competition itself will hone the skills of all lodges and dining establishments in the Hoedspruit area, boosting employment and the area’s entire tourism industry.
‘And the influence of the bush banquet is extending far and wide. Already we have seen people from Mozambique and Venda travelling hundreds of kilometres to enter. There is a business here!
‘What about the winelands? The coastal lodges? The mountain retreats? They can also do this. And I haven’t even touched on the international spin-offs for the country —”
The world’s first green school
‘We had this problem,” is how Heidi Smith puts it. ‘We had opened the school in January, raising the bulk of the money with a raffle for a one-hectare stand in the Raptors’ View Wildlife Estate, and now we needed a spectacular function for the raffle draw that had been advertised for March.”
The problem was the catering. They had put the Southern Cross School together on a shoestring. Smith’s partner, Sue Godding, suggested a bush banquet. Then Smith came up with the idea of a cooking competition between the lodges. ‘Why not?” she asked. ‘They cater in the bush all the time, doing river-bed dinners, etc.”
In two months flat they put the banquet together, and it was such a riotous success they did it again the next year.
The school itself had been an uphill battle. Originally Godding’s idea, it took almost three years to get off the ground.
‘We needed an English-medium school in Hoedspruit,” says Godding. ‘My husband Kevin and I were working at Jackalberry Lodge and we didn’t want to have to leave the bush to educate our two small daughters. This is a problem faced by many lodge personnel in management positions.”
She called a meeting, and Smith was one of the 60 parents who attended. They had never met before. Smith, who also had two small children, ran her own transport-broking company at that stage. Her husband Alan was a mango farmer.
What finally came out of that meeting was a unique concept: the world’s first green school, an educational institution that follows the national curriculum but whose ethos is entrenched in an environmental code, so that, wherever possible, the wild serves as a vehicle for instruction.
‘It seems such an obvious idea I don’t know why someone didn’t come up with it before,” says Smith. ‘I think it was our non-educational background that resulted in our fresh approach.” She does have an ecology background, however. She was very hands-on in the bid to get the area registered with the United Nations as a biosphere.
But now the slog began. ‘Initially everyone was positive,” says Godding. ‘Then as time passed, they all fell away, until it was only Heidi and I left driving the project. Rumours spread that we would never do it. But we kept spurring each other on.”
Gradually, a handful of other visionaries came on board. Allan Mansfield, one of the owners of Jackalberry Lodge, provided seed capital and persuaded wildlife property developer Trevor Jordan to donate 40ha of Raptor’s View to the school.
Royal Malewane’s innovative builder, Kobus van den Berg, got involved and brought in architect Francois Lotter to create an eco-friendly building.
The key was the headmaster. St Stithians teacher Jumbo Williams was doing an environmental camp at Kruger National Park when he heard about the school and phoned Godding. He told her it was what he had dreamt of for years. Now he’s there.
The school opened in January 2001 with 50 children. It caught the public imagination immediately and was given a stand at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in 2002. Now there are 150 children and a boarding house around which it is not uncommon to see giraffe and waterbuck grazing.