On the scrubbed wooden serving board lies a chunk of meat, with a pile of salt and chillies. Then one sees the long, curling eyelashes, soft cheeks and thick lips that identify this as part of s’kop — a cow’s head. Welcome to Durban’s Bovine Head Cookers’ Market.
It’s 10am and 40 customers sit on wooden benches at long communal dining tables covered with plastic cloths, each with sauces and condiments. Behind them the grisly business of preparation is under way.
Heads, which arrive frozen in municipal plastic bags, are deftly skinned and chopped with cleavers. The meat is then boiled in big pots, each straddling three paraffin stoves. It’s a messy business. But the market is clean and orderly — the result of a joint effort between iTrump, the municipal agency charged with regenerating Thekwini’s inner city, and traders.
It wasn’t always like this. Before the head cookers had proper facilities, they worked from pavements at the heart of Warwick Junction, Durban’s bustling transport interchange. Many passers-by were offended by the heads displayed on pavements slippery with blood and attracting rats. Water from the cooked heads was poured into stormwater drains, ending up in the sea.
Then the municipality stepped in to help. Health official Tobias Mkhize said: ”It’s a challenge and an opportunity. We know informal traders are here to stay.”
Mkhize headed the Bovine Head Cookers’ Task Team, which examined the environmental and health impacts. A new site was found a block away, along the same commuter route to town. The traders were each given a cooking area, concrete counter and chopping table with inlaid steel top. Paraffin stoves were contained in a three-sided concrete shelter to minimise the risk of fire.
Waste water from cooking now drains into a grille-covered channel that runs the length of the market to three tanks, which the council empties every month. A filter screens out fat and hair, allowing only fluids into the sewers.
Ten years ago street traders cooking perishable foods in Durban were subjected to regular dawn raids by police and health officials. Two hours later, trade would resume.
Officials began to see that food markets provided a valuable service to inner-city residents. ”A man living in Dalton hostel and working at Lever Brothers would go via a lady who would wrap samp or putu in a lunch box,” said Mkhize. ”So we asked ourselves: How can we talk about their issues and look at them positively?”
The Department of Health encouraged traders to cook on site and on demand — to minimise health risks. They were also encouraged to use cooler boxes filled with ice.
Customers start arriving at the restaurant from about 5am en route to work, meaning an early start for the 30 mostly female head cooks.
Khombisile Mhlongo has traded on Durban’s streets since 1988, switching from vetkoek and fish to more lucrative izikopo to better support her children.
Only few butcheries supply heads, some in far-off Verulam and Pinetown.
Sometimes the cooks band together to hire a taxi to transport the heads for R90, or individual traders pay for a row of seats at R6 each. Otherwise, they must pay R10 for heads to be wheeled from inner-city butcheries.
Uncooked heads cost between R45 and R50. Mhlongo cooks about eight heads a day, each yielding between 10 and 14 pieces of meat selling for R7 a portion. But overheads include transport costs, cooking fuel, water charges and overnight storage for stoves, cutlery and crockery.
Each night Mhlongo packs these into wooden crates to be moved to storage spaces in nearby Ark Street, at a R10 weekly rental. She pays R7 a day to the ”barrow boy” who wheels the load through the streets.
Izikopo are a delicacy among African men, specially reserved for fathers, and are traditionally prepared with ritual. Women in rural areas are barred from preparing them — but restrictions have broken down in the cities. Now urban women do it, and everyone eats them, ”even white people”, says Mhlongo.
Business is good, but Mhlongo would like a power supply. There are complaints of blocked drains, which overflow and stink. Traders in the outermost stalls get wet when it rains. The water bailiff system has been a problem, says Mkhize — few traders want to buy water at 50c for 25 litres when they can get it free from taxi ranks.
Discussions about rent are ongoing. Street traders pay between R10 and R35 a month for a space, and between R25 and R35 if it is sheltered. But this is hard to enforce, and the head cooks are not yet paying rent.
Running for five years now, the restaurant has been a key pilot project for a council getting to grips with informal enterprise.
Additional reporting by Ayanda Zulu