Something to crow about: The story of Nando’s, which has over a thousand branches worldwide, is linked to the history of peri-peri cuisine and maritime relations in the Indian Ocean.
By 2012, Zimbabwean and other African migrants in South Africa had been experiencing attacks for at least a decade. These incidents were a symptom of a broader xenophobic narrative of immigrants coming to “steal” jobs from low-income South Africans.
Living up to its reputation for “cheeky” ads that comment on current events, the chain restaurant Nando’s released a commercial that year pointing out that most people living in South Africa were not “indigenous”, irreverently calling on everyone from Afrikaners to Indians to Nigerians to “go home”.
The SABC refused to air it, fearing retributive attacks on migrant workers; other networks banned it too.
“Real South Africans love diversity,” the commercial’s narrator concludes, a sentiment that reflects the cosmopolitan history that led to Nando’s popularity and its spread around the world.
Famous for its version of “peri-peri cuisine” featuring the eponymous pepper, the chain started as a single restaurant in Johannesburg in 1987. By 2012, it had 1000 restaurants around the world, from Africa and Asia to the US and UK. It now has 1186 branches.
Nando’s is far from the only restaurant to specialise in using the chilli pepper, which typically comes from Mozambique, but it is the most global brand and one of the most popular.
The success of Nando’s restaurants around the world reflects the longer history of peri-peri cuisine and maritime connections in the Indian Ocean world. The cuisine blends different food traditions, ingredients available because of Portuguese and British colonialism, as well as precolonial connections between Africa and Asia.
It was this engagement with a larger world beyond its shores that brought the peri-peri chilli across the Indian Ocean to South Africa. The chain’s expansion across the Atlantic Ocean world was also a part of South Africa’s return to global engagement after apartheid ended in the 1990s.
The region that came to be the nation of South Africa has always been a critical outpost in global trading networks. Before European entry into the Indian Ocean world, monsoon winds enabled Gujarati and Arab merchants to sail to the eastern coast of Africa, setting up trade and migration networks with the Swahili coast that extended further south.
In 1497, Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama led four ships from Lisbon around Africa to India and back, a critical voyage in quests to find a trade route that connected Europe to the subcontinent and from there to the Far East. In the 16th century, Portugal acquired colonial holdings in today’s Mozambique and Angola.
By 1652, Dutch colonists had settled at the Cape of Good Hope; their descendants would come to be known as the Afrikaners. The British took over the Cape in 1806, and the Union of South Africa eventually became a dominion of the British.
South Africa has always had an eclectic food history. Before European colonisation, the San peoples were foragers. When Bantu speakers migrated to the region, they brought agriculture and pastoralism, including crops and skills learned from Indian Ocean trade routes.
The food that most people eat in South Africa today comes from precolonial food traditions, including pap. Cattle and meat are a critical part of wedding traditions, including at feasts and in paying lobola.
Finding a climate similar to the Mediterranean, European farmers grew crops such as grapes and wheat. Initially, the Dutch brought enslaved peoples from their holdings in Southeast Asia to work the land, many of whom intermarried with the Khoisan peoples. Today known as the Cape Malay population, they introduced an Indonesian cuisine centred on fishing culture and spices such as nutmeg and chilli peppers.
After the abolition of slavery in 1833, the British brought indentured labourers from India to work on sugar plantations in Natal. Indian food is such a huge part of local food culture, from curries to bunny chow, that comedian Trevor Noah has joked about his expertise ordering food at Indian restaurants.
As these food traditions blended in South Africa, local populations began using the piri-piri pepper in their cooking. Also known as the pili-pili in the Congo region and peri-peri in Southern Africa (the spelling of which comes from a Portuguese word), the pepper is a version of the Capsicum frutescens, which is related to plants native to Central and South America. In English, it is called the African bird’s-eye chilli.
The pepper’s journey encapsulates the Indian and Atlantic Ocean worlds to which
South Africa belonged — the Portuguese brought the piri-piri from their Latin American holdings to their settlements in Mozambique.
It now grows wild across Africa and is produced commercially in Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The iconic hot sauce was made originally by mixing the pepper from South America with other spices obtained from Portuguese trade in Asia and was used as a marinade for
meat, especially chicken. The sauce became popular in Africa before it made its way to Portugal, a circular route of food and trade.
More recently, Nando’s has helped the sauce become a household name.
British and Dutch were not the only Europeans to settle in South Africa, as Nando’s founding story illustrates. After World War II, migrants from the Portuguese archipelago of Madeira came to the region, and after Mozambique and Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975, many came to South Africa.
In 1987, Robert Brozin, who grew up in a Jewish family in South Africa, and Fernando Duarte, who was Portuguese by way of Mozambique, visited a Johannesburg restaurant.
They loved the chicken so much that they bought the restaurant and named it Nando’s after Fernando and his son of the same name, integrating into their recipes the beloved sauce from his European homeland made with African chilli peppers.
Alongside peri-peri chicken, Nando’s serves dishes including mushy peas and chips, as well as spicy rice, a dish familiar to Hispanic, Iberian and African populations. For dessert, you’ll find the nata (custard egg tarts) developed in the 18th century at a Portuguese monastery.
As apartheid wound down, Nando’s blended cuisine was positioned well to represent a new South Africa that embraced its diversity on a global stage. Gradually, Nando’s expanded across the world.
During apartheid, the UN implemented economic and cultural sanctions against South Africa. After Nelson Mandela’s election as president in April 1994, sanctions were dropped, allowing South Africa to engage in global trade and commerce once again. Nando’s became one of the first South African chain restaurants to break out into the world. Today, South Africa’s former coloniser, the UK, is Nando’s largest market with 392 restaurants.
Recently, the brand was featured as a sponsor of the fictional football team AFC Richmond on Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso (for which it was a real-life sponsor).
The popularity of Nando’s food, as well as its affordability and spread throughout South Africa and the region, has reflected African, Asian and Portuguese food traditions that were not erased with the establishment of white minority rule. But the public relations and marketing team behind the chain have not confined themselves to just selling their food.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Nando’s released an ad that read, “Turns out finger licking isn’t good. Rather reach for the soap,” a not-so-subtle dig at its American rival, KFC.
Nando’s has called out African and global leaders in its cheeky political ads. Several commercials have been banned in South Africa and beyond, including one that labelled
Zimbabwean leader Robert Mugabe as the “last dictator standing”.
And so the history of Nando’s is a microcosm of the history of South Africa. The food traditions on which it relies are part of democratic South Africa’s integration with the world economy after the end of apartheid and sanctions. But the restaurant also engages with much longer customs of food preparation and trade that extend beyond the country’s borders.
Today, Nando’s is particularly appealing to Africans living in the diaspora. The chain has recently spread to Texas, where there is a large African diaspora. Its popularity across the US might be because of its similarity to Hispanic cuisine, connecting the Portuguese empire to its neighbour Spain.
According to the chain’s official history, “Behind most things at Nando’s is an extraordinary story.” Its place in South Africa’s vibrant history is no exception.
• Trishula Patel is an assistant professor of history at the University of Denver in the US.
• This article was first published on 19 September under the headline “It’s always time for a cheeky Nando’s’ on the website Perspectives on History. https://www.historians.org/research-and-publi0cations/perspectives-on-history/september-2023/its-always-time-for-a-cheeky-nandos-the-global-journey-of-an-african-cuisine