Anni Dewani Prequel

I had even more to say about the mysterious murder of honeymooning bride Anni Dewani in the Sunday Times yesterday. Chas Withington, the Darling negoçiant who sources wine for Mzoli’s reports “I was there on the Wednesday after the incident and the locals were not happy to be unfairly tarred. They smelt a rat and seemingly there was one.”

m1

The murder last month of British honeymooning tourist Anni Dewani in Gugulethu has probably done more harm to SA tourism than staging the soccer World Cup brought benefits. Coverage on Sky News alternated with news of Prince William proposing to Kate Middleton in Kenya while the Observer newspaper ran a major feature on the township with more than 700 murders in five years. The brutal statistics are shocking: 18,000 murders a year in SA compared to 500 for the UK.

Helderberg celebrity chef (Overture) and proprietor of AmaZink restaurant in Khayamandi, the old township of Stellenbosch, Bertus Basson, recently returned from a culinary tour of Australia and confirms that perception of crime is the biggest factor discouraging antipodean tourists.

Bertus Basson

Bertus Basson

Amazink opened in June and Bertus feeds a 50:50 mix of tourists and locals. “We’ve a lot of foreign social workers from Germany and Sweden who live above the restaurant and they and their friends treat AmaZink as their local. When Scotland beat the Springboks, the place was pumping. I’ve been driving through to the township at night two or three times a week since the winter and we’ve never had an incident. That said, a Stellenbosch University student was murdered a couple of months ago at 3am. The problem with Khayamandi is there are good streets and bad streets and you don’t know which is which.”

Press reports link the Dewani murder to Mzoli’s, a butchery come African braaihouse in Gugulethu that had already closed when the honeymooners arrived, forcing them to drive further into the township. While any murder is a tragedy, if crime should scare away patrons from pioneering restaurants like AmaZink and Mzoli’s, it is bad news for the SA wine industry trying desperately to break out of a Whites Only laager.

Bertus reports his modest wine list finds traction with diners. “Our house wines are the most popular, thanks to competitive pricing. Our house red with a kif label from Stellenbosch designers Fanakalo is the Devonair Cabernet which we sell for R60; our house white is the Ernst Gouws Sauvignon Blanc which we list at R50. Both producers came to the party as they really want to sell their wine in a township.”

Mzoli’s has teamed up with negoçiant Charles Withington to produce own label wines like the Mandisi Merlot made from Darling grapes and a fruity Rosé. While only rated a stingy two stars (out of five) in the 2011 edition of a sighted wine guide, they should score five stars when accompanied by fatty lamb ribs, definitely the dish to order.

Non-meat options limited – there are none – ditto for wine glasses and cutlery. So bring your own can opener for the Windhoek bottles with tops that for some reason do not unscrew. It must be a Namibian thing.

Meat (lamb and pork chops in a fiery braai basting) is served on enamel plates (small) or bowls (large) and when I lunched with Withington, the only salads I saw were BYO. Mzoli’s is very much Meat City with BYO wet-wipes and far too important a cultural experience to be held hostage by gun-wielding thugs.