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The saying goes: If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen. It got very warm on Saturday when I took part in a friendly cooking competition at the launch of Kushinda Catering Academy at its studio in the south of Johannesburg. Let’s not discuss matters of winners and losers, that takes all the fun away from things!
Kushinda is a Swahili word that means to win, and that is what owner Nonhlanhla Ka Manganye aims to do and she hopes to help others do the same. Ka Manganye’s core business is Kushinda Caterers, which she started in 2013.
“I actually registered a company in 2010 hoping to do events. I tried events but it failed dismally. Maybe my heart wasn’t in it. You know with cooking, no matter how badly it goes I can always wake up the next morning willing to try again but with events I didn’t have the same energy.”
Ka Manganye is a former journalist who got her big break into the catering industry by working on a film production set. She catered for the now discontinued soapie, Isidingo, and had a short stint on Generations.
“When I started catering, it loved me back... I didn’t know what craft and what call time [was], I didn’t know anything about production catering. But Mr Ramadan Suleman gave me a chance and that’s how it started.”
The cook is branching out into training because she feels the need is there, yet nobody is taking advantage of it.
“I’m not a professional chef, I just love good, homey, tasty food. If you get to taste my food you will know that it is food that you can eat every single day. That’s what I want people to experience and know how to make food like that. Since I’m not a trained chef there were many things that I needed to learn. I needed to learn hygiene standards according to the hospitality industry, I needed to learn those things, it wasn’t enough that I loved to cook.
“I was trained by an EDP [entrepreneurial development programme], so it wasn’t a professional setting. So I realised that there was a gap in the market for us to train caterers. I wanted to be able to train caterers from elokshini. I wanted to be able to give others the chance that someone gave me,” she says.
Ka Manganye has classes for domestic workers (R950), caterers (R1,200 for a day), and social classes (R750 a class) to which you can even bring your kids.
“[For a social class] you don’t learn one dish, we go through a whole menu. If we’re working with dough, we teach you how to make bagels, and ujeqe [steamed bread] etc. We go through every single thing, every class we teach knife skills, like this is how you handle knives. We do hygiene, we go through a whole lot of things.
“Then there are domestic classes if you want to train your helper. By the time they leave they will be able to prepare lunch, breakfast and supper. We also teach them about things like gluten intolerance and how to best use the ingredients one has in the house.
“For caterers we have a three-day course that covers menus. In film production we have breakfast, we have lunch, we have craft. I need to teach you how to set a menu for eight weeks with different types of ingredients because that is the problem we have, our film budgets are small, I need to teach you to make the most of what you have. And every single thing needs to be made from scratch.”
While chatting, her eyes catch everything from reminding one of her students not to forget to cover the welcome nibbles to intercepting another, who Ka Manganye thought had handed her mother a mimosa. Her mother doesn’t drink. Both her parents were present at the launch and her mother was asked to open with a prayer.
Ka Manganye was brought to tears by this and says she has a strong matriarchal foundation. For six years she lived with her maternal grandmother, who had a garden filled with produce that she always prepared for her grandchildren. Her paternal grandmother also played a role in her life, awakening and nurturing the business side. That grandmother had a small spaza shop that catered for families not as well off as others in their Northern KwaZulu-Natal neighbourhood.
“I still remember being in my maternal grandmother’s kitchen...that’s where the love of cooking came from, that’s where the seed was actually planted. The business element of it I get from my paternal grandmother, who was a domestic worker in Gauteng. She had this spaza shop, she used to sell paraffin in a 1 litre, 500ml or in a gin nip. Ugogo understood things like LSM and marketing even though nobody had told her about it. I learnt that you didn’t have to start big in business, just start with what you have.”
Ka Maganye has applied to be accredited with the Small Enterprise Development Agency so that her training can be government-sponsored so as to allow more people access to it as it will be free of charge.
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