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If you hang with middle-class natives for any significant amount of time you will, inevitably, be invited to a braai. At that point you want to be very, very careful. One misstep, one unfortunate remark, and you will be branded as a filthy, ignorant foreigner and driven out of polite society forever.

On the surface a braai may seem like a casual outdoor gathering of friends and family that just happens to be centered on the preparation of food. In reality it is one of the most sacred rituals of South African life, one that comes with its own language and attitudes and requirements. You will be expected to be familiar with all of these, because every South African is born with an instinctive understanding of what is required and cannot conceive of anybody who isn’t similarly equipped. In other words, your inadvertent mistake will be read as a deliberate insult.

To start with, you’d better have a very good excuse indeed if you wish to decline an invitation to a braai. You must also express extreme gratitude at being asked, and complain bitterly about how this job interview/quest to save the world/birth of your first child will perforce keep you away.

Do not, at any point, refer to the event as a “barbecue”, “picnic” or “lunch”. It is none of those things, and equating a braai with any of them is disparaging.

Do not arrive at the braai with your own utensils or meat unless specifically asked to do so – preferably in writing. A bottle of wine, your own beer or any traditional dinner-party type of gift is fine, but the implication that your host isn’t fully prepared or has inferior hardware will cause deep hurt.

In a similar vein, make no attempt to help with the lighting of the fire, the cleaning of the grill or the actual handling of the meat unless explicitly invited. If you are so invited, follow all commands and suggestions to the letter without question or variation. Unless your host is a pre-teen he has his own unique method of doing these things, which in his eyes is superior to any conceivable alternative. You are welcome to visit the kitchen and pitch in with the washing of lettuce (or whatever it is that happens in there), but when it comes to anything on or around the fire, defer absolutely to the designated alpha male.

Have an answer ready in case you are asked how you prefer your red meat. It need not be restricted to rare, medium or well done; the more detailed your requirements, the better. “Well done on the outside with just a hint of pink in the middle,” for example, will mark you out as refined. Saying you have no preference or leaving it up to the braaier will show you up as an imbecile and raise suspicions that you may be a crypto-vegetarian.

You must – and this is an absolute – effusively praise your host and/or the primary braaier on the end product and the unrivaled skill that produced it. Regardless of whether you had to gag it down with a glass of water per swallow. A willingness to learn, such as by asking questions about the process (either during or after) will earn you extra credit. Just be careful to frame those questions so that they can not be inferred as doubt or judgment. Self-deprecation is also a good idea, and pointing out that your home country has no similarly advanced method of meat preparation is perfect.

Other than that you’ll be fine. There is no dress code for a braai (you can wear a tie or a little black number if you like, but everybody else will laugh at you) and there is nothing resembling table manners (failing to eat with your hands will mark you out as fastidious, but even that is allowed). Enjoy.

Updated; first published 09 April 2009

The omnipotent Professor Mamba (& Associates) is a spectacular and heavily marketed urban version of the sangomas – also known, in less politically correct parlance, as witch doctors – that dot the South African landscape.

Magic medicine and curse-work is a profitable and vibrant subculture in South Africa. As a tourist you’d have to go looking for it, in township markets or in rural villages, but it is pervasive if not obvious. We sometimes refer to it as the magic market, which is similar to the black market only more underground.

Professor Mamba is also, apparently, more benign than some. Like just about every magic tradition the South African version also has a dark side, and some practitioners play on both sides of the fence. There is muti (medicine) that requires ingredients found only deep inside the human body, and some rituals require sacrifices; no prizes for guessing what kind of sacrifice is most powerful.

Almost all African magic relies on the intervention of the ancestors, who are both powerful and very helpful as long as you give them the respect they require. But in more modern blends of magic there is a greater emphasis on herbal potions and fringe science. Instead of throwing the bones to see into the future you may find a sangoma throwing crystal fragments and reading the pattern in those.

A word to the unwary: if you require the services of somebody like the eminent Professor Mamba, tread carefully. Stick to practitioners that work from public places where you feel comfortable, and avoid ingesting anything you can’t readily identify. Some of the strongest muti contains battery acid, for starters.

Here is an extract from the long list of services Professor Mamba has on offer:

His specialities include, but are not limited to:
…
5. Remove the black spot in your hand that keeps taking your money away.
…
7. Introducing (Mulondox) blend for enlarging the penis in both length and girth of the tissues and muscle thus increasing size. It naturally releases suspensory ligaments from the base of the testicles making it big and strong on a permanent basis with 100% erection capability.
…
11. Ensure excellent school grades even for children with mental disabilities.
…

18. Bring supernatural luck into your life to win chance games like lotto, Casino dice, black jack, machines etc.
19. Bring you to see your enemies and make demands on them using a mirror.

UPDATE: Enter Professor J.J. Ssali
07 September, 2009

It could be pure coincidence, or perhaps they are using the same advertising agency. Far be it from us to suggest that anything less than proper or medical is happening here. But we couldn’t help notice the extraordinarily close resemblance between the abilities ascribed to Professor Mamba five months ago and those now within the grasp of Professor J.J. Ssali.

Ssali, it seems, can also identify your problems before you tell them, although it is not entirely clear whether this is a psychic ability with which he was born or whether this power derives from the ancient wizardly methodologies he has mastered.

According to his marketing material Prof Ssali is regarded by many as one of the greatest healers on the planet today. Like Prof Mamba he seemingly believes that increasing the size of the male member is the most important use to which his art can be put.

Here is a sampling of Ssali’s claims:

The speciality includes:
…
Remove the bad spell from your life which keeps taking away.
…
Make you see your enemies in the mirror and make demands on them.
…
Bring super natural luck into your life

UPDATE 2: It’s raining magicians! Please welcome: Prof. Lumumba & Ali, Prof LS Lutta & Mama Muna, Dr. Shedwa, Professor Wakho and Prof MB Mobutu
18 October, 2009

Either Professor Mamba started a wildly successful franchise, or his magic extends to cloning himself, or he is being shamelessly ripped off. Besides Mamba and Ssali we have managed, over the last couple of weeks, to collect no less than five different fliers from different magicians headquartered in different parts of Johannesburg and surrounds.

But it is not their differences that make them interesting. Quite the opposite.

Three of these five newcomers claim to have single-handedly developed the breakthrough Masai Gel that is so powerful a penis-enlargement agent. It took each of them thirteen years of research, and they had to go to “amazing lengths” to find the ingredients, so expect to pay a premium. The other two are somewhat more original; one retails “Sokoto mixture” (“special for weak men in bed”) and the other peddles “Ntego Improved Cream” (“suitable for all ages”).

Three make a point of pointing out that “all whites, blacks, coloured, Indians, etc” are welcome, and we’d assume that also includes foreign visitors. Those same three will also charge only R100 for a consultation,

Now to the typical (slightly superior and somewhat ill-informed) offshore observer this may not seem like a big deal. Darkest Africa is a place of mystery and magic, after all, and South Africa is pretty mature commercial environment; combine the two and you get a heavily marketed magic franchise, right?

Not so. For many decades witch doctors were about as easy to find as drug dealers; there was one around every corner, but they kept a low enough profile to avoid the authorities. They attracted customers almost entirely by word of mouth or, to keep an open mind, through some magical attractive force that they emenated. After 1994, even with sort-of kind-of partial recognition of traditional healers by medial authorities, a couple of these practitioners set up storefronts and hired receptionists, but they could hardly be said to have gone mainstream.

Now we suddenly have websites, outlets that claim to be open 24 hours a day and a strong indications of commoditisation. Something fundamental has shifted in the magic market, we’re just not entirely sure what.

To see the full fliers, check out the Howzzzt photo stream on Flickr. All our original images are available under Creative Commons license there.

Back-to-back with the Johannesburg Zoo and smack in the middle of some of the trendiest suburbs is the South African National Museum of Military History. It has a particularly unimposing entrance and driving around it makes it seem unimpressively small. Once inside you’ll realise that this is because, respectively, the curators don’t spend money on anything other than their exhibits, and those exhibits cram an astonishing variety of artefacts into an improbably small footprint.

This isn’t a rah-rah exhibit of South African military prowess, as you could be excused for expecting from an African nation. Even though we’ve built some pretty impressive weapons at various times in our history. Nor is it limited to South African wars and warfare, although numerically the Soviet tanks deployed in Angola outnumber the South American edged weapons. It’s just a great collection of weapons, machines, implements and accessories related to the wholesale slaughter of humans. And a small sideline on patching them up to send them back into battle, spying on them in order to kill them more efficiently and suchlike.

The absolute highlight of the museum is the working tanks you can clamber onto and into, just like the real fighter jet cockpit in which you can sit while making silly sounds involving machine gun fire and rocket explosions. Sadly none of the buttons activates any ordinance, but it’s still as close to Top Gun as you are likely to ever get.

If you have any interest in the Anglo-Boer or Anglo-Zulu wars, then don’t go off to the battlefields before visiting this museum. If you are interested in South Africa’s involvement in and the Second World War (and our near siding with Germany in it), ditto. If you are generally voracious for information, then take a guided tour. But we recommend a leisurely half-day wander about the place with no set mission or objective. Just nose around until you run out of things to see.

Kids love it, naturally, and are well catered for. Some of the tank and airplane exhibits are outdoors, so pick a nice day. Admission is R22, an amount that doesn’t translate into any meaningful fraction of a currency like the euro or dollar. As for finding it, any Jo’burger should be able to direct you easily.

South African National Museum of Military History
Tel: +27 11 646 5513
20 Erlswold Way
Saxonwold

We’re not a particularly formal bunch of people here in South Africa, and our multitude of languages and cultures don’t make for strict rules of address anyway. On occasion this causes some distress for a certain class of visitor. Take our advice: if you are old-fashioned enough to be affronted by being called anything other than “sir” or “madam”, then don’t come. And if you absolutely have to visit, say for business, then stick to chauffeur-driven cars, five star hotels and restaurants with French-sounding names. Just don’t set foot on the street.

If you are black and could pass for a local, then be prepared to be addressed in a dizzyingly large number of ways, all of which will be incomprehensible to you. Sadly there is no visual cue, no mode of dress or body language, that will set you apart as a foreigner. Just announce yourself as such at your earliest opportunity, crank up your accent a notch for good measure, and your interlocutor will switch over to passable English forthwith.

If you are caucasian, Asian or anything other than a milk-chocolate shade of brown, then you are really in for it. Depending on your sex, age and the ironic intentions of the person addressing you, you may be called any of the following: baas, bra, brother, boss, chief, dame (more often the Afrikaans version than the English), friend, hey you, lady, madam, mamma, man (in either English or Afrikaans in equal portions), meneer, mevrou, sis, sissy, sista and sister. Plus a couple of less common, regional variations.

None of these are necessarily an insult, compliment, a term of endearment or an offer of casual sex. What you are called usually has nothing at all to do with you, your appearance or your relationship with the caller. Don’t take it personally, in other words.

Note that it is considered a sign of ill breeding to respond with the same honorific with which you are addressed. Our suggestion is that you pick out one of the above (or two, if you wish to go gender-specific), try it out on a couple of people and, if it goes down well, stick with it. Do not, under any circumstances, accept from a stranger an offer to be taught a couple of friendly local words. You’ll go around innocently sprouting the most hideous insults imaginable for the rest of your trip. Our sense of humour is weird that way.