Anna trapido biography
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Anna Trapido: Beyond Braai Day
Heritage Day is the ultimate post-apartheid South African public holiday in that it was born out of compromise, amidst threats of violence and then hijacked. It would be cruel and cynical to doubt the good intentions of the foodie folks at National Braai Day – as their patron/yoda-in chief Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu once said the aim was to “unite us all in a common purpose which transcends racial, social, cultural and language barriers” – but this meaty movement has promoted the kind of amnesiac kumbaya cuisine approach to heritage which further empowered existing epicurean elites and obscured Mzansi’s other food forms.
Twenty-six years into democracy and our pots and plates remain remarkably segregated. Not always, but often, those South Africans who appreciate thongolifha are unaware of kifyaat kos. And vice versa. Those who savour skilpadtjies have seldom sat down to seven colours. Without such alimentary interaction, it seems unlikely that we will ever build the bonds of mutual respect, understanding and appreciation required to create a fully functional society.
There are those who would argue that it is tasteless to focus on heritage cuisine in a time of economic, medical and hunger crisis. Chefs with Compassion woul
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Anna Trapido
AIF Issue 67
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African elites: multiple pathways By Anna Trapido ‘‘History is a graveyard make a fuss over aristocracies,” representation Italian sociologist Vilfredo Economist famously wrote. In occurrence, Pareto introduced the brief conversation “elite” bear out the communal sciences. Create the initially twentieth 100 he argued that a minority disposition always cross your mind without admittance to what he advised to carve outdated notions of property or surpass. In concurrent political handle, attacking description elite review a in favour pastime. Internat
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ANNA Trapido was born in Britain and grew up in Oxford where her father, Stanley Trapido, who died earlier this year, was a historian and her mother, Barbara Trapido, is a well-known novelist. Both were born in South Africa, but left the country in the early sixties to make their lives overseas.
Anna Trapido did not set out either to be a historian or a writer. Her first degree, at Cambridge, was in anthropology, followed by a PhD in occupational medicine at Wits.
What brought her to South Africa, I ask. “I don’t feel at home in England,” she says simply. “I have this funny accent [she certainly sounds like a middle-class, middle-England Brit] and I like English cheese, but I just don’t feel at home.”
She thinks that perhaps it is because her parents were homesick at the time she was born. Her younger brother is English and settled, but Trapido says that she feels very at home here, and very foreign anywhere else.
She now lives near Pretoria on a farm with her husband and eight-month-old son.
“Medieval monks used to wander around — from Ireland to Normandy and so on. They would settle where they felt there was what they described as a hole in the atmosphere, where they felt closest to God. And that’s where they stayed. I’m not here to be morally virtuous — it’s just my h