‘Loboko Ya Mama’: Homemade recipes of belonging

abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, migrants in South Africa were not only exempted from social allowances such as food parcels but also targeted by xenophobic sentiments. Consequently, migrants who were already pushed to the margins of society experienced an increased sense of alienation from South African society. Based on Food for Change, 1 an online project in which eight forced migrant women from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda living in Gqeberha, South Africa, shared cooking recipes during the COVID-19 pandemic, this article approaches the cultivation of a sense of home and belonging through food. Using the concept of visceral politics, it analyses how food created a visceral experience in which embodied subjects acquire personal pleasure, affiliation with other embodied subjects and a sense of connectedness to their places of origin and South Africa. This approach documents how women exercised creative agency through their cooking by implementing knowledge from their home countries, acquiring new knowledge from other cuisines and adapting local ingredients and techniques to create meals that unite their households around the pleasure of eating ‘exactly like home’. In this way, they were able to reduce the impact that the alienating anti-migrant discourses outside their homes had on the everyday life inside them.


Introduction
African migrants were one of the groups disproportionally affected by the governmental response to the COVID-19 pandemic in South Africa. As measures to contain the virus hardened, the wellbeing of many migrant households was threatened by the increasing difficulty to satisfy daily needs such as safe access to food (Odunitan-Wayas, Alaba & Lambert 2021). Supermarkets became heavily controlled and other sources of food such as informal markets, which are often more affordable, became risky spaces for spreading COVID-19. These changes were paired with a decrease in migrants' purchasing power because the informal labour that many African migrants rely upon was diminished by the pandemic (Odunitan-Wayas, Alaba & Lambert 2021). In addition, African migrants were excluded from governmental support and targeted by anti-immigrant violence that crystallised into movements such as #PutSouthAfrica-First and Operation Dudula. 2 Thus, the health crisis also resulted in a greater societal exclusion of migrants.
Against this backdrop, there was an urge to cultivate critically engaged scholarship that could counter acts of oppression by acknowledging and supporting diverse forms of resistance. This call became the impetus behind my collaboration with eight forced migrant 3 women from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, living in Gqeberha, South Africa. Together we created Food for Change, an online engaged project through which we shared cooking recipes. This article focuses attention on the participants' embodied subjectivities and their emotions that emerged while cooking and sharing food. Food is recognised here as an agent of emotions as it is part of the material culture that constitutes migrants' sense of home and belonging (Nyamnjoh 2018). Feminist scholars have shown that emotions matter politically, as emotions are the medium through which the external world and oppressive power structures manifest themselves within the subjective experiences of individuals (Ahmed 2014). Considering the relation between emotions and power, I aim to unpack how, in the context of the pandemic, the participating women adapted and applied their culinary knowledge to generate embodied enjoyment that led to a sense of connectedness and wellbeing that challenged anti-migrant discourses.

Scholarship for solidarity
Food for Change originated from two inperson encounters during my PhD fieldwork in South Africa in March 2020. As part of the project Engaged Scholarship Narratives of Change, 4 I reached out to a self-organised community of women through the Eastern Cape Refugee Centre (ECRC). 5 Nine women responded to this call and eight of them decided to discuss if and how academia could collaborate with them. However, our ideas of collaboration were interrupted when the South African government declared a State of National Disaster (on 22 March 2020). The country soon entered into a strict lockdown, placing the women's livelihoods at risk.
Via WhatsApp, the eight women and I met and started an online dialogue on how to continue our collaboration. Our discussion problematised my position as a Mexican migrant based in the Global North. While I recognise myself as a mestizaa woman with mixed ethnic ancestrywith indigenous roots and thus as non-white, the women stressed that in the context of South Africa I was seen as 'white' or 'coloured' and had access to certain privileges. Aware of our differences, I based my participation on two key principles: humbleness and honesty. I explained my capacities and limitations as a PhD candidate, for instance that our collaboration would be part of my dissertation and that our meetings would have to be online during the pandemic. I also reinforced the core agreement that our collaboration should be shaped as a collective effort in which the women would decide if we should work together, how we should do it and with what purpose.
Based on our discussions, we continued our collaboration in order to respond to a specific challenge the women found relevant at the time: having food on a daily basis. This was translated into Food for Change, an online project on our daily cooking experiences during the pandemic. The women encouraged me to also share recipes -I chose corn cake and lentil stewto enable a culinary exchange between African and Latin American cuisines. Together we determined how university resources could be used to cover the cost of all the ingredients, transport and internet data needed for the women to choose, prepare and share their recipes. In practice, the project consisted of two rounds in which we shared recipes and a third round in which we cooked each other's recipes. This was followed by group discussions in which we agreed to refer to the women as mama, a sign of respect used in some African societies, and to use pseudonyms of their choice to protect their privacy.

Enjoyment and belonging
The women participating in Food for Change and I shared a total of thirty-four recipes that all had a common thread: our embodied experience of enjoyment. It was soon evident that each of us was selecting recipes primarily on the basis of what brought us a sense of pleasure and joy. I approach this here by understanding enjoyment as a physical, emotional, psychological and spiritual feeling of pleasure, happiness, or satisfaction (Baker 2021). Feminist critical studies (e.g. Nyamnjoh & Rowlands 2013;Lewis 2016;Nyamnjoh 2018) have noted that enjoyment brings an extra layer of analysis to food that moves beyond its functionality in order to explore the distinctive, and often silenced, connections between bodies and society. Mair, Sumner and Rotteau's (2008) analysis of the Slow Food Movement illustrates this by stressing how enjoying ethically produced quality food became an embodied form of political resistance against the spread of fast-food that (re)produced several forms of oppression. Such studies demonstrate that enjoyment of food is not only about individualised sensations, but also about the wider socioeconomic impact and sociocultural and environmental relevance of food.
For the women within this project, the sociocultural, political and economic relevance of our everyday food practices connected layered notions of belonging. We valued ingredients, such as cassava and free-range chicken, that were locally and traditionally sourced and that connected us to our places of origin. Henrietta Nyamnjoh and Michael Rowlands (2013; see also Nyamnjoh 2018) studied how specific ingredients are carried across migrants' journeys due to their symbolic and material value to sustain connections with culture and kinship. At the same time, though, we also incorporated ingredients and techniques found in South Africa and the Netherlands. We thereby showed how food (re)shaped transnational links that united us to our places of origin and helped us form our identities in different countries. On this matter, Abbots (2016) argues that food works as an 'anchor' that helps migrants feel connected to a place through a dialogue between people's bodies and the preparation and consumption of food. Indeed, we described how the smells, textures and flavours of food could trigger memories and thoughts that enhanced a sense of (re)connection to our homelands, which allowed us to feel connected across time and space while also enjoying the present moment (Sutton 2001, quoted in Abbots 2016. I analyse these responses to food through the concept of the visceral.

Visceral politics and enjoyment
In Food for Change, all the participating women made sense of their lived experiences through the body, which I refer to here as the visceral "realm of internallyfelt sensations, moods and states of being, which are born from sensory engagement with the material world" (Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008, p. 462). Probyn (2003) approaches this 'thinking body' through the idea of the rhizome, a network of multiple nodes, connections and ruptures with no clear beginning or end. This metaphor illustrates well the complex dialogue food created between our embodied emotions (Ahmed 2014) and our lived experiences of migration, our homelands and the pandemic.
The idea of the rhizome in visceral approaches to food takes Abbots' (2016) embodied practices a step further by stating that food not only anchors migrants' bodies across a homeland and new locations but also works at a deeper level by mediating the formation of political subjectivities. Probyn (2003) argues that visceral experiences of food are very much about power. It is therefore important to ask how different bodiesfor instance in terms of race, gender and classengage with food practices. This question was of particular importance in Food for Change because it was black and brown, African and Latin American, working-class migrant women who performed the tasks of cooking and sharing food. Feminist scholars have highlighted that food practices are often seen as a female task entrenched in structures of oppression and inequality (Lewis 2016). Work and activities related to food have been accused of sustaining structures that oppress female bodies, particularly women of colour. This was exactly what COVID-19 highlighted, as the duties of caretaking, which included the preparation of food, were mainly performed by women.
For the women participating in Food for Change, cooking was regarded as a daily task in their domestic lives and a leisure activity. The women did not narrate cooking as an oppressive imposition but neither did they describe it as their principal activity. The same could be said for me. Some women mentioned that their areas of expertise were mainly in their areas of employment. As Mama Yoyotte said, "Yes, we can cook, but we can also do hair, clothes, accounting. We can do many, many things" (personal profile communication, 18 June 2020). Thus, it is not my intention to portray the women only in relation to their food practices. Instead, I aim to document how we took the time to let our bodies be visceral: that is, to let the body feel fully sentient, complex and alive so it could be a source of power and information for counteracting oppression (Lorde 1993). Women's culinary knowledge, then, "can create sustaining relational bonds, generating a sense of security, wellbeing and contentment both for the cooks themselves as well as for those they feed" (Lewis 2016, p. 7). Such bonds can be seen as an illustration of Probyn's (2003) metaphor of the visceral body that creates rhizomatic networks that can lead to alternative pathways against discourses of oppression. This idea is exemplified in the following three recipes.

Homemade recipes of belonging Grilled ribs − a recipe of nostalgia and kinship
In Food for Change, the cooking and sharing of food was deeply interwoven with memory. The women and I considered it a special treat to eat from the recipes that belonged to our family and cultural traditions and thus stimulated connections back to our places of origin. This was the case for Mama Anitah, who selected grilled ribs as a dish that stimulated joyful memories from Uganda.
"I love this recipe! I chose it bse my grandfather had a very big farm of goats and cows. He used to call his people on weekends and slaughter one goat … . we enjoy to the fullest <3 Whenever l think of home, I remember him bse he was like our father and grandfather at the same time" (Text message, 15 May 2020).
Mama Anitah's narrative describes the feeling of joy and togetherness, of family and belonging that her recipe carries. We can imagine a sunny day on the farm with family and friends, and grandpa grilling goat meat, making sure everyone has enough to eat. Her grilled ribs recipe is about times with her loved ones, especially about memories of her grandfather, a person who symbolised kinship. In text, photos and especially videos, she referred to him in a cheerful tone, sharing anecdotes such as "I love goat meat because I grow up with my grandma and grandfather. He used to prepared goat meat for us, not make with soup or that, but grill!" (Video, 15 May 2020). Mama Anitah's weaving of narratives with the cooking process showed her commitment to (re)making a family recipe that involved bodily, emotional and spiritual connotations. It also resulted in a dynamic cooking process, in which she demonstrated the creative agency (Lewis 2016) to adapt her culinary knowledge in a different location (see Photos 1 and 2).
Her culinary knowledge also involved languages. She safeguarded secret ingredients by speaking them in Runyakitara, her Photo 1. Raw lamb ribs Photo by Mama Anitah profile mother tongue. And with music in the background, she filmed her family and friends gathered around the decorated dinner table: "Time for dinner! We're going to enjoy all of us, yum, yum! … We enjoy it, in this season of corona virus, and people was very surprise and very happy. It was a long time without sitting together and eating together. Thank you very much" (Video, 15 May 2020).
In her cooking, Mama Anitah exemplified Nyamnjoh's (2018) argument that food plays an important role in recreating significant memories that mark one's imaginary of 'home'. For Mama Anitah, grilled ribs viscerally connected her to her grandfather and the farm where she grew up. Cooking was then a deeply visceral experience in which enjoyment contained elements of both happiness and nostalgia. Although she was unable to replicate the recipe exactly, especially as she could not grill in the open air, her using the word "love" and heart emojis and her making a celebration out of eating the ribs, just as her grandfather used to do, produced a shared sense of enjoyment and connectedness with her family in Gqeberha.

Ghanaian fried rice − A recipe of pleasure and friendship
In the project, we not only talked about our places of origin but also mentioned how we were cultivating valuable connections in the host country. Mama Caren, for example, chose a recipe she learned from another migrant woman: "I learned this recipe from a dear friend! She is from Ghana and sometimes she cooked for me and my family. My children like the recipe so much that I learned to cook it myself … That's why I cook it today because it's their favourite!" (Video, 12 May 2020).
Mama Caren, as well as others, introduced recipes from different countries because the food brought joy and pleasure to her and her family. The women brought recipes from South Africa, Ethiopia and Cameroon, while I was influenced by Turkish cuisine when reproducing my family's recipes for corn cake. The recipes therefore revealed how our bodies had entered into contact with diverse cultural traditions of food which in turn (re)created new embodied subjectivities. As Mama Photo 2. The cooking process for grilled ribs Photo by Mama Anitah profile Caren exemplified through learning a Ghanaian recipe, encounters with new food have transformed the women's daily lives in Gqeberha and mine in the Netherlands, as the places where we are currently based. While there are issues among migrant communities, food has opened possibilities for transnational, South-South bonds that nourish a sense of solidarity and belonging.
Our food practices demonstrated that we not only fixated on "home" in our places of origin but also developed "a notion of home as porous, multi-scaled, sensory and a useful site for engaging with the visceral" (Longhurst, Johnston & Ho 2009, p. 334). Indeed, recipes such as Mama Caren's Ghanaian fried rice showed a complex overlapping of connections across different locations. She illustrated this by playing with the ingredients. For instance, she said that "I'm going to add turmeric, an Indian spice … And I'm also going to put black pepper, small, and my white pepper, and chilies, to make it Photo 3. Grilled ribs served with salad, white rice and baked potatoes Photo by Mama Anitah Photo 4. Ingredients for Ghanaian fried rice Photo by Mama Caren profile extra spicy" (Video, 12 May 2020). As portrayed in Photo 6, enjoyment worked as an embodied (e)motion of cooking in an intuitive fashion to bring pleasure to herself and her loved ones.

Fumbwa − A recipe for community
One of the most emotive elements in Food for Change came from photos of families gathering around a homemade meal. Such moments were meaningful because they allowed the participating women to involve their loved ones in the project's dynamics. An example of this came from Mama Petroni, who manifested joy from the beginning as she cooked fumbwa, a wild spinach stew from the DRC: "Today I choose to cook food exactly like home. Today I'll cook fumbwa!" (Video, 25 May 2020).
Photo 5. Ghanaian fried rice Photo by Mama Caren Photo 6. Family eating Ghanaian fried rice Photo by Mama Caren profile Mama Petroni explained that fumbwa cannot be easily found in South Africa, so it was important to cook it with care. She shared details and tips on how to clean it 'nicely' and boil it with a little water before mixing in a long list of ingredients, including eggplants, tomatoes, yellow peppers and unsalted peanut butter. Standing in front of her large cooking pot, Mama Petroni would exclaim "This is good!" and other such expressions, while the video showed the sounds, colours and textures of the fumbwa melding slowly with a wide range of flavours.
A sense of joy was also highlighted when the meal was ready and Mama Petroni's family gathered for dinner. Like the other women, she concluded her recipe by presenting a decorated dinner table, as shown in Photo 8. She then asked her daughter to present the table: "So my mum made soso ya makasi 6 today, and she made fumbwa, food from our country. She cooked it with peanut butter … So yeah I love fumbwa! There is some yellow pap here. We eat it with our hands; we Photo 7. Raw fumbwa leaves Photo by Mama Petroni.
Photo 8. Fumbwa served with soso ya makasi, yellow pap and fresh oranges Photo by Mama Petroni profile don't use a knife and fork. We enjoy eating it like this. We got some oranges on the table here. My mum's over there, my dad is making the video, and here is my brother and my little one [pointing to her baby girl]. Now we are going to eat and enjoy our food together!" (Video, 25 May 2020).
Mama Petroni's daughter captured different layers of enjoyment in her presentation. She emphasised the pleasure of tasting food from her home country, as did other women and I. Mama Petroni's daughter also added how she enjoyed eating with her hands, explaining that they "enjoy eating it like this". Nyamnjoh described how sensing food through the body enhances the relational aspect of food because it "implies touching the taste buds of those who eat the food, thus connecting them with home and leaving them with a sense of goodness, satisfaction and sensorial memories" (2018, p. 32). This is in line with the notion of the visceral, in which the women's bodies create diverse channels of connectedness.
In selecting and cooking each recipe, the participating women considered the tastes, needs and limitations of their choice. For example, Mama Yoyotte in her recipe of wild spinach and ndakala, a type of dried fish, made some adjustments: "because I have a child who has allergy to fish, I'm going to make chicken aside for her to eat" (Video, 25 May 2020). For the women, food was properly enjoyed when it was shared with others, as was illustrated in the quote from Mama Petroni's daughter. Enjoyment was also translated into the online realm as the women used WhatsApp to involve each other in their food practices. Mama Petroni, for instance, addressed me as she was finishing cooking the fumbwa: in between giggles, she made me crave her food by saying, "Oh la la! Mimi, I wish you were here so we could eat together, sorry for that Mimi. We will eat together one day!" (Video, 25 May 2020). This enjoyment was also clearly exemplified in the third round, in which we cooked each other's recipes. I cooked pondu, a stew of cassava leaves, under the women's guidance and was thus able Photo 9. Mama Petroni eating fumbwa with yellow pap Photo by Mama Petroni profile to taste a staple dish that united their community. Both examples show how by engaging the enjoyment that food evokes, the women opened possibilities for connectivity and conviviality within and beyond the project.
Community connections were especially meaningful as anti-migrant sentiments increased during the pandemic in South Africa. The women in this project enhanced their interconnections with their homelands as well as with South Africa and other countries through homemade meals that were nutritious, versatile and, above all, enjoyable. While it is true that food practices are prescribed in patriarchy and neoliberalism, the enjoyment experienced in Food for Change cultivated embodied connections across different locations and worldviews, demonstrating that while the body is subjected to power, it is also the vehicle for social struggle and transformation (Probyn 2003;Hayes-Conroy & Hayes-Conroy 2008). Enjoying the cooking, eating and sharing of food offered the opportunity to challenge oppressive, anti-migrant discourses, making the enjoyment and food an expression of everyday politics.

From anchor to rhizome
In this article, I showed how the women in Food for Change were able and eager to be creative and transform homemade meals that incorporated new knowledge, as Mama Caren did with her Ghanaian fried rice, to adapt recipes from their homeland, as Mama Anitah did with her grilled ribs, and to (re)create complex dishes 'exactly like home', as Mama Petroni did with her fumbwa. With such visceral experiences of food, the women and I demonstrated our capacity to claim a space to cultivate enjoyment and nourishment for ourselves and others that supported a sense of home and belonging despite the hardships of the pandemic.
Through our culinary knowledge, all of us stimulated visceral associations that I argue moved food from being an anchor (Abbots 2016) to working as a rhizome (Probyn 2003). An apt metaphor for such connections is the cassava, a resilient crop found in Mexico, Uganda and the DRC, whose strong and flexible roots develop complex networks of communication. In a similar way, in Food for Change, we created rhizomatic connections between our bodies and our social reality as (forced) migrants in South Africa and the Netherlands. In the intimacy of our kitchens, the women and I were conscious of the difficult circumstances faced during the pandemic and we used our cooking skills to directly address the need for (self)care, (self)recognition and (self)compassion in dealing with the crisis. This brings back Mair, Sumner and Rotteau's (2008) argument that food and its enjoyment is politically relevant because it is part of everyday life; it connects different knowledges and practices to nourish political practices. In a context that promotes migrants' alienation, the cooking and sharing of food supported a sense of connectivity, contentment and wellbeing, making of cooking a liberating practice and therefore a manifestation of women's creative agency to transform power dynamics in everyday life (Lewis 2016). This brings me back to this article's title, 'loboko ya mama', which literally means mama's hands. This Lingala phrase refers to how a loving mother has the capacity to create good food, delicious food, that brings joy and, as was shown here, a taste of 'home' to herself and others. Notes 1. https://engagedscholarshipnarrativesofchange. org/scholarship-for-change/food-for-change 2. In 2020, the Twitter account @uLerato_pillay used the hashtag #PutSouthAfricaFirst to spread anti-migrant statements online, blaming African migrants for issues such as unemployment and crime. This online trend evolved into Operation Dudula in 2021, a vigilante campaign that spread violence against migrants (Sibanda 2022). 3. I use the term "forced migrants" to denote that women's mobility has been heavily influenced by diverse factors that pushed them to leave their domestic political community indefinitely and also limits their opportunities to return. 4. This project, based at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, compares academia's role in the societal inclusion of forced migrants in South Africa, the Netherlands and the United States. 5. Although the women and I first met through the ECRC, they preferred to rely solely on their own community's self-organisation. 6. Congolese dish made of boiled chicken with pumpkin seed flour and a mixture of vegetables.