The two-faced cookie that called out a lying politician in South Africa
Al Jazeera
The sickly sweet tweegevrietjie is a visual representation of ‘the white man with a black heart who broke promises.’
Stopping at the Wembley Bakery in Belgravia – a Cape Town suburb designated for “Coloured” people only during apartheid – is best done on an empty stomach. It means you can really tuck into the seemingly endless rows of freshly baked cakes, tarts, cookies and doughnuts.
Many of the confections will be familiar to international visitors: red velvet cupcakes, jam swiss rolls and custard doughnuts. But others can only be found in certain parts of Cape Town: fragrant “koesisters” dusted with desiccated coconut, meringue-topped “Hertzoggies” and garish pink-and-brown “tweegevrietjies”.
Unlike the man it is named after – the Afrikaner nationalist JBM Hertzog, who first came to power a century ago – the Hertzoggie is a bite-sized delight. A crisp biscuit shell is filled with chunky apricot jam and topped with delicately spiced coconut meringue before being popped in the oven for a final singe. The cookie was invented by Hertzog’s white, female supporters in the 1920s, and continued to be baked at National Party – the party that would go on to implement apartheid in 1948 – events for decades to follow.
But the Hertzoggie would also find favour among a different segment of the population.
“Hertzog made two promises,” explains chef Cass Abrahams, a legendary Muslim cookbook author and radio personality who was responsible for bringing the centuries-old cuisine of her people to a wider audience from the 1970s onwards. “He said that he would give the women the vote, and hy sal die slawe dieselfde as die wittes maak (he would make the slaves equal to the whites).” Her choice of words is not accidental: Almost two centuries after the abolition of slavery, Abrahams and the Cape Malay (the descendents of enslaved Muslims from Indonesia and elsewhere) community have not forgotten their history of bondage.