Rainbow plates: the chefs reawakening Africa’s taste for vegan food

theguardian.com:

W hen Nicola Kagoro returned to Zimbabwe after a five-year stint as executive chef at one of Cape Town’s premier vegan restaurants, her vision had been to take what she had learned about affordable plant-based food and bring it home to Harare.

“Our dinners were six-course vegan meals with an international vegan chef: me,” she says. However, she soon had a bruising realisation: back in 2016, when she was first setting up, local people simply had no interest in buying what she was selling.

“There was no vegan culture in Zimbabwe,” says Kagoro, founder of the cookery business African Vegan on a Budget, who goes by the professional name Chef Cola. “[People] didn’t understand how you could have a six-course meal without meat. We were literally charging just US$1 for people to come to the dinners.”

After a while, however, attracting people to Kagoro’s table became less of a struggle. Her reputation from Cape Town reached the Zimbabwean capital and veganism, or at least plant-based food, became almost trendy. “[The dinners] went from $1 to me charging close to US$60 [£50] to have a seat at the table,” she says.

Now Kagoro, 34, has fronted a cooking slot on Zimbabwean television, is launching a takeaway service in March, and has thousands of followers on social media to whom she extolls the virtues – ethical, health and economic – of ditching animal products. “I think there are more African vegans coming out of the closet now,” she says. “They just didn’t speak about it before.”

For the past 40 years or so, Africa’s middle class has been growing, albeit with huge geographic variations – and linked to that growth are changing lifestyles and consumption patterns. Fast-food giants arrived on the continent and tapped into a clientele