Onezwa Mbola, a self-taught cook, content creator, and South African food icon, has launched her highly anticipated debut cookbook. A Food Love Story is an ode to simple living, community, and, most importantly, Nonkoliso Mbola – Onezwa’s late mother and the inspiration behind her life-changing journey into creating and sharing food.
Onezwa is known for the tranquil, farm-to-table lifestyle that she shares with her followers from Willowvale, her rural Eastern Cape village. In her videos, she warmly invites us along as she cooks, guides her garden through the seasons, and recreates and reinvents traditional dishes.
Growing up, Onezwa watched her mother tend to her own garden and transform what she grew and raised into the meals that would eventually bring Onezwa back to cooking. “My mother was a homemaker, always cooking and growing food, but she never had the opportunity to tell her own story,” Onezwa says. “I started cooking because of her, and I really wanted to tell her story.”
From Navigator to Cook
Onezwa’s own story did not start with cooking. A qualified marine navigator, she began her career travelling with the merchant navy and pursuing big-city living in Durban. However, upon falling pregnant, she soon found herself longing to return to the simpler life in which she had grown up, and craving the food that her mother used to make. “I missed her so much as I was becoming a mother myself. I yearned for her and thought cooking was the best way I could connect with her.”
“I started obsessing over this cabbage and potato dish that she used to make, and I tried making it,” she says. There was a challenge to this: “She hadn’t taught me any of her recipes before she passed, so everything was from memory. It didn’t turn out as good as hers, but I realised I really enjoyed this cooking thing!”
She continued to cook, sharpening her skills to restaurant quality and sharing her progress online. Her content developed further when she chose to leave the city and return to Willowvale, initially with no plan other than to restart her mother’s vegetable garden. “I grew up with fresh vegetables and livestock around, and I wanted to recreate that – not just for myself out of nostalgia but also for my child,” she says. “I feel like knowing where your food comes from breeds more respect for the earth and what you eat.”
Her followers grew and watched as she brought her garden to life, gathered fresh ingredients from the sea, and shared the day-to-day of rural coastal living. “A lot of people were shocked that there are rural communities that live off the ocean, and have done so for generations,” says Onezwa, who wanted to use her platform to share her community’s history and culture, alongside her mother’s story. Foraged and homegrown goods are indeed gaining interest with cooks, health enthusiasts, and hobbyists around the world, but Onezwa has demonstrated that these practices are far more than a passing trend.
More Than a Cookbook
In her online content and now her cookbook, Onezwa strives not only to celebrate food and flavour but also to capture and archive stories. The title, A Food Love Story, came to Onezwa early, before a publishing deal had been made. It was always going to be a love story to her mother. The book tells the story of Nonkoliso and Onezwa’s life, accompanied by a collection of recipes that were carefully selected from the many notebooks filled by Onezwa over the years, and woven through the timeline. During the process of writing, she began to realise that the book was made up of several love stories: to culture, a simpler life, and a love of community –all of which Onezwa hopes to inspire people to return to.
“What I really want for everyone is to be more connected, whatever that means to them,” she says. “Our children are so detached from how we used to live, not understanding what community is and what it takes to build one. It’s very important to foster relationships and go back to basics. Even if it starts with a shared dish from my cookbook.”
Despite living in a world in which community has become increasingly difficult to foster, Onezwa manages to bring people together wherever she goes, whether within her village, online, or among the elated crowds that have gathered at her book launches across South Africa. Her comment section, a place normally reserved for the worst of the internet, is filled only with people celebrating her wins or firmly standing by her in harder times.
“To go on social media and try to build a community requires a certain level of vulnerability,” she says. “It was very intimidating, but I always felt that I can block out the negativity because the content will find the right people. And it did – I have the most supportive community.”
This has been particularly true of the reaction to her cookbook, where launches and signings across the country have packed out bookstores and the corridors of shopping malls where the events are held, and the books are sold. The warmth of the reception from the individuals in these crowds could easily lead you to believe that all of them are friends and family of the author, were it not for the sheer numbers that make it clear that this is a broader community supporting someone with whom they’ve connected online.
At a time when everything seems to be speeding up, becoming more fragmented, impersonal, and inauthentic, Onezwa offers an antidote. She celebrates a slowed-down life and invites us to pursue it. In a world of increasing hostility and impatience towards those who think differently, she encourages people to respect traditions and cultures across the board.
A Food Love Story (Jonathan Ball, R370) is now available at major bookstores across South Africa.
Food photography by Toby Murphy Photography
