Namibia, the land of meat lovers

The cultural equivalent of the American hot dog, grilled beef – kapana – is the street food of this cow-revering nation's rich and poor.

from the February 21, 2008 edition

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Reporter Stephanie Hanes visits a Namibian meat market.

At official markets, such as Oshetu, the municipality rents grill space to registered kapana sellers, who often wait years for a spot. Elsewhere in Katutura, which has a population of about 200,000, unofficial meat cookers set up makeshift grills along taxi routes and on street corners. Usually the kapana sellers are men, although sometimes women will sell the accompanying buns and sometimes sit next to the kapana stalls selling cow hooves – a popular snack to gnaw on – out of plastic buckets.

To the uninitiated, all of the kapana stalls pretty much look alike – a bunch of sizzling meat and fat behind a veil of grill smoke.

But Best Karamatha, who lives in the high-end Katutura neighborhood dubbed "Luxury Hill," says there is a strategy to getting the best pieces.

"There are some stalls that are better than others," says Mr. Karamatha, who is carrying a bag of raw meat that he intends to turn into a potjie, a traditional stew cooked in a three-legged cast iron pot.

When he wants to buy kapana, Karamatha walks down the row of grillers, inspecting the strips of fat, looking for whiter pieces rather than those that have a yellowish tint. He won't go to any station where the griller calls out to him, he says, because that makes him suspicious. Instead, he'll look for something else: "Sometimes, you'll see them doing this," he says with a laugh, waving his hand back and forth as if he is trying to keep away flies.

That, he says, is a clue that the meat is fresh, and that the kapana seller is taking care of his product.

He says he gets kapana almost daily, but especially on the weekends.

"Meat for us is breakfast, lunch, and dinner," says Mr. Hukura, the Katutura tour guide. "When I took some South Africans around, they were wondering how people ate that much kapana. But everyone knows themselves. We know what kind of stomachs we have."

[Editor's note: The original version misspelled Katutura.]

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