How Indians turned the samosa into a billion-dollar snack

Johannesburg in 2003 was still very racially divided. Apart-heid was over, but South African whites, blacks and Asians mostly stayed in their own spaces. Finding a restaurant with genuinely mixed clientele was rare. Except, I was told, for World of Samoosas.

- Vikram Doctor

This was a hole-in-the-wall eatery in Oriental Plaza, a building that was both a result and defiance of apartheid. In the 1960s a nearby mixed neighbourhood was declared white only and most of its inhabitants forced out. To (very inadequately) compensate local traders, of mostly South Asian origin, they were given a building into which to crowd their shops. Despite the cramped conditions, Oriental Plaza quickly became one of the best locations in the city to buy fabric — and samoosas, as the snack is called in South Africa.

Sitting in World of Samoosas you saw white people coming to buy bags of samoosas as ideal starters for a braai, the iconic South African barbecue. The shop gave a free bottle of chutney with every five dozen samoosas. Black ladies with big bags of shopping enjoyed a break as they sat down to freshly fried samoosas, which came in varieties like beef, prawn, spinach & cheese and cheese & salami. South African Indians ordered sweet coconut samosas as a treat.

Indians would not be surprised at how samosas bring people together. Despite all our divisions, samosas seem to be one thing we can agree on. In different for ms and diverse fillings, they are made across India and have transcended associations with any particular community.

When Indian-American astronaut Sunita Williams went into space it seemed only natural to take samosas along. Last year an Indian restaurant in the UK tried to emulate this feat by trying to send samosas into space attached to helium balloons, but the stunt went awry and the payload is estimated to have crash landed in France.