Bunny chow Period BOrigin theory CVerified

Bunny chow is said to have arisen in Durban, South Africa, in the 1940s. That it is a dish of the Indian community that put down roots in Durban is certain. What is not settled is the origin story—who first made it, and in what setting—where several accounts stand side by side without resolution.

The wheat loaf that forms the vessel, the spices that go into the curry, the mutton or chicken: all are staples long present in the Old World. The sugar beans of the original filling are another matter. They are a kind of common bean, a plant native to the Americas, and when they first reached southern Africa is not clear. The people who would make the dish arrived some eighty years before it appeared. In 1860 a ship carrying indentured labourers for the sugar plantations arrived from India at Natal, and from then on an Indian way of life took hold in the region. Curry became an everyday presence at their tables, and that was the ground from which this portable meal would later grow.

Its shape was decided by the working life of the port city of Durban. The inside of a firm loaf is scooped out, and the hollow is filled with a soupy curry. No plate, no cutlery: it can be held in one hand and eaten within a short break. That practicality became the form of the dish itself, and it spread as a cheap, quick meal that filled a labourer's stomach.

Bunny chow has long come with a sad origin story of a distinctly South African kind. Under apartheid, it is said, Indian people were allowed neither to carry a knife nor to enter a restaurant, and so the golf-course caddies and the street labourers packed their curry into a hollowed-out loaf to carry it away.

But the sequence of this story does not fit. Apartheid was enacted into law in 1948, yet bunny chow is said to have been born earlier, in the 1940s, in Durban's Indian eateries. If the dish existed before the law, then the claim that apartheid law gave rise to the dish cannot stand. It was most likely a later, heavy history read back onto the dish's beginnings. What the timeline cannot tell us is whether the racial segregation that predated the law had a hand in the dish's birth. Nor does it rule out a separate story: that during the apartheid years (1948–1994), the need of people barred from restaurants for food to take away helped the dish spread.

The accounts that do not lean on the system sit better with the timeline. The one that fits most easily holds that indentured labourers on the sugar plantations, eating quickly during a short break, packed the filling into bread in place of a leaf. Another says that an Indian merchant running a lunch counter on Grey Street in Durban sold it. The vegetarian restaurant Kapitan's, which traded from 1912 for many decades, is said to have served the first bean bunny chow.

The name, too, ties back to the merchants. The Oxford English Dictionary favours deriving it from bania, a merchant caste of northern India: the Gujarati merchants of Grey Street were called bania, and their dish became bunny chow (chow being South African English slang for food). That said, the earliest written record of the word is from 1972, some thirty years after the dish was born in the 1940s. The year a word first appears in writing and the year a dish comes into being are two different things.

In the end, who made it first cannot be decided today, for the contemporary records are thin. Even so, every account places its makers in Durban's Indian community—plantation labourers and merchants alike—and gives the dish the same use: a portable meal to be eaten cheaply and quickly. Bunny chow reads less as a dish with a single inventor than as one that took its form naturally from the lives of people who had crossed the sea.