Food played role in Mandela's apartheid struggle

By Marius Bosch

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - Food featured prominently in Nelson Mandela's struggle against apartheid, from using cooking pots to smuggle messages during his 27-year imprisonment to his first dinner of chicken curry as a free man.

A new book on the life of Mandela, who turned 90 on Friday, says South Africa's first black president calls people to the dinner table saying: "Let's go to battle".

Author Anna Trapido describes the book "Hunger for Freedom" as a "gastro-political history with recipes".

The book describes how Mandela and his fellow prisoners at South Africa's Robben Island prison off Cape Town, where he spent 18 years, tried to make do with meagre rations of maize porridge while white prison warders gorged on crayfish.

In later years, the prisoners were allowed to move more freely and they collected seafood themselves to supplement their prison food.

But prisoners also used food as a weapon, holding hunger strikes to press for improved conditions.

Mandela and his comrades smuggled messages to non-political inmates in cooking pots, telling them of recent news and of decisions taken by the ANC prison leadership.

Mandela became a keen gardener, growing vegetables in several South African prisons to supplement the bland diet.