SaffasintheUK

**disclaimer** To anyone British that happens to be reading this, I apologise for the liberal use of Saffa slang.   Ask your friend to translate the bits you don’t understand. Make sure you are ready to braai, when you do ;-) I have found myself trying to explain the South African braai culture to my colleagues and friends, and recently got to thinking….what is it that makes a braai so special to us.   Why is it not “just a BBQ”? And that is, of course, the very response I get when I describe a braai to one of my colleagues…”oh we do that when the weather is good.   It’s a BBQ!” Um, no. And FFS stop saying that. Please. But what is it then that separates the braai from the BBQ….the men from the mice so to speak?   Why are we so bloody special that our tradition is so unique when it is, at face value, literally a BBQ?   I can say that a braai is so quintessentially South African that it is to us what tea is to the British. I can say that it’s a deep-seated cultural pra