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Tapiwa Guzha celebrates and educates through unique African flavours

January 20, 2023 (Last Updated: January 17, 2023)

Tapi Tapi is more than just an eatery; it is also an educational project that aims to teach both locals and foreigners about African cuisine and the culture of sharing food.

“Tapi Tapi” is a Bantu ideophone that means “sweet sweet.” It’s a phrase that appears in several Zimbabwean pop cultural contexts, and it also plays on the founder’s name, Tapiwa Guzha.

Tapiwa Guzha, a molecular biologist from Zimbabwe, seeks to educate and alter the way customers experience food by introducing them to authentic African flavours. He also wants to heal and build up the continent’s sense of self-worth through food and food rituals.

According to Tapiwa, eating has been used to undermine people’s sense of self-worth and is often a source of othering.

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Tapi Tapi is located in Observatory, Cape Town’s most eclectic neighbourhood. Its distinctiveness is not just due to the unusual flavours; it also stems from the business’s educational goal.

While Tapi Tapi originally served as an ice cream-centric space, it now expands its wide variety of continental flavours into cocktails, baked goods, bread, fermented milk, soda, and other sweets and treats.

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Since it first launched in July 2018, Tapi Tapi has developed into a fantastic storytelling vehicle. Sharing African folklore, rituals, and cultural practises through crunchy cones and frozen morsels is a unique way to celebrate our diversity, embrace our differences, and realise that we have a lot more in common than we think.

Tapi Tapi started out as a direct delivery service that made ice cream deliveries all over the Western Cape while also planning pop-up tasting events that allowed people to interact with the various foods and culinary customs from across the continent.

“In part, Tapi Tapi is focused on rehabilitating the self-esteem of people from the continent about our food practices, as well as our culture and beliefs. I use food because it’s universal; people need to eat. So it’s a nice tool to get people to listen,” says Tapiwa.

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