Tapi Tapi makes ice cream with a deep mission: to soothe the collective souls of African people by sharing folk traditions, rituals and cultures through food.
Located in Cape Town’s artistic centre of Observatory, Lower Main Road offers a fascinating array of thrift stores, cafes and restaurants best explored on foot. Among them is an unassuming ice cream cafe called Tapi Tapi (a Bantu ideophone [nyaudzosingwi] that means “sweet sweet”) whose calligraphy-clad, alley-style entrance serves as an invitation to simply pay attention.
That’s because Tapi Tapi is no ordinary ice cream cafe. With a firm focus on rehabilitating the collective self-esteem of African people by sharing folk traditions, rituals and cultures through food practices, all its ice creams are handmade in small batches with ingredients typically communally sourced from the gardens of friends and patrons.
Over the course of each month, you may find a curated menu of ice cream flavours that includes amagwinya (a deep-fried dough from South Africa), kelewele (an ensemble of caramelised plantain, ginger and fire-roasted peanut from Ghana), and nhopi (a roasted pumpkin and dark chocolate pairing common in Zimbabwe). In the next month, the menu might feature flavours like thiakry (a millet couscous and sour milk pairing from West Africa), mbwire mbwire (roasted sorghum biscuits from Zimbabwe), and mowa, an amaranth greens and yellow plum vegan dish that is enjoyed across the continent. No flavours are ever repeated.
Founder Tapiwa Guzha says that Tapi Tapi started as a “self-imposed dare” that was largely inspired by childhood memories of lingering in his grandmother’s kitchen whenever desserts were being prepared. Born and raised in Zimbabwe, Guzha moved to South Africa in 2005 to study at the University of Cape Town and went on to earn his PhD in molecular biology in 2014. The following year, he began his postdoctoral fellowship in Stellenbosch, a wine oasis in South Africa’s Western Cape province, where he recalls seeing a trilingual sign for the first time. “The default is Afrikaans and English for building signs, room names and that kind of thing,” he says, “but the first time I saw a third language was Xhosa [a Bantu language], and it was a ‘trespassers will be prosecuted’ sign.”
