Travel the world’s barbecue trail and you’ll find meat on a stick almost everywhere. South Africa’s version goes by the Afrikaans name sosatie. Like all good Cape Malay meat dishes, fruit and curry are never far off—the former (usually apricots) interspersed with the meat on the skewers, the latter used to flavor the marinade and sauce. “Cape Malay,” by the way, refers to the descendants of Indonesian and Malaysian slaves and indentured servants brought to Cape Town to work in farming. “There is perhaps no other single dish that can be regarded as more genuinely Afrikaans than sosaties,” wrote South African poet and food writer C. Louis Leipoldt. Writing in the 1940s, Leipoldt was to Afrikaans food what James Beard was to our own. Like all great food writers, Leipoldt dispensed not only recipes but the wisdom gleaned from considering cooking a manifestation of culture. The following sosaties are based on Leipoldt’s.