Geraldine Matiwane's crowdfunding campaign to open a Nigerian restaurant aims to provide employment opportunities for immigrants who have gone through similar experiences to her own.

Every once in a while we’re reminded just how powerful food can be – even beyond the realm of viral Instagram accounts. When it’s used as a vessel for communicating or breaking down barriers between people, food becomes so much more than just sustenance.

Geraldine Matiwane understands this better than most. Matiwane, a 25-year-old nurse, disability worker and the home chef behind the Miss Gee’s Kitchen Instagram account, migrated from Nigeria to South Australia at the age of eight with her family. In an all-too-common predicament, Matiwane and her family fled a life of poverty and disadvantage and landed in a small rural town, where they promptly bore the stigma of being outsiders. The challenges didn’t stop there.

“My race, appearance, accent, and traditional food were some of the major causes of bullying I experienced,” Matiwane tells SBS. “There were times growing up where I begged to be returned back home, but my mother insisted that Australia was my home now. It was difficult to make friends and to participate in group activity, as no one wanted the 'black' girl. There were times where I would hide in the library to eat my lunch at school; I would spray deodorant in the area after eating. In year eight, I personally asked my mother to stop preparing my lunch to avoid taking traditional meals to school.”

“My race, appearance, accent, and traditional food were some of the major causes of bullying I experienced."

Although older now, Matiwane hasn’t really wiped those schoolyard memories entirely – she’s possibly not too dissimilar to a lot of adults who were “weird lunch kids” in that way. But Matiwane has found a degree of solace in cooking traditional Nigerian food and in sharing images of her meals on her Instagram account, which she’s been doing since 2014. Her 7000+ followers, it seems, are a far cry from the uber-judgemental kids from her past.

“When I discovered my own skills in the kitchen, I was hungry for more,” she tells SBS. “I was hungry to further expand my knowledge and to use that to terminate all negative stereotypes about Nigerian food.”

For those wondering what Nigerian cuisine actually comprises, Matiwane is all too ready to tell you that it’s different from “African food”, an umbrella term Australians are getting too comfortable with using. “A typical Nigerian meal entails delicious fried plantain with jollof rice (tomato rice), grilled lamb chops or goat chops with egg salad on a Sunday afternoon,” she says. “Decades from now, Nigerian cuisine will stand proudly and be recognised as a unique entity of its own.”

"There were times where I would hide in the library to eat my lunch at school; I would spray deodorant in the area after eating.”

Matiwane recently launched a crowdfunding campaign, which she hopes will help her realise her dreams: to open a bricks-and-mortar Nigerian restaurant in Adelaide. Her goal is $10,000, an amount that will enable her to cover rent and production costs for the first three months of opening.

Her campaign, called “Bully Survival: The Power of Food” has multiple aims: Matiwane hopes to provide employment opportunities for immigrants going through similar experiences to her own, provide “a pathway for other upcoming female chefs” and showcase “a different side of Africa, the positive side – the unique taste of Nigerian food”.

“Food is one of the key tools to breaking the cycle of racism, discrimination and hatred towards people,” she says. “Food enables one or more groups of people to come together in a collective manner and share their stories, cultures, experiences and most importantly, laughter!”

Follow Miss Gee’s Kitchen on Instagram, and support Matiwane’s crowdfunding campaign today – every little bit helps!