It starts as shopping
A [[braai]] is usually described by its ending — the fire, the smoke, the standing around. The photograph of the beginning is more useful.
A beef roast sitting in marinade inside a plastic bag, lamb chops, a package of A coarse sausage of beef, usually with pork and spice, cooked over the coals in a long coil rather than cut into links.DSAE · entry, chicken wings. Four different cooking times, four different prices, one afternoon.
The shopping is where the planning happens. The wors goes on first because it takes the longest and because people eat it while standing, which buys the cook time. The chops are for the middle of the afternoon. The chicken is the last thing and the thing the children wait for.
None of that is written on the packaging. It is the ordinary expertise of anyone who has run one of these, and it is invisible in every photograph of the fire itself.
This is the part of the ritual that looks like an errand and is not.