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Pathisa Nyathi
CLUTCHING pen and notebook, I walk into a restaurant along Robert Mugabe Way in Bulawayo. I am under the command of my stomach. The time is 1300hrs. My eyes dart around to identify a table where I can sit down and order some meal.

I do not find a single empty table, so I decide to sit next to a man I do not know. Apparently, he knows me. To get us talking he tells me he is very sick, though not eating like one. I am drawn to his eyes, often a reliable measure of sickness, and confidently declare he is as fit as a fiddle. Indeed, he confesses that his illness is induced by hunger.

He is eating voraciously. He is already tucking his right hand into a meal of white isitshwala and what these days the Bulawayo folk refer to as amalusu.

In our culture conversations get started and sustained when individuals’ lineages have been identified. “Ungumfoka bani?” I enquired, but after telling him, he had a clean bill of health. He is a Mr Mlilo who works in South Africa.

He attended Mzingwane High School from 1974 to 1977 at the time when Obadiah Mlilo, his relative was head of the school. Mr Mlilo seems quite au fait with the history of the Mlilos and the five brothers who came up from South Africa to settle in Zimbabwe. All manner of conversations ensued, some going as far back as Wanezi Mission, which he attended.

I had brought a notebook and pen so I could sit down, and pen an article concerning food. I wrote a book titled, “Beyond Nutrition: Food as a Cultural Expression.”

We quickly struck the same musical note. He loved amasi, which he consumed with alacrity after dealing decisively and conclusively with tripe. I too loved the dish until a week ago.

We soon discover we both love ulude. He too is in love with the same indigenous vegetable, especially when fresh cream has been added. That is true of me too.

Mlilo goes on to tell me that the Beitbridge border officials know him as Mr Lude. There were times when they suspected he was carrying dagga, as the two plants bear some common resemblance.

So, it began to look like food was the commodity that we shared in common. I had planned to write an article before getting to the restaurant. We met at a food restaurant and shared a lively conversation regarding food.

Once upon a time, long, long ago Africans in Bulawayo, like everywhere else in Rhodesia then were forbidden from walking on street pavements. They shopped through apertures in walls as a way of maintaining some sanitising distance, some sort of buffer zone between whites and blacks. Supermarkets in the central business district were out of bounds to Africans.

Only next to the City Hall were there some wares, characteristically referred as curios where Africans were allowed to ply their wares. The name has stuck though naturalised.

In Victoria Falls where there exists arguably Zimbabwe’s largest curio market, they are known as izikuriyo. It is a name for the very curious artefacts that Africans produce. Vendors were allowed to sell these because they did not present any business to the supermarkets owned by whites who did not produce curious curios.

The situation today is very different from that during the colonial times. All manner of item is being sold nonchalantly outside the major supermarkets ranging from rat kill to tshangane bags. It would be futile for the Bulawayo City Council to proscribe the practice and police its implementation. The stomach dictates and does so dictatorially. No democracy or rule of law when it comes to an empty stomach.
I have been observing that whereas we blacks, inaccurately described in colour terms as we are nowhere near ebony, began shopping from the supermarkets that were once the preserve of whites, certain African food items were excluded.

For example, the understanding of fruit included the likes of pears, kiwi fruit, grapes, mangoes, pawpaws, guava, peaches, and plums, inter alia.

More than 40 years on, indigenous African fruits have not made it into the supermarkets. The colonial hangover lingers big time. You will not go to a supermarket to buy umbumbulu, umtshwankela, umnyiyi, ubhuzu, izibunduma, umtshekisane, umhlagawuwe, amawobowobo, uxakuxaku et cetera. They are too indigenous to qualify, perhaps that is the thinking.

Some kinds of meat have been making it into the supermarkets albeit at a snail pace.

Goat meat seems to have made it of late, competing with lamb and mutton, which, together with pork and bacon, were the preferred meat in addition to beef of course.

The most recent entry in the meat category is what is disparagingly referred to as chicken makhaya. There is chicken, real chicken which requires no description. Then there is the chicken, the roadrunner in the rural areas with hardly any roads to talk about.

This chicken with numerous qualificatives is consumed in the communal lands, recently promoted from tribal trust lands and native reserves. The chicken makhaya is being served in many restaurants and supermarkets these days and is seriously threatening the broiler, which has the unassailable position as the master of the fridge. I am yet to see a chicken makhaya in a fridge!

Many insects and caterpillars are only beginning to get into the supermarkets. The mopane worm is a good example though the manner of preparation is foreign. Locusts are yet to fly into the store shelves.

Not so long ago I read about some people aboard a Ugandan aircraft who were arrested for selling what the passengers were buying like hot cakes — the locusts. The fellow who filmed the transaction was also arrested.

Just who is the African trying to please? Locusts are for the inferior people who do not board aeroplanes. That seems to be the statement from African airlines that serve no African cuisines. Mayebabo!!

Birds that we know and whose flesh we consume are yet to fly and end up in supermarket fridges. Ithendele, the guinea fowl, and isikhwehle the partridge are yet to get approval from the standards association with little knowledge of African cuisines.

We certainly spend a lot of money and effort running away from our past, our ancestors and ourselves as if humanity is measured in terms of social and physical proximity to whites.

The definition of vegetables has also been restricted to the exotics. Only recently is ulude, fresh or dried, being made available in prepared form in some supermarkets. In the western suburbs, almost on a daily basis we hear screaming children, “Ulude ledelele lentanga!” You may buy these vegetables either from these ear-splitting peripatetic vendors or the 4th Avenue multi-commodity market or eMkambo in Makokoba Township.

African vegetables do not seem to qualify to grace the supermarket shelves.

In some hotels, indigenous cuisines are prepared and served on specific days. Otherwise, the dishes on a daily offer are exotic, beetroot, parsley, baby corn, olives et cetera. We love it that way. Colonial ibhabhalazi found the best partners in Africa.

Mlilo observed that in South Africa there are Portuguese restaurants that serve Portuguese dishes, prepared the Portuguese way with characteristic Portuguese chillies. The same goes for Indian cuisines, Italian cuisines and indeed, cuisines of other nationalities, with the exception of Africans.

Colonisation was not entirely political. Africa Mayibuye!!