Food: Ugali

Ugali with beans and greens, a classic.

The main starch consumed in northern Tanzania is ugali. Ugali consists of maize flour (cornflower) cooked with water until it has a thick dough-like consistency. It's eaten with your hands and is usually rolled into a bite size piece and mixed with a stew or beans. It's very similar to some other African starch staples (Garri in Nigeria, Fufu in Ghana, Posho in Uganda) in that it's a thick rather tasteless clump of starch. It's available in almost every small cookery, restaurant and social gatherings that present food like weddings or funerals.

Nice piece of ugali. 

A beginner ugali eater is highly obvious and very messy so it's an important skill to learn. Because you eat it with your hand it is widely accepted that you need to wash your hands before eating, though this doesn't always mean with soap, especially in rural areas. It's always a conundrum when offered food in an area like that, do you skip washing your hand (cultural inappropriate, risk of germs on hands) or do you put your hand in the basin of water that four people had previously rinsed their hands in? And might I add, four people that probably have a higher probability of carrying something that will cause you to have diarrhea for two days straight? Sometimes you get lucky and someone pours water from a jug into a basin allowing you to rinse your hands, and sometimes you're even luckier and there is soap to accompany you.

I thought it was interesting that all these regions had a similar preparation and style of a starch with varying core ingredients (yam, maize, cassava). I found myself wondering about the pre-colonial foods and found this interesting tidbit on this extremely informative website about African food:

Before the European colonization of Africa and intercontinental trade, the staples of the African diet were rice, sorghum, millet, barley and lentils. Starting around 200 to 300 AD the Arabs brought dried fruits, rice, mangoes, citrus, black pepper, ginger and other spices by way of trans-Saharan camel caravans. By 500 AD traders introduced bananas and coconuts from Malaysia. Muslim influence began around 700 AD and spread rapidly throughout the continent. For hundreds of years there was an Indian Ocean slave trade when Muslim Arabs and Iranians traded goods for slaves. By the 15th century, the Europeans arrived and started colonizing Africa. The colonies of France, Great Britain, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Portugal are gone but their influence on local cuisines remains.

Africa has five culinary/geographical regions (not geo-political areas) that derived variations of cuisine depending on their contact with the rest of the world. The regions are Ethiopia, West Africa, East Africa, Portuguese Africa and South Africa.

Many of the foods we eat everyday originated in Africa. Wheat, barley, oats, millet, Blackeye peas, sorghum, tamarind (part of Worcestershire sauce), okra, yams (not sweet potatoes), watermelon, cantaloupe, sesame, cumin and sugar beets all originated in Africa.

These staple starches like ugali are eaten by literally everyone because they are grown by everyone in rural areas. It's common to see people eating ugali twice a day, every day. In Nigeria people would have a garri porridge for breakfast with proper garri for lunch and dinner. Most things are boiled since oil is very expensive and also because people cook over an open fire. Because the goal is to serve many people and get full, repetition of foods is not really an issue.  People eat what is in season and what they can afford, hence the ubiquity and popularity of these starches. Rice has become more popular as trade increases and most rural areas consider it a delicacy reserved for special occasions.

It's something we have really lost in America when thinking of our current disconnect with growing and consuming food. I'm not even sure what I would say my staple starch was growing up..bleached wheat flour maybe? And although I'd probably seen a wheat field I had absolutely no idea how to process it from the raw material to the wheat flour until I looked it up out of curiosity at an adult age. Would we even know where to begin if we had to harvest our maize crop and turn it into a flour? And on top of all this, when we finally process it to a starch, we would realize that we all had forgotten how to eat with our hands.