Our Food Will Make Us Proud!

It’s not a surprise that Zimbabwe's culinary culture is one to be greatly celebrated. After all, the country is shaped like a teapot and even has a ‘smoke that thunders’ steaming on its tip.

Across many parts of southerly Africa, ice cream is not an everyday treat but rather a special one for noteworthy occasions. In many African households, an ice cream container in a refrigerator often contains frozen stew, meat and frequently beans from the week before. After ice-cream has been consumed on a unique occasion, what remains are the ice cream cartons. Finding actual ice cream inside an ice cream container in your refrigerator means one of two things: a special event is coming up or your folks are very affluent and live a comfortable life.

The types of foods one consumes can be status symbols. The same way that ice cream is seen as a luxury which conveys financial stability, certain food items are viewed as reserved for the poor. In most cases these include the traditional and indigenous foods of Zimbabwe. Food such as Mufushwa, Maputi, Chimodho, Maheu eChirema just to mention a few. Mufushwa are sun-dried leafy vegetables prepared as stews. Since they are seasonal and mainly found during the rainy season, the fresh ones are preserved to be enjoyed during the dry season. The vegetables include traditional ones such as rape (brassica napus), covo (marrow-stem kale) and muboora (pumpkin leaves). Indigenous varieties include mutsine (black jack leaves) and mumowa (red amaranth). Maputi are popped maize kernels; chimodho is cornbread prepared using flour and maize meal, and maheu is a fermented beverage made from maize meal and a mixture of other grains like sorghum or finger millet or pearl millet.

Tapiwa Guzha, the owner of TAPI TAPI ice cream parlour in Observatory, Cape Town, South Africa, creates a melangé of two worlds, creating the best ice cream known to humans. Using the flavours most available to poorer citizens, Guzha infuses the taste of Africa's indigenous delicacies into ice cream. His craft is cunningly oxymoronic. Imagine finding a mine of ice-cream flavours borrowed from our rich indigenous culinary heritage; flavours such as salty Maputi and Mufushwa Masala. Mufushwa is a highly nutritious food, but is not widely consumed in urban areas as the middle class and bourgeois associate it with rural areas and poverty.

In Zimbabwe’s culinary culture, mufushwa and ice cream are polar opposites. Guzha introduces this wonderful combination in both vegan and non-vegan options. TAPI TAPI is beyond ice cream. From the contrast between the ice cream and its flavours to the symbolism of such a store being found in the “Mother City”, the parlour is a Pan-African treasure. Cape Town is referred to as “Mother City” as it was the gateway between Europeans’ first contact with the people of southern Africa.

Guzha’s work interrogates the status quo. A huge poster in his parlour reads “Our flavours are not weird! We’ve all been socialised to believe Eurocentric food should be the global norm.” Meanwhile, painted as a mural on a wall adjacent to the door and hung in a picture frame are words Guzha titles “A reminder to you, my child”.

The message goes on to say, this is your home my child, land of your people. One must nourish oneself from the land, tend it so that others may enjoy it too. He instructs the child to remember that their stories, lives and histories do not begin in1488. (In 1488, Bartholomeu Dias became the first European navigator to round the southern tip of Africa. His discoveries established the sea route between Europe and Asia.)

On the mural, Guzha goes on to cite how a great and ongoing injustice has occurred because of colonization. He says this injustice rots the mind and decays the heart. He laments how these have been inherited over centuries. His child must not hold onto oppression, but cast it out. Guzha tells his child not to allow their story to be written for them, but rather to create space for self and room for others. He reminds his child of the need to build community and embrace diversity. In this way, “we are stronger together.'

From the aesthetics of the ice cream parlour to the mural on the wall. it is clear Guzha is a man on a mission. His push for authentic cuisine is an attempt to break down barriers. He creates cuisine which mirrors the people around it and empowers the people to whom the food belongs.

Tapi Tapi is beyond ice cream. From the contrast between the ice cream and its flavours to the symbolism of such a store being found in the “Mother City”, the parlour is a pan-African treasure. Guzha’s work breaks known mental barriers in African cuisine, pushing for renewed sovereignty one lick at a time.

Webster Makombe is a regular contributor to Emerging Voices. Read more from him here.

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To Love and Unlove

We're including this essay and accompanying audio in our Conversations with Old(er) Women section. It's certainly not because of the writer's age: she is 24 years old, at the beginning of her life's journey. But reading the essay, I'm struck by the questions she poses. As an elder, I often ask myself similar ones. I come up with different answers, but the questions resonate.

What would my life amount to? At various turns in our lives, we all struggle with this question. Ruminate over purpose and finality. Study, work, passion, romance, friendship, and family ‒ we pick and choose ‒ move these up and down the priority list as we move through life. We don’t always have choices in these matters, and other times, we have the choice and fumble. Balance is a difficult art. Wanting to balance is harder.

When I am breathing my last, what would I really care about? When I am gone, what would I want to be remembered for? We probably think about life through the paradigm of death, through such questions, because it helps us make a simpler snap judgement about life’s many burdensome questions. Death, a point that concentrates your entire life because there won’t be any left now.

What does it mean to be me? And what should I be doing in the meanwhile? Because in the meanwhile, that is all there is. And in the meanwhile, that is what we wish to fill with purpose. Because meaning makes us feel consequential.

Like everyone, I sometimes think about life through these questions. When I do, I am less sure of what life would and should present to me. I am not sure if I will find lasting love and companionship. I am not sure if I will survive journalism, or if journalism itself will survive! But I am sure of one thing. As sure as anyone can be of anything I think: the only thing I would value in my last moments is to know that my life meant love. Utter, complete, unabashed love.

It is for a bunch of people to say, she knew how to love! That and only that would be a compliment to a life well lived for me. And so in a life so focused on wanting to build love, and breathe love, and show love, I have come to hit a roadblock. I do not know how to unlove.

For the longest time, I did not think I needed to know. Why would I want to unlove anyone? Life’s nature, I would probably move away from some people at some point, and that might mean loving them differently or from afar, but I wouldn’t have to unlove? Romantic relationships failing? I can still love in a larger sense; a love based on the good there was, a love based on memory, but removed from them. But I certainly wouldn’t need to unlove?

I have been proven wrong. My life threw me in the deep end recently, and I didn’t swim very well in unloving waters.

Within a few months, I came to lose love, twice (with the same man), then find unexpected new romance that came all packaged in true romcom fashion, only to lose that too in a short span. Quite an eventful six months. Romance has been my curse, and I have struggled with the art of letting go.

What I am writing about is not a regret of loving someone. I have only been with a few men, and with the few I actually loved. That is not something everyone can say. So I have been lucky I suppose. But knowing when to let go, that has been the trouble.

‘Strangers in their own land’, that’s the title of a book by Arlie Russell Hochschild. Now the book has nothing to do with romance, it is about the American Right. You could think of it as the American Right’s romance with Trump, but not the kind of romance I am talking about here. Or maybe it is? I thought I was going for the right man and ended up more hurt? Well, thinking in retrospect has the benefit of time and wisdom. But anyway, the title of the book is something I have been drawn to.

Stranger in my own land is what I have felt the past six months. I thought I knew how to love well. I did love well, in my opinion. It is the one thing I thought I knew how to do real well. A love for people generally. A love for those I was with. And yet I feel like I have been in a stranger's territory. My previous love, relationship, I felt it quite deeply, extraordinarily. And yet it seemed to me like a borrowed burden.

I kept tugging at it for a while. Why? Why this unease? What is it that I am feeling? Why restlessness in me? Well, turns out my romance had gone sour a lot before I cared to recognise and I stretched it way too far. That is, I did not know when to pause, stop, and change course. I did not know when to stop loving, and start the process of unloving.

I loved a man who did not know how to love me back, especially as time progressed and we stayed together for longer. He had many issues, and I became one among them. And what started to be enjoyable companionship no longer was so. So we broke up, he wanted to stay friends, I struggled with it. Then he wanted to get back together, I struggled with that too. But finally I broke up with him, for real. It sounds tedious and it was even more tedious to live this. But I came to learn an important lesson from it: sometimes it is important to let go of love. To unlove is not to lose compassion for the other person. That is what I thought and so I stuck around for him. To unlove is just to break away from the attachment and heal. It might very well be an act of love, for yourself and for the other. Because my continued love, indulgence and care towards him just got me more misery.

All of this realisation became even more crystal clear when I met someone new. I wasn’t meaning to. I hadn’t planned. But he turned out to be so brilliant and kind that all I had tolerated and braced in my previous relationship was simply put to shame. But circumstances have meant we can’t be together. To my utter sadness. Initially, me being me, I of course cried buckets. But then, I paused. I thought, I felt. Wrote about what I felt. And now, I am letting go. I am unloving. And because I now know how to unlove, I think I can love even more bravely.

So to more love, to me, you and to everyone there is. And to our brave hearts that take a chance.

Manasa Narayanan is a regular contributor to Emerging Voices.

Read more of Manasa's work here.

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Passport Apartheid

Condemn the South African apartheid regime and support the international boycott (1976) vintage poster by Rachael Romero.

In Zimbabwe, one of the popular relishes to go with the staple dish of sadza (a porridge of cornmeal and water) is “haifiridzi”. The history of this delicious dish speaks to the stringent pass laws in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe’s name under colonial rule) under the Native Passes Act. The same effects of these pass laws in colonial times can be seen in the present day visa system. Haifiridzi was invented by the witty native working men in Rhodesia’s high density towns as a way to cope with the law that hindered them from owning property and having their wives in their worker’s quarters. These men were only permitted to have two pots--one for sadza and one for relish, which was usually a meat portion. Most relishes would be missing a rare component, marrow-stem green kale known as muriwo, a side dish staple in Zimbabwe even today.

Failing to have an extra pot in which to cook the muriwo, after cooking their sadza and meat in the other two pots, the native workers would then simply add the muriwo to the pot with the relish, giving birth to what is known today as “haifiridzi”. The name is a Shona language version of Highfields which was a popular high density town housing most workers quarters. It was strategically positioned by the Rhodesian town planners to be next to the industrial area of what is now Harare (then called Salisbury) amongst other worker’s towns such as Mufakose, Glen View, Glen Norah and Kambuzuma.

Today’s restrictions resemble the pass laws that blocked black citizens economic opportunities, decent wages and a healthy social and family life.

To this day, Zimbabweans under self rule are still making their own compromises, their own mixes. Many don’t come out as nicely as “haifiridzi”. Today’s restrictions resemble the pass laws that blocked black citizens economic opportunities, decent wages and a healthy social and family life. Visa laws today are separating working husbands and wives. Just as pass laws stopped ‘natives’ looking for empowerment in certain districts, visa laws are obstructing Zimbabweans and Africans at large from working at good jobs.

This is a form of systematic racial discrimination based on one’s nationality. Many people are disenfranchised from the right to travel. People with Zimbabwean passports have great difficulty obtaining visas, be they for tourism, study or work. Some African citizens have to travel to other African countries to obtain a visa due to lack of consular services in their respective countries. This form of segregation is reminiscent of in-country travel for a black man during colonial times when Zimbabwe was Rhodesia.

In Rhodesia, failing to walk around with a pass or a “chitupa” or failure to produce it at required times was lethal. There could be dire consequences, some resulting in death. Today many Zimbabwean dreams, especially of youth, are killed for lack of obtaining a visa to work and study in other countries. Soon after high school, one of my friends was unable to pursue a career in criminology because he failed to obtain a study visa. This was in spite of the fact that he had excelled in his studies, had been enrolled at a reputable institution and had even secured a scholarship. But failure to get a visa was the end of his dream of a good education.

The visa application process itself is so intense and so interrogative it feels inhumane. The patronizing treatment received at the consular offices to the frisking, detention and interrogation received at immigration and border controls if one misses but a single correct response during questioning are humiliating.

The visa application process itself is so intense and so interrogative it feels inhumane.

Such treatment is akin to the treatment given native workers during colonial times when a person was found outside their district of origin or their registered district of employment.

It boggles the mind to think this form of discrimination even transcends diplomatic ties. A recent example is the inhumane and frustrating experience of South African President Ceril Ramaphosa at the hands of Polish immigration authorities on his way to the Ukraine-Russia Peace Talks. In June, 2009, then Mining Minister Obert Mpofu was denied a UK visa to attend an investment conference. Today many Zimbabweans face deportation from South Africa as this neighboring country has decided not to renew the Zimbabwean Exemption Permit (ZEP) visa. Visa requirements and visa restrictions are a huge stumbling block to the economic and social progress of many Zimbabweans.

Zimbabweans are Africans, and Africans are disproportionately impacted by visa restrictions. A European can mostly travel freely, often visa free. Europe has a relaxed inter-continental visa-free travel system. But in Africa, a Zimbabwean would need a visa to visit Egypt, a country with which it shares a continent.

As an individual who has been fortunate enough to travel to around eleven countries, I am appalled at the problems faced by my fellow African citizens due to visa restrictions. Now technology and online visa appointment booking begin the stress and mental strain of securing a visa even before the formal process itself starts. Failure to attain a visa can be fatal, killing one’s travel plans dead. My first time traveling was to Washington D.C. I received my visa at the Embassy at around 1400 hours and my flight was four hours later. If my visa interview had been delayed by even a day, I would not have been able to travel.

I was going on an advocacy tour to prepare me to attend college. My whole future prospects would have shattered had I failed to secure a 10 minute interview.