Llewellyn
King
Read Llewellyn's bio and previous columns
January 1, 2009
Zimbabwes Days of Yore and Plenty
The pictures are harder to take than the words. The words you can skip
over. The pictures take you by the throat. All of my boyhood in Southern
Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, came surging back to me with choking sorrow when
I saw press pictures of Zimbabwean children digging through the roadside
gravel, in the hopes of finding kernels of maize corn in American
English that may have blown off passing trucks.
When hunger stalks Africa, maize is more important than gold the
difference between living and dying. It is eaten in several ways. Even
the stalks are chewed in the way Latin Americans chew sugar cane.
Mostly, it is made into a stiff porridge called sadza.
Some of my earliest memories of the vital importance attached to maize
go back to when I was nine years old and was awarded the job in our
household of measuring the weekly maize ration to each employee. By law,
every man and domestic helpers were mostly men received 15 pounds of
maize each week.
My
job was to watch the precious ground maize grits to Americans
weighed out of 100-pound sacks into smaller sacks. The weekly weighing
was a jolly time, with much joking and laughing (and you have not
laughed until you have laughed in Africa) while the meal was dispensed,
weighed with a scale hung on a tree limb.
This weekly ceremony, together with the distribution of stewing beef,
was symptomatic of everything that was right and wrong with life in
colonial Africa. It was humanitarian; it was generous; and it was
patronizing. The amount of meal far exceeded the daily consumption of
one person and was designed, although this was not mentioned, to feed
more than one hungry mouth. It was a government-abetted welfare
paternalism in action.
I
have often thought about this conscious food distribution from the
better-off whites to the poor blacks as less an act of racism than of
British class snobbery noblesse oblige in the colonial context. It was
the same instinct that caused the viceroy of India to pretend to find
work for 5,000 people at his palace in New Delhi.
Much of the meal ration found its way to extended families in the
townships or to peddlers who came around on bicycles. None of it went to
waste. The classic meal, eaten with little variation, was sadza, which
is a dumpling that diners shape with their hands and dip into a stew
made ideally with meat, but sometimes with other protein-rich
ingredients like beans, or termites and caterpillars, which were
harvested as delicacies. I ate a lot sadza with various stews, but the
caterpillars were beyond me.
The question I have most often been asked is, What was it like in
Rhodesia? I have never had a good answer except to say that it was like
living in a good London suburb, but with a back story of indigenous
people who came and went in our lives without really registering.
British author Evelyn Waugh described this phenomenon as far back as
1937, when he wondered at the morbid lack of curiosity of the settlers
for the indigenous people. He might have been told that it was the
selfsame lack of curiosity that his characters in Brideshead
Revisited had about the workers in the rest of England.
At
this passage of time, it is almost possible to defend the British in
Rhodesia. Their greatest gift, I sometimes think, was not democracy,
law, literacy or religion, but the golden maize they brought with them
in 1890, which replaced rapoco, a low-yield grain grown in the region.
Maize was produced in such abundance in Zimbabwe, before President
Robert Mugabe destroyed the commercial farms, that it was exported
throughout southern Africa.
Now the breadbasket is empty, and children sift through roadside gravel
for corn kernels blown from trucks. Would that I could fix my scale to a
tree and weigh out a plentiful measure for those children, who are no
older than I was, when I was the quartermaster in another time.
© 2009 North Star
Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.
Click here to talk to our writers and
editors about this column and others in our discussion forum.
To e-mail feedback
about this column,
click here. If you enjoy this writer's
work, please contact your local newspapers editors and ask them to carry
it.
This
is Column # LK078.
Request permission to publish here. |