Good eats...

I’m safely back from Mtwara and eating a ton to make up for my unplanned fast. Several of you have asked about what kinds of food people eat here. Tanzanian cuisine has yet to take the world by storm, but maybe it’s just a well-kept secret... Tanzanian food is influenced heavily by centuries of trade with India and the Arabian peninsula (spiced teas, breads, and curries), as well as some lingering vestiges of British and German colonial food preferences ("chips", doughnuts, and an unhealthy love of sausages).

Usually, when I have been offered a Tanzanian breakfast, it consists of a couple of chapati (basically a deep-fried, thick tortilla) and chai (tea). At their worst, chapati can be flavorless, tough gut-busters, but I admit there have been a few times when a nice hot chapati really hits the spot. Granted, that spot is frequently the thighs and rear, so I try to go light on the chapati. The accompanying chai might be plain or spiced with masala, a blend of cinnamon, cloves, and cardamom… yum! Many Tanzanians also eat dense, heavy doughnut-like creations such as maandazi (large and made from wheat) or vitumbua (smaller, made from rice flour). I admit I haven’t tried them yet…



Lunch is normally the biggest meal of the day. Lunch and dinner are similar, and people’s favorite dishes usually depend on the region where they are from. People from coastal towns are more likely to choose rice, while people from inland areas are more likely to favor ugali, which guidebooks and dictionaries like to translate as polenta, but I take issue with that association. Ugali is a kind of doughy, bland, glutinous, springy concoction resembling gluey mashed potatoes crossed with Play-Doh made of maize, cassava, millet, wheat, or sorghum flour. No seasonings are usually added. I think you can tell where I stand on ugali (pictured below).



Along with ugali or rice is served a sauce (sausi), usually tomato-based, often with some sort of meat cooked in it. The sauces are usually delicious. As I am partial to beef, I had a nasty surprise this lunchtime with a mystery meat that turned out to be chicken liver. Side dishes are usually chopped and stewed greens (mchicha), and red beans stewed with onions and spices (maharage). I really love the red beans over rice, maybe because it’s not that far removed from New Orleans-style food. The saving grace for this spicy food lover is pilipili, a kind of semi-cooked hot-pepper salsa. Pilipili are red and green peppers that closely resemble jalapenos or Scotch bonnets in flavor, and are chopped up and cooked with tomatoes and onions. People here think it’s hysterical that an mzungu asks for pilipili. My mother-in-law would love it!

Street food is cheap, very filling, and Tums-worthy. On offer are usually mishkaki (beef kebabs), kuku (chicken), mayai (eggs), or occasionally kitimoto (pork). All are usually accompanied by chipsi (french fries), and occasionally a fresh (or not-so-fresh, depending on how long it has been sitting) tomato and onion salad. The food is commonly precooked and then re-heated in a pan over a grill with a hefty ladling of oil. On the coast, you can occasionally find fried pweza (octopus) on the menu -- be forewarned that it has been tenderized by beating it with a rock on the sandy beach! Below is a picture of a typical food stall (like the one I ate at in Lindi).



In northwest Tanzania, plantains and green bananas (ndizi) are a staple of people’s diets, and people will often eat plantains with meat in a sauce (ndizi nyama), as in the picture below. Sometimes I enjoy the plantains, especially if the sausi is flavorful, but sometimes they’re a bit chewy and strange. Along the coast, the Swahili influence has infused Indian spices into some of the dishes, so biriyani and pilau are common rice dishes served in coastal towns, with or without meat. I love both of them, though I have to be careful to avoid chomping down on a big piece of cinnamon bark or a whole cardamom pod in my lunch! My favorite meal by far, however, is njegere (peas), which is green shelled peas and other vegetables cooked in a coconut curry and served over rice.



I admit I have been spoiled food-wise by starting out in Dar, where there are tons of Indian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Ethiopian food, burger joints, French pastry shops, etc. According to the Rough Guide published this past summer, in Mtwara where I will be living once my research project starts, there are only 4 restaurants that serve non-Tanzanian fare, and 3 of these serve only Indian food. And I thought cheese was a precious commodity in Dar…

Bongo Stars...

I feel strangely compelled to make poorly informed comparisons of and generalizations about popular culture. I can’t help it, I’m admit I derived a strange pleasure from watching Bongo Star Search, the Tanzanian equivalent of American Idol, minus a goodly portion of the slick Hollywood production. It even has a Randy Jackson look-alike, complete with the wire-rim glasses. Anyone who knows me knows I don’t watch much TV, but I admit I enjoy the first week or so of each season of American Idol, simply because the performances are so bad that they’re incredibly entertaining. Everyone remembers William Hong’s “She Bangs,” right? I’m happy to report that the story is no different in the tryouts stage of Bongo Star Search, which is a recognizable copycat of American Idol, complete with behind-the-scenes female equivalent of Ryan Seacrest, but with a number of other features that render it uniquely Tanzanian.



First, dancing skill – of both the Britney Spears/Janet Jackson variety and traditional Maasai herdsman style – seems to be much more highly valued on Bongo Star Search than on American Idol. Tanzanians are incredibly good dancers and have an amazing ability to dance and sing simultaneously, which makes the dancing a real talent show, regardless of the style. Second, while many of the contestants are in Western dress (jeans, T-shirts, etc), the round I was just watching featured a guy in traditional Maasai dress (like Yona our guard is wearing in my blog). Maybe he will be the next Bongo Star.

The language difference might make it even more entertaining. First, fully half the tryout songs are in Swahili, and reflect a healthy range of hip-hoppish bongo flava style, romantic ballads, and traditional tribal songs. Most Tanzanians, especially in Dar, speak some English because it is taught in schools, but sung English seems to render some words indiscernible to a ear attuned to Swahili, which means that sometimes it takes me a few bars to realize the song actually has English lyrics! To my utter delight, Shania Twain, Celine Dion, and Whitney Houston are particular favorites.

I rarely had the opportunity to watch television while I was in Mtwara, as we don’t have a TV at home in Dar, and while I had one in my hostel room for the last week, most places in Mtwara have only one satellite or cable feed for the whole complex, meaning that I watched in my room what everyone else watched in theirs, or at least what the guy at the reception desk wanted to watch. Which, in an evangelical Lutheran hostel, means that 80% of the last week I have been exclusively watching Swahili gospel TV on the Agape Television Network. It also means that several times I have been happily enjoying a program, only to have the channel change midstream. Argh.

The waiting game...

I don’t have my research permits yet (and have no idea when that will finally happen as I am working through bureaucracies in 2 countries), so I can’t start my project, but while I am waiting, I decided it might be wise to make a preliminary site visit down to Lindi and Mtwara Regions, where I’ll be doing the interviews for my research project. It was convenient that a colleague on the social science team was passing through Dar on his way to Mtwara and could serve as my chaperone… the flight to Mtwara is just under an hour, which, while considerably more expensive than bus or ferry, is well worth it for the sheer difference in comfort and reduction in risk of bodily harm. After several harrowing incidents that almost kept us from making it onto the flight, including a late driver, horrendous traffic, my travel companion being a standby passenger, and pouring rain on the tarmac, we made it onto the plane.

To picture the airport where we landed at Mtwara, imagine the smallest airport in the smallest town you can think of (the closest approximation I can think of is the airport you fly into when traveling to Hanover, NH, but even that was years ago). The baggage claim is a wooden ledge, and immigration and customs is a 3-foot wide booth with a hand-painted sign and an older man who stands behind a folding table checking passports. Even for a domestic flight. This nice gentleman only checks wazungu passports (how’s that for racial profiling?), recording their details in a carefully lined notebook. I managed to escape the check, probably 1) because I was traveling with a Tanzanian and lacked the tourist gloss, and 2) because of the stricken expression on my face, having just realized my bag hadn’t arrived in the “baggage claim” (i.e., it wasn’t on the cart), and was still on the plane, Mozambique-bound with most of my earthly Tanzanian possessions. Thankfully the plane was headed back to Mtwara later that afternoon, so after filing a lost bag report (written in marker on a napkin), waiting in town a few hours and snacking on some delicious pilau, we picked up the bag and headed out to the field.

We slept in a town north of Mtwara called Lindi for the first three days because the nearby village the team was working in, Chikonji, was too small even to have a guesthouse. This posed a bit of a challenge to my colleague, who was to stay on in Chikonji for a week — sans Land Cruiser — to do ethnographic interviews. I liked to joke with him that he should look into sleeping in the goat house, which are small raised houses on stilts – kind of like hen houses – raised off the ground to keep the goats out of reach of prowling hyenas at night. Toting along his own mattress and bottled water, my colleague managed one better than sleeping with the goats: he finagled a room for himself in a local house with a very sweet family, and the local kids were excited about the new visitor (and the chance to see themselves on a digital camera screen).



Lindi, where we spent a few nights, is a medium-sized town built right on the Indian Ocean. As you can see below, the view from our guesthouse was incredible (though I have declined to feature the guesthouse because, well, suffice it to say it won’t ever be featured in any guidebooks).



In the afternoons after we returned from the village, we would go work on the beach where there was a local café serving cold beer and soda. Pickings were slim for meals: the first evening we went to the kituo cha basi (bus station), or the “standi.” The sheer amount of oil one consumes in a single meal at the standi -- mine was mishikaki (basically shish kebabs), chipsi (fries), and mayai (a very oily tomato and onion omelet) -- is mind-boggling. Suffice it to say the next few evenings I had bananas and tea for dinner.



Little did I know that Thanksgiving would be the last day of good eats -- roasted corn on the side of the road, peanuts, deep-fried chicken (no batter), and more chipsi -- before the dry spell that befell me once I arrived in Mtwara for the weekend. There were no restaurants open near my hostel over the weekend, leaving me to survive on beef jerky, mangoes, Skittles, Pepsi, and a whole lot of cashews... mmm!