STEMBILE MPOFU
I learnt life-changing lessons from the streets and home kitchens of Liberia. One of the most important was the resourcefulness of the Liberian people. Most of the food one sees on the street is grown by Liberians on their small farms and processed in their homesteads in the interior or home kitchens in the city. Liberia does not have a booming manufacturing and processing industry or huge commercial farms and the supermarkets are not frequented by the majority of people.
Most goods are traded in the bustling markets and roadside stalls. You will find goods and food products that have been imported from various parts of the world. More impressively however, you will find that Liberians themselves have produced many of the local goods available using knowledge systems that they have evolved over centuries. The goods are not produced using sophisticated stainless steel machinery. Age-old methods are used to make products like palm oil, coconut oil, peanut butter, and different snacks like plantain chips and sesame sweets. They are transported from the interior (rural areas) on hard packed dust roads mostly in small sedans packed tight and piled high with all sorts of produce.
The four million people from this small country, which is rated as one of the poorest in the world, are more self sufficient and resilient than people living in developed countries and other developing countries like Zimbabwe. As Zimbabweans we may pride ourselves on our infrastructure that, although deteriorating at a fast rate is better than that of Liberia. We may consider ourselves more advanced and perhaps think of Liberians as being “backward”. However it struck me then and still does now, that Liberians are unlikely to stand in cooking oil queues or spend hours on end waiting for a bread delivery truck for them to buy one loaf of bread. They are not at the mercy of a company that may decide it can no longer supply goods to the market for one reason or another. Their reliance on mass produced goods whose sale generates bumper profits for unseen shareholders somewhere in the world is not wholesome. They will not be thrown into frenzied desperation if imported products like flour disappear from the market because the company importing it no longer finds that market profitable. There are several reasons for this and these reasons are where the lessons lie.
The first being that Liberians have retained their own homegrown cuisine which utilises resources available in their environment. Wheat does not grow in their climate so you will not find a great deal of bread on the market. Rice, their staple food, grows easily in the swampy areas that are plentiful in the forests, so Liberians make rice bread. In fact the variety of recipes that use rice as a base are plentiful. Making this the second reason, the ability to use one product to produce many different things. Often when I was served with a new dish and I asked how it was prepared the answers I received often set me off on a journey of discovery. The answer to most questions would not just include how to prepare a certain dish but also information about the processing steps and the different ways to produce different flavours or products from the same plant. It was through this that I realised that the expansive Liberian cuisine was the result of using different parts of the same plant in many different ways. For example the palm tree has an extensive variety of products that are made from it. Firstly the young immature fruit can be dehydrated by heating it, then pounded into powder when dry and used for cooking in the same way bicarbonate of soda is used. The mature palm fruit can be eaten raw, roasted or boiled. The boiled flesh of the fruit is also used to make palm butter, a delicious sauce that is mixed with crayfish, fish, chicken or any type of meat available. After extensive boiling, the flesh of the palm fruit also produces red palm oil, while the palm kernels can be processed to make clear palm kernel oil for cooking.
If the kernel oil is processed differently it can make a different type of oil that can be used to make soap or as body oil that can be mixed with medicinal herbs and applied as a salve for burns and other topical wounds. The sap of the palm tree is tapped to produce palm wine. The fronds of the palm tree are woven and used as roofing material for houses and to build canoes that can navigate the huge waterways crisscrossing Liberia. This knowledge and its practice has been developed over thousands of years by hundreds of generations. It is informed by research and practice that is based on scientific knowledge and concepts that have been learnt, tested and refined over years and passed down from generation to generation.
My friend and mentor Evelyn Johnson gave me insight into the generational learning she underwent as a young girl. Her story is not much different to stories of many young people growing up in Africa’s rural areas and in it are many lessons.
Evelyn is affectionately known as “Fingers” because of her exceptional cooking skills taught to her by her grandmother. At the age of four, in a small village in Maryland in Liberia’s Southeast she began taking instruction in the science of food processing and technology and food preparation. Her grandmother taught her physical, chemical and microbiological methods and techniques to process an enormous variety of different foods. She was taught techniques in drying, salting, smoking, fermentation of food products and thereafter how to cook them, present them and serve them. I have described these processes in language that is technical. This is to emphasise the fact that these processes are in fact technical and scientific processes. They are rarely seen as such when they are being taught to a grand child by her grandmother in a rural dwelling in a developing country. We are unlikely to see them as skills that hold real value unless they are acquired formally and certified by a registered institution.
When Evelyn speaks of her grandmother it is with great love and a deep appreciation for the skills she took time to teach her. As she says, out of all the grand children in their homestead her grandmother took the most time with her instruction. She tells of how her grandmother’s home had a constant stream of people stopping by, either on their way to and from their farms or the other economic or social activities they were engaged in. They stopped by because they knew there would be an array of different foods and fruits on offer – cassava, plantain, fish, snails, bush meat, palm butter, pineapples, water melons, corn and many other delicacies depending on the season. The food would be there because her grandmother loved to cook and host people. She would refuse to take any payment for her offerings but many of the visitors would insist on leaving Evelyn with a small payment in cash or kind which she would tuck away somewhere for a rainy day if it was cash or if it was food add it to the family store. The rich array of food on offer was not purchased from a super market it was cultivated on the farms or was available from the abundant Liberian rain forests and rivers which make up almost half of Liberia’s land mass. These same forests, farms and rivers still provide many Liberian families with abundant supplies of food and raw materials for their livelihood today. This profusion and abundance are what struck me on my first journey to the south east of Liberia. The bright colours of peppers, eggplant, bitter ball, cassava, plantain and pineapples sold on busy roadside markets and small verandahs of the different homesteads.
Liberia and her people opened my eyes to what we lost as Zimbabweans through the colonisation process and our subsequent quest for development. We have distanced ourselves from our environment to the extent that we no longer know how to utilise the resources around us to sustain us. The colonisers found a thriving population that was self-sustaining and self-reliant. The farming that was being successfully carried out by the people of the region was subsistence farming. The introduction and success of commercial farming required subsistence level farming to dwindle. Commercial farming took the land and forced the African people to be labourers on the commercial farms. These people would otherwise have been carrying out subsistence farming on this land and retained their ability to self-sustain. The loss of self-reliance created a ready market for the industrialisation project that took Zimbabweans even further from their environment creating a citizen who believes they can’t survive without products manufactured by a company.
Zimbabweans will now stand in
long queues waiting for cooking oil and spend hours each day waiting for a bread delivery so they can jostle to get one loaf. This makes one wonder what oil was used for cooking before the advent of Olivine refineries and what was eaten for breakfast before Lobels bread factory was commissioned. Surely we had knowledge of ways we could use the resources around us to sustain ourselves. These knowledge systems have been whittled down to us growing rape and rugare in our vegetable patches. Our traditional diet is no longer varied and our preference for highly processed foods and western cuisine has seen us develop health conditions that we had hitherto not experienced.
These tastes have led to Zimbabwe having to import a great deal of food material and goods because we no longer rely on what is in our environment to contribute to our sustenance. We have lost many of the skills that we had to produce goods we need from our own environment. Those skills have had little value placed on them because they are seen as not being able to generate as much monetary reward as those acquired formally. Yet it is those skills that will keep a population well supplied with a wide variety of food and goods where the big manufacturing plants fail or do not exist.
There is a lesson for Zimbabwe as it charts its way to realising vision 2030. As we look forward to developing our nation, let us also look back and rekindle our own indigenous knowledge. We are luckier than other more developed nations because the knowledge is still accessible and can be retrieved. We still have access to forests and land where we can begin to cultivate plants that have served us well. The dormant skills will reconnect us with the environment that sustained our fore-bearers for thousands of years. Lets take these skills forward and allow them to evolve with us. We should not find ourselves paralysed by a shortage of bread or cooking oil, we should have alternatives that we have control over. If many individuals have these skills and can produce goods by processing the resources they have access to, we can certainly create a safety net by producing a second tier production level just from home industries. We must not forget that all these products that are now mass-produced and bought from the supermarket were once made in kitchens, garden sheds and outhouses before big industry developed machines to carry out mass production. It is much easier to buy goods from the supermarket. However having no knowledge of how that product came to be means that we can be held to ransom by manufacturers.
Having taken these lessons from Liberia to heart, I made my first batch of plum jam from the plum tree in my garden. For now my family is not desperate for fruit juice or Mazoe because we are making plum juice too. I have seen that mazhanje, our indigenous fruit has started making an appearance on the streets. As I do some research to figure out how I can process them and other indigenous offerings like matamba and matohwe, I feel deep gratitude to my Liberian Professors, Caroline Bowah, Evelyn Johnson and Emily Frank, it is small steps but I feel like I have earned a PhD!
