An Ode To Ugali

I love ugali. Admittedly, I was 'forced' to love it, more like an arranged marriage, except the absence of options. An arranged marriage is worse when there are options. When there aren't, you will grudgingly learn to love whoever was chosen for you, because - get ready for the groundbreaking revelation - you have no OPTION. In a nutshell, that's how I began a lifelong affair with ugali.

We ate ugali for breakfast, ate it for lunch, and ate it for supper. It wasn't a big deal. We did not know that something else existed apart from ugali or its related variations such as porridge and mkarango. If it was possible, we'd eat ugali accompanied by ugali.

I learnt the other day why it was impossible. I haven't looked at it the same again. A few foreigners were asked to rate ugali and they came with one unanimous conclusion - it is very TASTELESS. I have interacted with ugali all my life and I had never thought of it as tasteless.

It forced me to reminisce my primary school days. For those who went to boarding school, I know they understand the kind of torture we went through. Most of it revolved around food. Our experience (or at the very least most of us) at the fabled KHA were tough. I can legitimately blame it in all my addictions.

Nothing ever came close to the trauma we experienced in boarding. We were fed with just enough food to keep us alive and endure a few strokes of cane from time to time, especially for people like me whose IQs then competed favourably with donkey hooves.

I remember how I'd wait anxiously for the bell to ring for meals. Immediately after meals, I'd begin the anxious wait for the next meal. If anything KHA's food did not fill up your stomach. It made you hungrier.

It turns out that the go-to meal was ugali. The sight of large ugali was probably arousing at the time. We had developed a secret and strict code of eating it. We'd begin with veges using the scorched earth policy. You'd never see a trace of anything remotely related to the badly cooked cabbages or sukuma wiki.

I remember one female teacher chanced upon this sinister ugali-eating protocol. She pitied one boy who got a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have his plate replenished with the badly cooked mbogas which was a delicacy by the way. It had to be - we had no choice.

However, when the female teacher looked around, she realised that all boys did not have vegetables on their plate. She might have thought there was an anomaly somewhere or the cooks deliberately denied boys veges. We must have laughed because she did not know out secret code.

At the time, ugali was not tasteless. We loved it the way it was. As far as we were concerned, ugali was blameless and upright. We even began trading ugali for bread. It was simple, you gave another person ugali and the other person would repay you with bread.

I loved ugali so much that I often traded it for my bread. The bread wasn't that big either. It was an eighth. But both commodities had equal value. Half for half, full for full. When I talk about equal value, I do not mean the entire loaf, but just the eighth.

Since I wasn't big on bread, my memories are slightly skewed towards ugali. There was something controversial about those who loved bread during our time at KHA.

Now, it has been revealed that ugali is tasteless. One person even likened to wet cement. However, it won't break our tight relationship, which is strengthened more by KHA memories.

Although I do not look at ugali the same way, the love for it will forever remain