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
