Uncategorized – Mwizenge Sustainable Model Village

July 22, 2024July 22, 2024

Cassava Leaves Cooking Chigwada

Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D.

Emeritus Professor of Sociology

The traditional Tumbuka cooking of Chigwada vegetable ndiyo, dende, relish or umunani involves many stages. These were followed when I cooked the Chigwada as “The Village Chef” at the Mwizenge Sustainable Model Village with the help of two Research Assistants; Mr. Robert Phiri and Ms. Jusi Nya Banda.

Stages of Cooking Chigwada

You start with making chidulo, second collect fresh tender chigwada or cassava leaves, third pound the leaves with a pestle and mortar, fourth pour the chidulo into a cooking pot and put the mashed-up leaves into a cooking pot and place it on the fire. Boil the chigwada for half an hour and add nthendelo, nthwilo or raw fresh groundnut powder. Add salt and any tomatoes. Boil covered for half an hour. Stir every few minutes to avoid burning at the bottom. Add some water if the chigwada seems to be thickening. After half an hour, stir the nthendelo in the chikwada. After cooking for two and half hours, the Chigwada is ready to serve and eat with sima or nshima. I will critique my cooking of the Chigwada and the taste compared to how my grandmother and my mother used to cook it.

1. Chidulo is made from a choice of many dry leaves of a farm field crop. The chidulo can be made from dry maize stalks, from vitondozo vya skaba or stalks of dry groundnut leaves, dry banana leaves, dry groundnut shells, dry bean plant leaves and shells, dry visokoto from maize. In this case I decided to use the dry stalks of the maize which was about to be harvested. We set a pile of the stalks on fire and collected the cool ashes.

2. The ashes were put in chichezo container which had holes made at the bottom. The ashes were placed in the container and cold water was poured into the ashes. Soon, a dark golden brown liquid began to drip out at the bottom which was collecting in a container at the bottom.

3. We collected about 2 lbs or 1 Kg of fresh soft or tender chigwada leaves from the trees. Put them in a mortar and pound the leaves until they are a wet moist mash.

4. We pounded raw peanuts with a pestle and mortar and made about 6 cups of fresh peanut or groundnut powder.

5. We poured 5 cups of the chidulo liquid into the cooking pot and added the mashed chigwada leaves and began to boil the chigwada for 30 minutes.

6. I poured 4 cups of the raw groundnut or peanut powder on top of the chigwada. DO NOT stir yet. Add one teaspoon of salt. You can add tomatoes but this is optional. Boil covered for 30 minutes.

7. I stirred the chigwada vigorously and let it simmer and added water if necessary if the chigwada is drying up. Stir every few minutes to prevent the chigwada from burning at the bottom. Lower the heat.

8. After two and half hours, stir the chigwada and remove it from the fire as it is ready to be served with nshima.

Critiquing the Cooked Chigwada

I ate and enjoyed the nshima with the cooked chigwada. But the taste was nowhere close to how my grandmother and mother used to cook it. Fist I need to determine which crop stalk has the strongest chidulo. Is the chidulo from the dry groundnut leaves, banana leaves, bean leaves or maize visokoto and any other, the strongest? I could not find a flat stable surface for the sensitive scale I was using. This might sound simple. I could not find a small foldable table in Lusaka after going to so many shops.

My grandmother and my mother used a clay pot for cooking. This may make a difference. I think the chigwada needs very slow deep cooking. Metal pots are not always the best way to cook all foods. Adding more water when cooking the chigwada dilutes the chidulo which needs to have a sharp acidic taste at its best. Chidulo is not just a flavoring to the Chigwada but it is a central ingredient that tremendously defines the characteristic taste. It is a uniquely Zambian taste embedded in traditional cooking among the Tumbuka.

What was best about the cooking experiment is that we had all the basic tools. When we repeat or replicate the cooking, my team and I will only improve and get better. This is the central feature of any scientific approach.

July 17, 2024July 17, 2024

Bathroom Solutions

The first 13 years of my life up to 57 years ago, I lived in the villages and rural schools in the remote Eastern Province of Zambia in Southern Africa where there were no indoor flash toilets. You might not want to read this article any further if you are eating, about to eat or you have a weak stomach. I have lived predominantly in the cities in Zambia and the United States during the last 57 years navigating between use of the flash toilet of the city and rural village toilets or commonly known as out houses in the United States and latrines in the British colonial Northern Rhodesia of the 1950s and 60s. At one point 60 years ago in my rural village, toilets did not even exist. All villages now have toilets. Recently, I spent 2 weeks at my Mwizenge Sustainable Model village in rural Lusaka in Zambia sleeping in my own hut. I was confronted with and contemplated the challenges of using the rural village outhouses which I helped design and directed the building of.

History of the Latrine

I was attending the Dutch Mission Tamanda Boys Boarding Upper School north of Fort Jameson (now Chipata) in the remote Eastern Province of Zambia in 1965. I was 11 years old and in my 6^th grade classroom one morning when we heard a loud alarming campus wide commotion. The whole of my class of 40 students and 3 other classrooms emptied of students as everyone scrambled toward one the 6 teaching staff houses’ toilets where a crowd had already gathered. The teacher’s 3-year-old little girl had fallen into the wide toilet hole pit and could be heard crying from deep inside the dark outhouse hole. Some of the taller 17-year-old classmates were urgently summoned to retrieve the girl from deep in the dark filth.

Fortunately for the little girl, a number of the outhouse floor wooden beam floor supports had decayed and collapsed inside the shallow pit. The wooden poles had crossed each other which inadvertently created blockages which broke the girls’ fall. She was wedged just 3 feet below the hole and crying instead of being at the bottom of a ten-foot-deep toilet. One of the taller boys knelt on one knee to reach for the girl with his long arm and lifted her out amidst cheers. She was more frightened as she was not physically hurt. Her grateful mother carried her in her arms and scrubbed her with some clean soap and water. This incident exposed all about the perils of rural village outhouses at the time. The hole of the toilet should not have been big enough for a small child to fall through it.

Use of Outhouse

A friend of mine who was also a lecturer or professor at University of Zambia confided in me that when he visited the village in rural Zambia, he made sure he emptied all his pockets including keys before squatting, straddling the hole. In my home village many years ago, I took this advice further. I removed my shoes, my trousers, emptied my pockets of my wallet which had a bunch of credit cards and my Virginia Driver’s license, and my rental car keys.

After living in the United States for so long, I find it a challenge to use the village outhouse for long periods. According to the CDC, I might be among the 41.9% of adults in the United States who are obese. Therefore, I am unable to squat for too long on the village toilet when I am living at the Mwizenge Sustainable model village. Squatting for too long becomes a further challenge if there are too many not just the small houseflies, but especially the large green B-52 green bombers recklessly zipping around.

Outhouse Social Etiquette

There are also the challenges of social etiquette when using the village toilet. One of the most difficult is how do you tell if someone else is already occupying the special house at that same moment you want to urgently employ its services. If you are inside, you cough loudly to signal to whoever is approaching that you are already inside. Both men and women in the traditional Zambian customs have to make sure neither their mother-in-law nor father-in-law are occupying the joint at the time they would like to use it. You need to gather good intelligence before you decide to use the toilet. This problem may be solved by having more than one toilet.

In most cases in rural areas, the toilets may only have an opaque screen structure and not an actual door that you can use to close the toilet. This is how as you are busy using the toilet, often chickens have a tendency to walk in to check you out. When the chickens see you, they emit special alarm sounds.

Chicken one: “Chuc-ru- ru- ru- !!!!! (We are surprised you are here!!!)

Chicken two: “Chuc – ru – ru- ru- ru!!!! (We are scared!!!!!!)

Rooster Deep voice: “Cle – kwe -kwe- kwe!!(Man! This is really scary!!!!)

Village chickens make similar sounds when they see a snake or strangers walking around the village.

Since I cannot squat for long any more due to my age, especially weight and poor physical shape, I have sought relief by asking the village carpenter to make me a special movable wooden gizmo box that makes it possible for me to sit like I do when I use a flush toilet.

June 1st, 2024 – Mwizenge S. Tembo, Ph. D., Emeritus Professor of Sociology.

September 25, 2019July 17, 2024

Herbal Healing

Illness, Modern Medicine and Herbal Research

There is Chongwe Hospital in Chongwe small town 20 Kms down the road along the Great East Road. There is also Nangwenya clinic nearby 8 Kms away on the Great East Road going towards Chongwe. The Mwizenge Model Village of 50 Hectares or 123 Acres of Savannah Wilderness will provide me with many opportunities to conduct further research into Zambian traditional healing methods and the various herbs that are used from trees. I will validate some of the observations I have made over the years. I will also document more of the tree roots and other sources of treatments of various ailments.

For example, when I was about 16 years old I had a wart on the left side of my forehead that would not go away. In modern medicine, they use some chemical treatments that are applied on the wart and in some cases they are zapped using some type frozen pin. My father went into the bush and collected a long red spider’s web string. He told me to wrap it around the base of my wart and not to wash my face for 3 days. Before the third day was over the wart fell off painlessly has never been back since I was 16.