sadza stories

I'd never had sadza before I came here. It's the staple food for Zimbabweans, made with mealie-meal (maize-meal). The maize is ground down into a white powder of a consistency somewhere between sand and Johnson's Baby Powder, if you get the top brand.

Sadza comes in different forms: bota, which is the watery porridge-form we eat most days for breakfast, power permitting. Then there's full-on sadza, a stiff white paste you're supposed to eat in pinchfuls, a wodge of sadza squeezed between the first three fingers of your right hand. Sadza tastes best with a vegetable relish made of tomatoes, onions, "leaves" (rape or spinach), salt and peanut butter, or with meat. These days in Zimbabwe though, peanut butter's a scarce luxury and price controls mean there's precious little meat. So it's sadza wejongwe (sadza with salt water) for afternoon tea and sadza nemajuru (sadza and dried termites) for supper. That's what the weekly Manica Post said on Friday in a front-page story. And that's a government paper.

I'm fascinated by the stories about sadza, how traditionally Zimbabwean girls were taught to grind it, how good Shona wives make sure there's never a pasty white lump in their husband's plate, how you can be sent back to your in-laws simply because you haven't mastered the art of sadza-making. In the past, if a man married a woman who turned out not to be a virgin -- and he wasn't the one responsible -- he could let his in-laws know by returning a plate of white sadza with a hole scooped out in the middle. The sadza said it all.

Mealie-meal's been in short supply for several weeks now, which makes tempers short. So I was elated when I got down to the grocer's shop this morning and found her workers unloading a bakkie full of white Ngwerewere super refined. A few seconds earlier there'd been no-one there -- the shop's pretty bare -- but now customers appeared from nowhere. Marii? How much?

The grocer lets her assistant Simba do the talking. His name means power, strength or authority and he's going to need every ounce of authority he's got to sell this stuff. Nine point six, he says. That's 9.6 million for just five kgs. The grocer's going to have to move this lot fast, before a gang of hungry National Price and Incomes Commission (NIPC) inspectors arrive. The gazetted price -- the one fixed by the government in September -- is just 145,000 dollars. At 9.6 million a bag, a teacher working on last month's salary would only be able to buy two and a half bags: just 12.5 kg. No wonder my teacher friend Mai Nigel told me yesterday she was "taking leave" this term. There's not much point working these days, not if your salary won't stretch to your sadza. They reckon 10 kgs will do a family a week and a half.

"Where'd you get it from?" I ask, counting out wads of blue 100,000 notes. Today I'm lucky: I have cash.

"From a new farmer," the grocer says and she looks up at me through her fringe.

New farmer is such a loaded term these days. It might mean old-style war vet, who invaded a white-owned farm, terrorised the former white owners, slashed a few cows and made off with the family silver and a few tractors. Or it might mean something different: someone a lot less violent, someone genuinely interested in a new career, someone driven to the land as a way of fending for his family in Zimbabwe's worst-ever economic crisis. This new farmer is an army brigadier's wife, says the grocer.

"Such a nice woman," she says defensively. I nod.

"Her husband's been transferred to Gweru," she says. (What, for the elections?) "I never knew an army brigadier could be so nice."

Nice is such a convenient word, despite Mrs Cuthbert's ban on it in our News books at the bottom end of primary school. "Nice means nothing, children," she said. Now sometimes that's a good thing.