Recently I popped over to Kenya to be PA for my wife, Toni, who was there as part of a Curtin University delegation. While she worked, I asked Fredie (sic) to show me the real Kenya, not the tourist stuff. We called into a roadside restaurant for nyama chomu, which is salted roast meat, in this case goat. With that we had fried potato balls with tomato sauce, mashed potato with peas and corn and a drink (see photo). They had run out of ugali, a solid corn flour dough, thankfully. I would have been the first mzungu to have been in there for weeks, maybe years, yet it was very relaxing being African.
“So where are the knives and forks Fredie?”
“Use hands.” Stupid mzungu.
“Which hand Fredie?”
“Either. And not like that, grab a handful.”
After eating a modest amount of food, having that constant visitor fear of whether I might regret this meal during the night, I expressed to Fredie that I was done.
“You have to finish the meat. You don’t leave meat in Africa.”
Sawa, sawa. So much to learn.
And I was the only one of the delegation to have polite guts for the fortnight.
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