Mama Afrika and the long-lost art of freehand dicing.

A year ago I got dressed up in a bright blue silk dress, ate a four-course seafood lunch, drank numerous glasses of champagne and called it a Christmas party.
This year was somewhat different.

This year – I cooked.
Although not entirely new to the concept, this was not the sort of cooking that comes with $50 recipe books and utensils that cost half a month’s wage. Nor was the final product the sort of gastronomic art they dedicate TV shows to. This was beef and rice assembled by 4 chefs, one knife, two enormous pots, some charcoal – and many a bucket.

I’m no stranger to seeing a feast put together. For a few years our house on the island went from quiet oasis to fully functioning guesthouse at Christmas with a three-day eating extravaganza inclusive. Although my role in the kitchen was more of an observational one I knew enough about how to use conventional utensils to see how the whole process could come together.
With that in mind, and having seen enough of African cooking (from a safe distance) I ventured over to Kesho Leo early Friday morning, potato peeler stashed safely in my back pocket – ready to cook.

I soon learnt that if was going to be an African chef, I needed to look like one.
With my obsession with matching clothes remarkably still intact 4 months in, I won’t pretend I didn’t have a moment of panic. And yet against all the odds I wound up with a white headscarf with matching blue and white Kanga (colourful material used for clothing). Small point to note – my body shape is significantly different to your average Tanzanian woman. I inherited the sort of genes that give me somewhat plate shaped rear and decidedly more prominent waist. So with the beautiful blue material wrapped sarong style around me ‘harry high-pants’ style I should have looked bootylicious. I just looked frumpy.
Nevertheless, with my master chef Eliza on site to direct, we got down to business.

Step 1: prepare beef. Holding on for dear life to a strip of slimy, fatty meat at one end Eliza pulled the other and sawed the flesh into chunks. It took a lot of willpower not to make all the appropriate gagging noises when it came to cracking bone that looked suspiciously like a spinal cord. I have never been more acutely aware that this was not beef lightly seared on a bed of herb mash. This was cow.

Step 2: onions. Diced onions to be precise. With no chopping board in site I thought I was being quite industrious using the lid of a water bucket. Before I got in trouble for scratching the bucket, with a little instruction from Aggie I was rediscovering the ancient art of finely dicing vegetables in my hand. Only 4 cuts (the other three were bovine spinal cord induced) and at least 12 perfectly diced onions later and it was decided that I was the expert at this skilful task – a self-proclaimed title.
Mama Afrika was born.

Step 3: Rice. Rice with rocks.12 kilos of rice that needs to be hand sorted to remove the offending but potentially very damaging to expensive dental work rocks. The first few minutes were an interesting challenge. I soon realised that the skilful art of flipping rice in a rounded woven plate thing (if there’s a fancy gastronomic term I don’t know it) is one I’m yet to finely tune. Where Aggie, Maswai and Eliza made a beautiful display of airborne rock-free rice sorting – I spent an hour hunched over, looking suspiciously like a mentally challenged psychopath searching for the secret to life in a half plate/half bowl of rice riddled with frustratingly small rocks. It wasn’t until Aggie pondered on the brilliance of a machine that could sort the rocks from the rice, if only such a thing existed, that I realised they weren’t giving me an ‘authentic African cooking experience’ by taking it back to basics. This was, quite simply a daily chore.

  Step 4: Given my superior talent for root vegetable preparation and obvious handicap in the sifting department - I moved on to garlic. Lots of and lots of garlic. Lots and lots of miniature garlic cloves with sticky, annoying skin that gets under your fingernails and burns like hell. I was regretting taking up precious pocket space with the potato peeler and dreaming of the garlic press I left at the volunteer village. That said, I did develop a finely tuned method that unfortunately saw me tending to the massive pile of garlic on my own.

While I was intently lost in mastering these various arts of preparation, the real cooks were expertly putting together the feast. Aggie was bitterly disappointed that I didn’t know how to make ‘African fire’. A fire I can make, one that burns at the perfect temperature consistently for several hours was a little beyond my level of expertise.

With the beef and onions sautéed, water boiled, rice added and garlic mixed through, we turned our attention to preparing the salad and a tastebud disintegrating chilli sauce. I did try, in vain, to introduce the potato peeler (despite the absence of potatoes) but instead reverted back to my now well-developed talent for freehand dicing.


By 1pm, 3 hours since our masterchef session began, almost 20kgs of mouth-watering pilau was ready. Heaped into buckets, our masterpiece was served to the 8 mamas, 19 kids, 8 volunteers, a dozen workers and a handful of Kesho Leo friends and family who, as with any Christmas party, had come together to celebrate the year that was.

So this year, as my friends got dressed up, ate gourmet lunches, drank numerous glasses of champagne and posted photos on facebook of their fancy Christmas parties – I put on my Kanga, abandoned my utensils and rediscovered the art of doing things the basic way. Things may have changed – but I’m not complaining.