IMMORAL MAIZE

Hugh Russell unveils the recipe for nshima,

and the cause of Zambia's impending famine

Lusaka UNLESS you're suffering a severe attack of compassion-fatigue, you'll know that famine is with us again, and this time it's happening right here on my doorstep, in southern Africa. Food stocks officially ran out in Zambia last Thursday, much to the admitted surprise of our vice-president, the Honourable Enoch Kavindele, who said rather plaintively that the government had thought the stocks would last a little longer, but they hadn't. Shame.

Help is at hand. The United States and Canada have offered Zambia several zillion tons of food for free. But wait just one cassava-picking minute — there's a snag. Yes, they're offering us maize. Yes, that's what we need. But . . . it's genetically modified maize!

Ha! Oh no, you don't, Uncle Sammy! Some of our politicians are sharp enough to realise that GM food is, of course, part of a cunning neocolonialist plot to destabilise decent African countries by weakening our physical condition, robbing us of our manhood and making the potholes in the road even deeper and more numerous.

Our redoubtable President, Levy Mwanawasa, has refused to allow this maize to be distributed to the starving until he can be sure that it's safe. No doubt he's seen the video footage of protests against GM food in the UK. Two or three hundred muzungus in green anoraks trampling over fields in Norfolk can't be wrong, can they?

Instead he's called a conference to debate the issue. This conference is taking place as I write, in our splendid Mulungushi International Conference Centre, where delegates will undoubtedly be provided with mid-morning coffee and biccies, lunch, midafternoon tea and biccies, and din-dins.

While the conference confers, children in the drought-stricken villages of the worst-hit regions will sit down to meals of rats, roots and other rubbish, and shortly you can confidently expect to see television pictures of Zambian kiddies with those tell-tale swollen bellies.

The country needs maize. and it needs it badly. Without maize there can be no mealie meal, and without mealie meal there can be no 'nshima' — our national dish. Cue, once again, vice-president Enoch Kavindele.

I'm rather fond of Enoch. He cuts an endearing figure as he blunders around the Lusaka political arena, one step ahead of his harassed press officer, spraying misguided and ill-chosen remarks like an African John Prescott. This time he came up with a vintage Enochism. Zambians, he announced, should diversify their diet. They should eat potatoes or rice or pasta instead of nshima.

That might sound reasonable to European ears. To appreciate just how ludicrously unreal a suggestion it is, you need to understand the place of nshima in our society and culture, The truth is, if you sit a hungry Zambian down in front of smoked trout, steak au poivre, French fries, creme caramel and a decent Stilton, he may eat it. But afterwards he will look up and say, 'Fine. Now, where's the nshima?'

To a Zambian, nshima means more than his daily bread, more even than the bread of heaven. It means more than a full rice bowl does to a Chinese peasant. It means more than a sack of spuds does to Paddy O'Gob from Ballykisselbow. Nshima to a Zambian means everything. It is food. It is medicine. It is comfort and security. It is a remedy for loneliness, it is a celebration of family life, it is a refuge in time of trouble, it is a hangover cure. It is literally the stuff of life. In Zambia we eat nshima for breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, and as a midnight snack. Our idea of a change from nshima is more nshima. Our idea of a varied diet is nshima on two different plates.

What is it? To make nshima, you take cobs of maize, strip the kernels from the cobs and grind them into a fine whitish powder, known as mealie meal. Then you cook it in boiling water, and it is in the cooking that the mystique of nshima begins. Actually, all the nshima cook does is boil the stuff. But she — note, always `she'; this is Africa, man!

— she stirs it with a special stick. An nshima stick. All right, it's actually only a long wooden spoon — long, because as nshima comes to the boil it spits at you — but it's a special stick, nonetheless. Eventually the mixture thickens and is scooped out on to a large plate, where it lies in thick, glutinous heaps, looking for all the world like mashed potato.

Only the very hungry eat it on its own. Otherwise it is always eaten with something else; that something else being known as 'relish'. If you're well off, your relish might be meat with gravy. If not, perhaps kapenta — tiny dried fish with a strangely pungent smell. In the worst-case scenario — that is, if you are one of the 85 per cent of Zambians who live in extreme poverty — your relish will be a few edible leaves, plucked from the garden or the bush, and cooked up with onion and tomato.

But the important thing is the nshima. And the next important thing is how you eat the stuff. Yes. you've guessed. Those who live hand-to-mouth eat hand-to-mouth. You use your fingers. The skilled Zambian nshima-eater — and there is no such thing as an unskilled Zambian nshima-eater — takes a small portion of nshima, rolls it deftly into a ball in the palm of his hand, dunks it into whatever relish is going and pops it delicately into his mouth. If a naive European takes a knife and fork to it, every Zambian within a hundred yards will pee himself laughing. I know. I was that European.

And what does it taste like, after all this? Well, there you have me. To my palate ... nothing. Nothing I can put my finger, or fingers, on. Nshima is so bland, so `pappy', so hopelessly uninteresting, so eternally boring that I find I lose my appetite just thinking about it. But we need it. We've got to have it. It's what we eat. So why, you may be forgiven for asking, don't we grow enough of it?

Drought, says the government. Bollocks, say the critics. They point out that Zambia is a country riddled with rivers, studded with gushing boreholes. The government apparently reckons on two crops of maize a year. My gardener, who should obviously be the Zambian minister of agriculture, produces three with ease. This year's third crop is currently as high as — oh, as an elephant's eye. (Or would be, if we had an elephant to measure against it, but we ate most of our elephants years ago, too. With nshima, of course.) Common sense tells us that all it would take for Zambia to be self-sufficient in its favourite food is a little forward planning — the same forward planning that would have told vice-president Enoch that the country was running out of food stocks long before last Thursday. But forward planning, like mealie meal, we don't have. And soon you'll see the pictures of the kids in the villages, lying in the dust, too weak to flick the flies from their faces.

It's not only genetically modified maize our country needs. It's some genetically modified politicians.