Sokoni

Before the car calamity, Jamila and I had been to the market. I was pretty well stocked with fruit, having asked Jeroam to buy me the usual- mango pineapple,papaya, and bananas, and also some limes,but lemons if he couldn't find any. The GOM who usually sends him to do this, had told me there seemed to be a problem on the citrus front. Not any more there isn't:I now have enough of both to stock a lemonade factory.
However we needed vegetables, so we were off to the market. Around this area over the last year, there has been a total clearout of roadside vendors. Beside our old house on Heile Selassie (now the residence of the Rwandan Ambassador), all the shops on both sides of the road have gone, including the Corner Bar. The GOM says they were just bulldozed. The same is true on the road to Mwenge and in other parts of the city as well, I understand.
Jamila totally approves: she says how much cleaner and greener the place looks without all the shops cluttering up the place. True enough, but still...I'm not so sure - I was thinking how you could get vegetables, cold drinks, padlocks, bread, LPG for the cooker,a dress made, the promise of a photocopier arriving "next week" from the Secretarial Bureau outside our gate, bootleg CDs and DVDs and, if you needed it, the company of the hardest drinking Wazungu and Tanzanians in Dar (including, I think, the BBC World rep) all within a few minutes walk, every day of the year including Christmas Day. There must have been hundreds of people getting a living just from that short stretch of road.
OK, so they were all on the land without any title, but not all the stores were wooden shacks, well, actually, yes they were. That is Jamila's argument: that now they are gone, people will set up in purpose built places, that will be smart and clean. I think that is optimistic, the beauty of the opportunistic traders is that people needed very little capital to set up their businesses, and they just don't have the wherewithal to set up in a place where they will have to pay rent electricity etc before they sell a single thing
I never did work out why nobody ever set up shop outside our old place - I know there were all these big metal signs saying the equivalent of Trespassers will be prosecuted, but I can't believe that put people off. But all we ever had was the odd cow or some goats tethered for a day or so for grazing.
A vaccuum has to be filled, so there is now along the same stretch the equivalent of an open air garden centre -hundreds of plants with soilballs in plastic bags.
Anyway, all that is readily available locally for fruit and veg are some small kiosks, so off to market we went.
The market we went to is deceptive - it looks like a single row of stalls on the road side, but as you push through the mitumbo stall (secondhand clothes - the largest single export of the EU to Tanzania) there are loads of stalls behind. I could have taken home a live chicken and some really rank fried fish and other meat I couldn't possibly identify, but..
Jamila tried to convince me of the incomparable taste of cassava leaves, but we got a bit stuck on the cooking techniques. I got the bit about pounding them, but after that it became a bit like a Tanzanian version of the Bob Newhart Walter Raleigh sketch. Bob who? -oh, you have to be over 50. It still is one of the all time great comedy monologues :"Are you saying "snuff," Walt? What's snuff? You take a pinch of tobacco and you shove it up your nose! And it makes you sneeze, huh. I imagine it would, Walt, yeah. It has some other uses, though. You can chew it? Or put it in a pipe. Or you can shred it up and put it on a piece of paper, and roll it up - don't tell me, Walt, don't tell me- you stick in your ear, right Walt? Oh, between your lips! Then what do you do to it? You set fire to it! Then what do you do, Walt? You inhale the smoke! Walt, we've been a little worried about you...you're gonna have a tough time getting people to stick burning leaves in their mouth...." That was me. However it is sorted as we're having a Tz dinner - with me being the maid of all work, so I'll tell you what they taste like soon.
I got mchicha - spinach - and later the GOM was really grumpy about that, because he has only had it in restaurants where it is really bitter and stringy; I wanted to do it in coconut milk but the nuts are young at the moment so I couldn't. I knew about the incessant rinsing but was surprised at how many changes of water were needed, and I could have done with a child or two to strip it for me, but when I cooked it,it was fine and he even admitted it!
Virtually everything is priced singly and sold in threes. So a tomato would be eg 100shillings(4p)and then you count how many groups of three you want and then, usually, another is put in as a present. It was OK at first as I wasn't buying, but as soon as I did, the mzungu effect happened and Jumila's costs went up - eg when we went back to the stall for the cassava leaves they had doubled in price. She was also offered a papaya at 800 shillings, when she said the current price was about 400. What I couldn't get was Viazi Ulaya (European potatoes) although there were of course plenty of viazi vitumu (Sweet potatoes) which I can't stand, although the GOM is partial to them. I think cassava root is viazi vikubwa -big potatoes, and this is also what politicians get called.
Baskets full, we headed into car hell!