Trevor Noah said somewhere that the Britons must have run away from their overcast plot because they were tired of having to eat potatoes all the damn time.
One of the most illustrious, John Hanning Speke himself, the first white man to set his eyes on Nam Lolwe even managed to brave malaria just to avoid the malaise endless rain and potato soup inflicted on his soul.
Imagine my consternation when I learnt he put his snotty nose up and called the international meal of his hosts in Tanganyika, the venerable Ugali, "paste". I was shocked! Apart from the insults he landed on my ancestors' peers by calling them savages1, he had the temerity to call Ugali paste.
Ugali, of all meals, the most unpretentious carbohydrate that ever graced the plate and palate of a human being anywhere on this here planet, called paste (at this stage, I am just copy-pasting).
Ugali, whether made of maize, millet, sorghum, cassava or a mixture of any of the above ingredients in combination with any other ingredients according to the taste of the eaters, does not claim to have an exceptional, out-of-the-world flavour that will make you immediately sit up like the first time you tasted hot chillis; instead, when well-cooked, its flavours gently caress your mouth and make your eyes go wide with surprise because it promises that, whatever you eat, you are going to have a good time eating it.
And it keeps that promise.
Some people make it soft while others make it hard, and the name paste may make you think it is made the same as mashed potatoes, but you cannot call it 'mash' because its ingredients must be pulverised well in advance for its existence to be possible and its cooking process cannot be anything less than baking despite the absence of an oven due to its open nature. And now, for something I have been wondering about: what do you call a process in which high heat is applied to a food cooked in a open pot and mashed violently until it becomes ready? I call it baking.
Ugali is easy to cook badly, and anyone with a sufficiently advanced sense of taste will notice when you do a bad job because, now, it is not just the Ugali you have ruined - you have just made the entire meal worse for everyone.
Ugali's merit lies not in its flavour profile, but in the way it amplifies the flavours of its companions and steps out of the way, itself cheering on the stews and accompaniments you choose like Kenyans on Twitter cheering the lynching of an unfortunate idiot, providing a polite background sound to your chosen accompaniment - tea, ripe plantain bananas, sukuma wiki, spinach, sukuma matumbo, sagaa, managu, beef, mutton and veal stews, pork, fish, soup, potatoes, beans, green grams, avocadoes, mutura, even salt. It is a meal with many friends and few enemies - except John Hanning Speke. But he is dead now, and Ugali is chugging along just fine.
After long, hard thinking about Speke's gripe, I realise that he may have actually met one of those communities whose members are poor in the art of making proper Ugali but I cannot apologise on their behalf because: