I have eaten ugali, East Africa’s signature dish, in a fisherman’s hut on the shoreline of Lake Victoria. I’ve forgotten the conversation but, hungry as I was at the time, I still recall how much I appreciated the starch.
I have eaten it in Kibera, Nairobi’s sprawling slum, and noticed residents’ distrust of me slowly shrink as my healthy serving did the same.
I have shared it with herdsmen while sitting on wooden stools in the bush, and with refugees, businesspeople and politicians, in settings simple and grand.
If you come to East Africa and avoid ugali, you may very well have a wonderful visit. But it will not be an authentic one.
Ugali is to that part of the world what rice is to Asia. Not trying it would be as unfathomable as visiting Mexico without consuming tortillas, or forgoing pad thai in Thailand or arepas in Venezuela. Really “getting” a place means swallowing its delicacies.
To consume ugali, which is a cornmeal concoction not unlike a very thick pile of mashed potatoes, you scoop up a small clump with your fingers and manipulate it before masticating it. There is a right way and a wrong way to consume what might be called Africa’s polenta.
First, pick it up with the right hand. Doing otherwise is like screaming aloud, “I am a mzungu,” or foreigner, in Swahili. Roll it up into a ball as you might a wad of silly putty and stick your thumb into the center to create a deep gully. Then, and here’s the best part, use this mass of maize as a mini-shovel to scoop up the other food you have around. That might include nyama choma, which is grilled meat, and sukuma wiki, which is the Kenyan version of greens.
I will not argue here that ugali is the grandest of comestibles. But it is filling, fresh and goes with everything. And it can also be found virtually everywhere, sometimes going by a variety of other regional names: sembe, ngima, kuon, obokima, posho, to name just a few.
I ate ugali on a semiregular basis during my five years as the Nairobi bureau chief of The New York Times. A recent three-week vacation there, after nine years away, brought back memories galore and, on more than one occasion, steaming mounds of ugali. Actress Lupita Nyong’o, whom I knew when she was still a student in Kenya and not yet a star, recently confided during a trip back home that one of the things she misses most about her new red-carpet life is that most unglamorous of foods: ugali.
I highly doubt that most Western travelers to East Africa will whip up ugali in their own home kitchens, but that is largely beside the point. If you avoid ugali while on your African safari, it means that you did not escape the tourist bubble. It means you never shared a true East African meal with a local. It means your experience was seriously lacking — as bland, one might say, as the cornmeal you skipped.
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