Chapati Movement by Eddy Ashioya

 The art of food is like lovemaking. The better it is, the more guilty you feel once you are finished. I don’t know much about food—which should not imply that I am the Rosetta stone of knowledge on lovemaking—but there’s no need to tell the devil to go to hell.

Of course in the old literary traditions, the devil always gets the best part; and like wasps around treacle, I have discovered that chapo ndengu is God’s cheat meal. It is what God eats when He wants to reward himself for being God.

There are two kinds of people—chapo ndengu and chapo ndondo. My father loved chapo ndondo but my mother hated cooking it—the mandondo not the chapo—and you could taste it, a meal not even worthy for the Philistines. Like most teenagers—stoned and rapacious—I grew up making the connection between food and love, and nothing wrapped me in love more than chapo ndengu. You might forgive me a touch of deja vu, but with every bite, the memories keep flooding back; of watching Robin Hood on Sundays after church, of my first crush Elizabeth and her crooked teeth, of Bruno, the estate dog and my personal bodyguard. Those days, you wouldn’t play so far away from the house, all brotherhood was suspended and friendships forged through kalongolongo, forgotten. Mzae would call you once, and then once more. “Eddy, shauri yako!” was your final klaxon call before the rupture.

In my heydays I lived in Pipeline with its pygmy-style population of Kamba men and slender light skinned girls with stomachs like chopping boards and lips dipped in blood and skin taut as processed shea butter—girls who look like they could have just walked out of a romance novel. They say you will find chapati there that you will not find anywhere else in the world. The key is to eat the Kshs 10 ($0.074) chapatis from Pipeline hot, and not to ask any questions, like is that transformer oil or is he wiping sweat off his brow with the same hands that he is kneading with? These are facts that no Kenyan can pretend not to know.

Like Jesus getting sacrificed between two thieves, the best way to have chapo ndengu is two chapatis and one plate of ndengu. Why two? Because one chapati is too little, and more than two is just, well, gluttony—one of the Messiah’s seven deadly vices. Full marks if there is one mountain waru dancing suggestively in the ndengu soup with firifiri kwa umbali, adding silk to chapati’s steel.

Unlike in Uganda, whose women are still sent to grow love handles and whom you can witness in their blasphemous derrière which shimmer—or in Gen Z terms, ‘recoil’—Kenya’s food is dry and pretty much tasteless. The skinny, flat tummy fore headed starving goddesses of Kenya would not draw a reluctant glance from a Baganda man, or so they say.

The real undercurrents though, the things left unsaid, the undrawn parallels, are related to chapati’s checkered past: it has always been a clandestine meal, pardon the pun—when chapati could travel, through hands, up to 300km a night in what was called the Chapati Movement of 1857. Some said that these chapatis had secret codes which were used to convey messages and confidential information. Some say that the Chapati Movement was just a way to mobilize the people and unite them to revolt against the Britishers.

Now, when I make chapos and ndengu, mostly for my clandes, I sneer at those who ask for chapo ndondo, as if their mother’s never taught them that food in the mouth is not yet in the belly, as if they don’t know that when it comes to mandondo, it is bad manners, at least in public, to ask for beans, especially when it is rosecoco.

#chinedutales