NEWSLETTER 2007

Dear friends,

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature. Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” Helen Keller

As Zimbabwe remains stuck in an unrelenting tailspin, I also have come to the inevitable fight or flight crossroads. I am pleased to report that I have opted to fight. So I am here in Zimbabwe to stay, to the bitter end. More on that some other day.

On a recent trip abroad I came across this billboard
in Musina, a South African town near the border with Zimbabwe. It was just as well I saw it, because without it I probably would have patronized the guys in South Africa. I am now convinced that as a general rule there is better news coverage of Zimbabwe abroad than at home. So regardless of where you are, you are likely to have access to at least the same level of Zimbabwe news as me. I will therefore spare you the boredom of a detailed general review. I will concentrate on personal experiences instead. If after reading this letter you are still awake enough to handle more anecdotes, please see below.

In a nutshell, life in Zimbabwe today is like camping. You have to organize all your amenities yourself. Not just the electricity and water but all the way down to rearing your own chickens! Little wonder then that my friends Sandra and Trevor who are camping buffs appear to be coping better than most.

Inefficiency in each sector has blighted other sectors in turn until the whole system got hopelessly snarled up. It now takes all day to get nowhere. The central bank printers for example have failed to issue appropriate money denominations commensurate with hyperinflation. So banks have run out of cash. Hapless depositors are literally camping outside the banks and by empty ATMs in the hope of accessing their money, for what it’s worth. This has had knock on effects on business in general which already had enough problems to begin with. Those who have suffered the bank queues will probably never bank their cash again if they can help it. So the financial services sector, which has proved to be resilient thus far, may be facing its worst test to date.

Under-nourished people are no longer confined to remote areas. Harare and other big cities now have their share of them. I am not too surprised though. It now takes enough effort to feed my one mouth. I particularly feel sorry for the pregnant ladies I see who clearly haven’t got enough sustenance for themselves, never mind for their babies!

When I traveled abroad a few weeks ago three households gave me independent lists of groceries they were wanting me to bring back for them. I discovered an interesting motif running through the three lists. They all included common table salt! I was both surprised and saddened by this. The shortage situation is now so ridiculous it continues to surprise even us who live here!

Equally surprising are signs that there could be more food in Darfur than in Zimbabwe. A friend Ken traveling from the Sudan used his precious baggage allowance to bring back edible oils and flour. This is what he had to say,” I was in Sudan recently and must be one of the few people to fly out of Sudan with things like oil, flour, sugar, rice, yeast etc for use back home. Most people are trying to get stuff into Sudan but I was taking it to Zim!”

Sitting in a dentist's waiting room I overheard two ladies chatting. One said, "Kirisimasi ino ndiri kuizeza. Kumba kwangu hakuna chiriko. I hope no one comes to visit me." (I am dreading this Christmas. I've got nothing at home. I hope no one comes to visit me).

If symptoms persist we may well witness a regression of aesthetic norms. Before industrialization food supplies were seasonal and erratic. Since a season is shorter than a pregnancy term, a woman’s chances of successfully carrying a pregnancy to full term depended on the size of energy reserves (fat) that she had to begin with. So, overweight ladies were popular. If the current shortage trend persists, we may eventually witness a resurgence of bygone aesthetic values.

Talking of vital statistics, I remember browsing around the library in my student days and stumbling upon a certain surgery journal. It carried an article on breast reduction surgery. I wondered why anyone would want to do that! This year I found out. On the morning of 13 May 2007 I went to the South African Embassy in Harare to collect my passport. I was served by a lady at counter number 3. While she sat there I think I noticed that she had an impressive cleavage, but let it ride. It was only when she stood up to fetch my passport from the back office that I realized the full extent of her gifting. She is easily the most well-endowed woman I have ever seen! She looked like she could easily keel over. Yet she strolled to the back office with surprisingly great ease. They say, “Nzou hairemerwe nenyanga dzayo.” (An elephant never feels the weight of its tusks). However, I could still see too much of a good thing there. She could do with that operation.

Not far from the South African Embassy I had a less interesting experience. On 9 October 2007 I went to the Diagnostic Imaging Centre for some investigations relating to a running injury. After the first X-ray the radiographer asked me to turn over and lie on my left side. As I did that, she went, “Ahhh Zesa yaenda!”(Oh no! We’ve just lost power). They had a generator but it could only support emergency lighting. The X-ray machines were too big for it. So I had to fiddle around for a few hours waiting for the power supply to be restored. In the end an exercise that should have taken only fifteen minutes cost me a whole morning.

Less than a month later I had a similar misfortune, this time at the dentist. He was preparing to re-do my old filling. Only after injecting anaesthetic he had to abort the operation due to power supply problems. Fortunately he had not drilled yet. So the procedure was rescheduled for another day. The moral of these stories is that do not have open heart surgery in Zimbabwe these days.

If I remember well I think we also had a power cut while I wrote one of my exams.
The demands of my mathematics studies continue to intensify. One of the modules I took this year was Calculus in Higher Dimensions. For the first time in my life I had to hammer stuff in so hard that I once ended up with a headache. It is quite possible that I have risen to my level of incompetence! Throughout my life, visualizing things in three dimensions has been a breeze. At Fletcher High School I was privileged to have the late Victor Chiwome for a classmate and friend. Victor was so bright that some authorities considered him to be superhuman. Fletcher High School traditionally took in the cream from schools across Zimbabwe. That made Victor le crème de le crème. I have yet to meet anyone else as bright. For all his intelligence, there was one thing I could do better than him. That was visualizing geometric interpretations of mathematical concepts. That is being tested now! Dealing in three dimensions is one thing, but when the calculus transcends four dimensions and more, it tends to stretch the imagination a bit. I suspect there could be convergence of calculus and surrealism waiting to be discovered out there.

Fletcher High School turned fifty this year. In a moment of weakness I volunteered to join the Golden Jubilee Celebrations steering committee. It was like running a marathon. By the time we finished, I was worn out, hot and possibly smelt bad but exhilarated. If you wish to read my editorial contribution to The Sunday Mail supplement published on 23 September 2007 as part of the Fletcher High School Golden Jubilee celebrations please see below.

I stepped down from a couple of voluntary commitments. After twelve years on the sound team at the church I stepped down in July. I felt I no longer had any new sound advice to give. A month earlier I had stepped down from the board of Feba Radio Zimbabwe (after ten years’ service) as well as the International Board of Feba Radio (after six years service) .

Much of my international travel related to Feba International Board work. So I should be traveling a lot less from now.

Talking of travel, British Airways has finally given up on Zimbabwe. They pulled out on 31 October 2007. All other European airlines had long since gone but for a while it looked like BA were going to stick it out indefinitely.

This is bad news for me personally because British Airways is the second most special airline to me after Singapore Airlines (see appendix below for explanation). I have probably done more air miles on British Airways than on any other airline. Also my first ever flight to London in the spring of 1978 was on British Airways. I subsequently dallied with Swiss Air as well as South African Airways but British Airways remains my senior wife for the London route.

The British Airways day flight from Harare to London was particularly convenient.
I struggle to sleep well on aeroplanes, so day flights are a real blessing. The only time I have ever slept well on a flight was when I was upgraded to a class with flat beds (also on BA). No matter how well the seats recline, I can never sleep well as long as I am not fully horizontal. I still don’t know the exact physiological basis of this. I suspect that for as long as the heart has to pump blood upwards, profound rest is not possible. If this is correct then it must be great fun sleeping on weightless spacecraft.

What I certainly won’t miss is the standard of catering on that British Airways Harare- London day flight. It was the second worst on any airline I have ever flown. The whole idea of brunch is my pet hate in the best of times, let alone when it is proffered as the only meal on a 10 hour flight!

I had three experiences of trauma this year, two physical and the other psychological.

The first case of physical trauma was brunch on the Harare-to-London British Airways day flight.

The symptom of the second physical trauma was a sciatica. Initially I put it down to a running injury but the more I think about it the more I am convinced that it was due to lifting heavy zvigubhus(Jerry cans). Whether it is diesel or water, I usually get help where I load them. However when I get home I am on my own. Many times I have whipped a 55litre container out of the car by myself. I am undergoing re-habilitation therapy now and I expect to be running again sometime in the New Year.

On the morning of 15 Jan 2007 I discovered , to my horror, the first undeniable grey hair on my head. I was devastated. It was downhill for me now. I sought consolation from my brother but all he could say was, “What it means is that you have been in free fall all along and you are just about to hit the ground.” For a while, I had good reason to intensify my search for a wife. However, not long after that food shortages started to really bite ( no pun intended). Now I can barely feed myself. So a wife is again out of the question until I sort out my food security.
The silver lining ( no pun intended) is that I should be wise now, at last. A friend(?) once teased me saying, “So when does the wisdom kick in then?!”

Age is not always a bad thing. The Gwatamatic turned ten this year and that has certainly helped its credibility. If you wish to read more about it, please see below.
Here’s wishing you a good Christmas and New Year. Please don’t forget to keep Christ in Christmas. These days I seem to receive far too many greeting cards that are palpably reluctant to acknowledge Christmas. They are ever so ready to dwell on the festive aspect while at the same time denying the very basis of the festivities. I think that is ludicrous. A lady at the church recently posed an interesting question: CHRISTMAS/ SACRED; CHRIST/ MASSACRED. Where do you draw the line? Thanks for that Colleen.

Best wishes,
Will.

APPENDIX
Extract from my newsletter of the year 2004 explaining how British Airways was relegated.
Airline review
Prior to this year British Airways was the best airline I had ever flown. After flying Singapore Airlines, I am afraid to say British Airways has now been relegated to a mediocre score in my book. It was like meeting a better woman after years of mistaken belief that your girlfriend was the best. Singapore Airlines is outstanding on both long haul and regional flights. The average age of their fleet is lower than most and their in-flight entertainment is free of padding. Everything on offer is worthwhile. They are clearly not niggardly. I did not sleep a wink for the entire flight from Johannesburg to Singapore because there was so much to do. I had never achieved this on any other long haul airline. I particularly enjoyed the documentaries channel. I think I watched all the documentaries and some of them more than once. One of them even changed my life. I am now taking omega 3 fatty acid capsules everyday since I watched the documentary.

On the Singapore to Bali leg I was privileged to fly on a brand new aircraft for the first time in my life. Singapore Airlines had recently acquired the exclusive new “Leadership” Airbus which was earmarked to ply between Singapore and Los Angeles on the proposed 18 hour non-stop flights (the longest scheduled non-stop civilian flights ever). They were “running in” the aircraft in the Bali route before the direct Los Angeles flights scheduled to start two weeks later. The plane practically has no economy class, which is great news for those with long legs! I guess if passengers are going to be confined to the cabin for 18 hours, steerage becomes inappropriate. There are even coffee bars on board!

If Singapore Airlines is the best airline I have ever flown, Air India has got to be the worst. I flew Air India for two hours from Bombay to New Delhi and it felt like eternity. There were squadrons of mosquitoes buzzing in the immigration hall as well as on board. The refreshments were a pitiful sight and they had sluggish old men for cabin staff. The plane was so run down it was hard to believe it was a Boeing 747-400. It was even harder to believe it could get airborne as it rattled down the runway. So it was an amusing surprise when it did take off! The Air India Boeing 747-400 is the ultimate gwaimani(beast of burden). It is functional but totally devoid of style, aesthetics and respect. You can spit on the floor without feeling guilty and I think some passengers did. On the way back to Bombay I flew Jet Airways which was like a breath of fresh air. The two airlines are as different as chalk to cheese. Jet Airways is full of light and air, clean and vibrant with even more vibrant young pretty hostesses.

Fletcher High School Supplement Editorial

Editorial contribution to The Sunday Mail supplement published on 23 September 2007 on the occasion of the Fletcher High School Golden Jubilee celebrations.
FLETCHER HIGH SCHOOL GOLDEN JUBILEE
SCHOOL DESIGN PHILOSOPHY
Fletcher High School may be only fifty years old but its heritage has origins which trace back more than five hundred years. It is part of a lineage that has its roots in medieval times. The school was modeled on the venerable English grammar school design. To put our school’s pedigree in context, this article reviews the origins and rise of grammar schools in general.
Grammar schools trace their origins back to before the fifteenth century, as schools in which classics (i.e. Latin and Greek) were emphasized as university preparatory subjects. In medieval times, the importance of Latin in government and religion meant there was a strong demand to learn the language. Schools were set up to teach the basis of Latin grammar, calling themselves ‘grammar schools’. Later the curriculum was considerably broadened to include other languages, such as Greek, Hebrew, English and European languages, as well as the natural sciences, mathematics, history, geography and other subjects. Needless to say the ancient languages are no longer an important component of the curriculum in grammar schools today.
A number of agendas fortuitously converged to give the rise of grammar schools impetus. One such agenda was religious. Before grammar schools, monasteries were probably the only respectable establishment for education. In order to remedy this and strengthen establishment of the Protestant movement, Queen Elizabeth I founded several grammar schools. Also some new schools were founded with the proceeds of the dissolution of the monasteries by King Henry VIII.
In the absence of civic authorities, grammar schools were established as acts of charity, either by private benefactors or corporate bodies such as guilds. The revolution in British civic government that took place in the late 19th century created a new breed of grammar schools. It became markedly easier to set up a school. At the same time, there was a great emphasis on the importance of self-improvement, and parents keen for their children to receive a decent education took a lead in organizing the creation of new schools. Many took the title ‘grammar school’ for historical reasons. Grammar schools thus emerged as one part of the highly varied British education system before 1944. Newer schools tended to emulate the older grammar schools, copying their curriculum, ethos, ambitions as well as gowned teachers and cane-wielding prefects. When I was at Fletcher in the seventies, vestiges of this were still evident. The teachers did not don gowns but the principal did. The prefects had modernized, they were now wielding electric cables!

Following the Education Act 1944 the Tripartite System was established. This placed the grammar school as the place of education for the academically gifted. Other children attended technical schools or secondary modern schools. The system had its detractors. Critics condemned it as being elitist and defenders claimed that grammar schools allow pupils to obtain a good education through merit rather than through family income.
Today in Britain a grammar school is one with a strong academic reputation. Grammar schools often perform well in league tables, and there is a high level of competition for places in them. That sounds reminiscent of Fletcher High School.
Right from the outset, Fletcher was a grammar school to the bone. The first principal, Mr D Davies together with his wife authored English grammar textbooks. They valued the study of English grammar no less than their counterparts five hundred years earlier valued the study of Latin grammar. Apparently Mr Davies required every boy in the school to read at least one English literature library book per week. And he even checked on them by way of review interviews!
It is good to note that Fletcher has managed to keep up grammar school performance standards in spite of economic constraints obtaining these days. Long live Fletcher!
William Gwata.

Gwatamatic 10th Anniversary

The first commercial gwatamatic rig had its maiden run on 13 December 1997. This week we celebrate the tenth anniversary of that momentous occasion.


EXTRACTS FROM PRESS RELEASE ON THE OCCASION OF THE TENTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE GWATAMATIC


The gwatamatic 2000 is a revolutionary automatic machine that I invented in 1997 for cooking large quantities of sadza to a professional standard consistently. Sadza is the maize-based staple food of Central, East and Southern Africa, and is also known as isitshwala, ugali, pap, nsima, and kenke.

THE ROAD TO THE GWATAMATIC

In the words of the late Paul Webb, arguably the most humorous Zimbabwean Toastmaster of all time, if you look around the room where you are everything you see started off as an idea in a human mind somewhere. If it were not for ideas, we would all be standing in virgin African bush with no clothes on!

Likewise, the gwatamatic started as an idea. That was in the summer of 1985. I was a student at the University of Surrey, UK on professional training attachment at the Frimley Park Hospital laboratory in Camberley. At university we were trained in a manual chemistry laboratory where we fiddled around with test tubes a lot. In contrast, at the hospital laboratory there was no test tube in sight. All the samples were loaded into automated analysers which worked away by themselves and ultimately printed the results. Apart from labour saving, the automated analyser machines (particularly the Roche Cobas Bio) were impressive in another way, namely reproducibility. For example if we measured the calcium level of one sample repeatedly, the machine gave the same result consistently for as long as the sample had not deteriorated.

Reproducibility was very important to a student bent on passing exams. So I delved deeper to investigate the basis of such impressive reproducibility. The secret turned out to be electronic discipline. The instructions which ran the machine were stored in its computer memory. So the process always ran exactly the same each time regardless of who pressed the start button.

At that time I was already aware that cooking is a form of chemistry. Moreover reproducibility is a problem in cookery too. The quality of sadza in particular often varies with the mood of the cook.

Every neighborhood has at least some outstanding cook. Yet all those neighborhoods are also bound to have some cooks using exactly the same materials who are in trouble with their husbands every night over the quality of meals. So I embarked on a mission to bring electronic discipline to the kitchen in order to save marriages. If the recipe followed by the ace cook could be reduced to digital code and made available to others, then there could be hope for mankind.

As they say, “Mwana anofanira kurerwa namai vake.” So I felt a responsibility to implement this idea. However I was aware that many businesses fail due to poor financial management. As a pre-emptive move, I joined a firm of accountants and enrolled for an accountancy degree by distance education. After graduation I stayed on in accountancy for another six years. The money was good and I was comfortable. My time in accountancy at National Foods Limited represents some of the best years of my working life. For a while there was a real danger of staying on in the transit lounge and forgetting about the destination. Then in the mid-nineties the finance director retired and was replaced by a pharaoh that knew not Joseph. That is when my problems started. The silver lining was that my insecurity gave much impetus to the development of the gwatamatic prototype. To cut a long story short, the new pharaoh effectively drove me out of formal employment. Then I proceeded to go and cook sadza full time.

I started spending significant time and money on the gwatamatic prototype in 1996.
In July 1997 the first pot of sadza came out. After patenting the apparatus, I resigned from National Foods Limited in October 1997. The first commercial gwatamatic rig was installed in the National Foods Stirling Road canteen and had a successful maiden run on 13 December 1997.

BRINGING SADZA NEARER TO THE CONSUMER

A hundred years ago in Europe, housewives used to bake bread for their families day in day out. That was the way to do things in those days. Then one day bakeries came in with the capacity to make bread faster, cheaper and better than most housewives. The rest is history.

Before the gwatamatic, sadza cooked in bulk had a bad reputation. “Sadza rebhodho,” was the utility contemptuous reference to it. There is very good reason for that. Sadza cooking is an arduous task. No matter how skilled a chef is, beyond ten litres the sadza starts to overpower the human biceps. Without thorough mixing, a chef’s skills are bound to come to naught. The gwatamatic solved this limitation with a two-horsepower impeller.
Today gwatamatic rigs are still largely restricted to institutional restaurants. The challenge is to bring the benefits of the gwatamatic to ordinary people who are not associated with institutions. To go back to the bread analogy, the benefits of bakery technology are brought into households through two main avenues: household bread making machines and sliced bread in a plastic bag. The former is largely a novelty while the latter is the more practical mass market route.

Accordingly, vacuum packed sadza in a plastic bag is now a technical reality. There is still some work to do on the promotion and distribution side before it can enter the realms of mainstream commercial reality.

The inconvenience and waste associated with home cooking should eventually become a thing of the past.



AMAZING MAIZE

Maize is now so ingrained in our culture that it is difficult to envisage as an exotic grain.

Origin
On the basis of archeological and ethnic evidence, the geographic point of origin of maize is generally conceded to be tropical Latin America. The most likely ancestor of maize is a Mexican grass called teosinte. Apart from mere morphological resemblance, teosinte can be crossed readily with maize to produce fertile progeny. It is also susceptible to common maize diseases such as corn rust.
Legend: 1. The teosinte spike ear has two rows of spikelets.
2. Early corn, as reconstructed from its oldest remains from Tehuacan, Mexico. It has four ranks of paired spikelets.
3. The modern ear of maize has many ranks of paired kernels, with the result that the number of rows on any cob is always even (check this next time you have a green mealie)

Dispersal
Maize was introduced to Europe by Middle Ages travelers such as Christopher Columbus.

There is documentary evidence that maize first appeared in Southern Africa as a Carribean-type brought in from Holland. Holland must have served only as a clearing point for the corn brought in from the New World. We can assume too that the Portuguese actively brought in other maize types.

Triumph
Ironically, maize owes much of its success to its plain taste. An overwhelming prerequisite for any successful staple is that it should be bland, e.g. potatoes, rice, cassava and, of course, maize. The stronger flavoured a food is the more quickly people will get tired of it.

The ultimate bland food is water, nobody ever gets tired of it. An infinite variety of drinks can be made simply by adding different flavourings to water. In the same way an unlimited variety of meals can be made simply by varying the relish one puts with the sadza.

Yellow maize is a less popular staple largely because the yellow pigment (carotene) has a characteristic flavour of its own, strong enough to come through most relish. Also its gluten content tends to be lower than white maizes, so yellow sadza tends to fall apart. In other words gluten is an essential natural binding agent in sadza.

Other virtues behind maize’s success are high yields, ease of storage and the fact that it is easily improved by mass selection. These converged to help maize displace the indigenous small grains.

Apart from the Americas and Africa maize has also been established as a basic food in South East Asia. It is also grown extensively in some parts of Southern Europe, particularly the Balkans. The United States of America, however, still produces more than half of the world’s total production.

Sundry Uses
In addition to sadza a whole myriad of other applications of maize has been developed. These include breakfast foods, snacks, custard powder, samp, imitation rice, tortillas, edible maize oils, brewers’ inputs, industrial starches and stockfeeds.

This article was originally researched and written by William Gwata for the Red Seal Review, the house magazine of National Foods Limited, Fourth Quarter 1992. It is reproduced here with permission.

THE CHEMISTRY OF SADZA COOKING

Maize meal
There are three primary grades of maize meal, namely super refined, roller meal and straight run. The prime difference among them is cellulose(bran) content. During the milling process leading to roller meal, if 100kg of raw maize is fed into the mill, only 85kg of roller meal come out. This is referred to as an 85% extraction rate. The 15% lost is recovered as a by-product called maize bran.
The extraction rate of milling processes leading to super refined meal is typically 65%.
With straight run maize meal, nothing is taken out so the extraction rate is 100%.


Surface chemistry
Dry maize meal is not readily wettable. In chemical terms, it is said to have a high interfacial free energy with water. This applies to both cold and hot water. That is why it forms lumps, in an attempt to minimize the interfacial area, and hence interfacial free energy consumption. For any matter, a spherical configuration offers the minimum surface area to volume ratio possible. That is why sadza lumps approximate to little spheres.

Hot water seals and stabilizes lumps making them difficult to disperse. In contrast, lumps in cold water are less stable and easy to disperse. That is why cold water is generally used to start the porridge (kupambira) in manual cooking scenarios. This is not necessary in the gwatamatic because it has a very powerful impeller that can disperse even sealed lumps.


Starch chemistry
Starch is a polymer of glucose. That means its building blocks are glucose molecules linked together. In nature starch usually arises as a blend of two basic forms namely amylose and amylopectin. Amylose is a long chain form in a spiral configuration like a spring. It contributes to sadza’s elastic texture. Amylopectin is a repeatedly branching form. It gives sadza its taste.


Key stages
The key stages of sadza cooking are first simmering (kukwata), final thickening and final simmering. The first simmering is the most critical stage for physical reasons. Sadza is a very bad conductor of heat. So heat is transferred into the cooking mixture mainly through convection currents. Convection currents are only possible when the mixture is still runny. Therefore most of the cooking happens at this stage. Thereafter the mixture is too thick for convection.
If this stage is compromised for any reason, you get ungelatinized (uncooked) sadza called mbodza which happens to be the cause of many divorces. Conversely, if you have got time, try holding it at this stage for an hour and you will see the amazing difference it makes.
Maize meal added in the final thickening stage gives the sadza its body. Like scones, sadza is typically made up of both thoroughly cooked and partially cooked starch.

Final simmering is nice to have but it is not essential for life. If you are under time pressure you can get away without it.

CONSUMERS’ QUOTATIONS


“Taidya dikita mhani pano apa!”


“Sadza rinodyika risina kana usavika iri.”


“My wife cannot match the gwatamatic standard of sadza. So she is in trouble with me now. I tell her, sadza harina kuibva iri!”

MANUAL SADZA RECIPE

For those who still do not have access to gwatamatic standard sadza, here is a manual recipe. We should stress that this is only nyama yeasina imbwa (consolation award) compared to the gwatamatic real thing.

To make 2 litres of sadza

REQUIREMENTS

Note: If you are not prepared to measure out ALL the ingredients carefully, this recipe will not be much help to you.

Equipment
Three-litre saucepan, mixing bowl, measuring jug, scale, mugoti(flat spoon).

Ingredients
2 litres water
500 grams maize meal
NO salt

PROCEDURES

1. Measure out 2 litres of cold water. Split it into two parts of 1.5 litres and 0.5 litres respectively.
2. Boil the 1.5 litres.
3. Weigh out 500 grams of maize meal. Split it into two portions of 200g and 300g respectively.
4. Mix the 200g maize meal and 0.5litre cold water in a mixing bowl to make a smooth paste.
5. Add the paste to 1.5 litres boiling water in a saucepan stirring briskly to prevent lumps forming. These exact measurements ensure that you get the correct porridge viscosity first time every time without any need to fiddle around.
6. Continue stirring until the mixture starts bubbling.
7. Reduce heat and simmer for at least 15 minutes. This is the most critical stage of the entire process. If you have to cut corners do it elsewhere and NOT here.*
8. Turn up the heat and add the remaining 300grams maize meal gradually with vigorous mixing.
9. Reduce heat and simmer for at least 30 minutes.
10. Mix again thoroughly immediately prior to serving.

NOTES

Can be served with curries, any other savoury relish or soured milk.

German proverb: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t control it!”

"In physical science the first essential step in the direction of learning any subject is to find principles of numerical reckoning and practicable methods for measuring some quality connected with it. I often say that when you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind; it may be the beginning of knowledge, but you have scarcely in your thoughts advanced to the state of Science, whatever the matter may be." Sir William Thompson (Lord Kelvin).

THE TRUTH – About Constraints Confronting Entrepreneurs

Contrary to popular belief, funding is hardly ever the biggest barrier that entrepreneurs have to surmount.

If a business idea is weak, no amount of funding can redeem it. Conversely if a business idea is good, its strength could help attract funding. Quality of the business idea is where it’s at. If you came up with a cure for AIDS do you think you would struggle to raise capital to commercialize it?

So if you are struggling to raise capital for your business idea, resist the temptation to blame external factors. Rather your first port of call should be honest introspection. Courting corporate finance partners is very much like courtship in the romantic sense. If you find you are not having any luck, do not blame the ladies. The gwatamatic business model required some significant internal refinement before it became sellable. It is possible to hone your business idea and still not have much success. In such a case communication may be the limiting factor. One powerful way to communicate an idea is to build a functional prototype. It worked for the gwatamatic.

Funding does not even come in second place on the league of constraints. The second most formidable barrier that would-be entrepreneurs often have to face is discouragement. Without enough fortitude on the part of the entrepreneur, discouragement could scupper an otherwise viable project. On the road to the gwatamatic, some seasoned engineers told me it could not be done!

Sure, funding remains a significant constraint in any project. However it is hardly ever the main constraint. It is more often a utility scapegoat where weaknesses actually lie elsewhere in the project.

THE FUTURE

The road to the gwatamatic was like an expedition up to a summit. Reaching the summit was the original destination. In practice, the destination was reduction of the entire sadza recipe to a mathematical model. Arrival at the destination uncovered even more interesting prospects.

Among other things, the journey to the summit highlighted the parlous state of the foundations of culinary engineering. There is a plethora of culinary recipes out there scattered all over the place without any logical basis for navigating them. They are lumped together in vague broad groupings such as Mexican, Thai, Italian, Chinese etc. It is a situation reminiscent of the state of chemistry before the periodic table was developed. Man has been to the moon and back, but he still can’t round up the chaos in his kitchen! Cookery remains a highly fragmented, speculative branch of chemistry. At last there appears to be some hope.

When we successfully digitized the sadza recipe, it was like reaching a summit and discovering much more interesting territory beyond. The new territory is the prospect of digitizing all culinary recipes known to man and more. All cookery recipes are probably related members of a single ordered system. Cracking this order should provide a rigorous foundation for cookery. It would eventually transform cookery from a haphazard hit-or-miss art into a precise logical science. That way when you go to a bookshop you won’t buy a recipe book but a CD. The protocols on the CD can then be run on a universal cooking apparatus which prepares any dish of your choice without need for human judgment or skill. The gwatamatic already does this but for sadza only.

If you think of the gwatamatic as the equivalent of a pocket calculator; which is designed to do only one thing, the universal cooking apparatus will be like a PC which is capable of performing an infinite variety of tasks as long as you supply the programs.

Digitizing culinary recipes promise to bring about some novel extra benefits. Object oriented cookery could become a reality. For example if on a particular day you are craving a tangy meat dish, you could type that in and hey presto, the database pulls out all recipes capable of satisfying the craving. Remember even if the recipe you settle on happens to be Mongolian, you won’t have to find a Mongolian chef.

As was the experience in the development of the periodic table, organizing all known recipes on a logical foundation is bound to reveal gaps which could lead to discovery of novel dishes. Better still, once digitized any new recipes could be tested and refined in the virtual mode without breaking a single egg.

Who said cookery was a mature industry?

WG

Punishment of the Innocent

A few years ago a Zimbabwe government minister was on national radio extolling the virtues of decolonizing the African palate. Her plea must have fallen on deaf ears, judging by the incidence and length of bread queues in Harare today (PHOTO 1).

There are four phases to projects that go wrong:
Euphoria
Disillusionment
Search for the guilty
Punishment of the innocent

Project Zimbabwe’s phase number 4 is now unfolding at retail outlets across the country.
The government ordered massive price cuts in manufacturing, wholesale and retail businesses last month in an effort to curb hyperinflation. The businesses initially ignored the order, prompting an aggressive government crackdown.

After Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, the eighties were a decade of euphoria. Hopes were high laced with some youthful arrogance. People vowed that Zimbabwe would never go the way of the rest of Africa. Unfortunately there was no clear national economic strategy on the ground to ensure the country would go the prosperity route. There still isn’t, as far as I know! Economically we are still drifting aimlessly through time. However in the eighties an illusion of prosperity was created by generous aid funds that poured in from many directions. Some analysts believe the Cold War helped too. Both sides were extra generous to Third World countries like Zimbabwe whose support they coveted in the Cold War game. Whether the analysts are correct or not, one thing is certain. The inflow of handouts more than made up for Zimbabwe’s lack of sound economic strategy.

As the honeymoon tailed off, possibly hastened by the collapse of communism, Zimbabwe was in for a bumpy return to reality. Disillusionment set in. True to Zimbabwean tradition there had to be a scapegoat. The fashionable scapegoat of the early nineties was the Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP). So effective was the propaganda that even some guys who should know better were convinced that they were dupes of some cruel conspiracy out there. The acronym ESAP was translated to Even Sadza’s A Problem! So nothing is new after all!

Project Zimbabwe’s phase four is now unfolding at retail outlets across the country. It is now quite hazardous to be a player in the supply chain of consumer goods. Earlier in the year I was invited to be a director on the board of a company in the retail sector. It was quite an honour then. So I gladly accepted. However with the recent turn of events, it has turned out to be a nightmare. There is real risk of arrest hanging over all the directors’ heads. It is like sitting on a powder keg! Directors of OK and Innscor (some of the retail giants of Zimbabwe) have already been arrested for “overcharging”. If titans like that can be incarcerated on nebulous charges, there is little hope. In fact the price control task force has already been to rattle our cage a few times. Fortunately we are in compliance with the price reduction regime. Compliance however comes with a huge price tag.

We have had to sell a fair amount of stock at a loss. Against such a background, restocking is difficult (PHOTO 2), even with the best will in the world. Failure to restock has its cost too, the threat of nationalization. If this is carried through then we will witness yet another economic disaster just when we were convinced we were at the bottom of the trough. One only has to look across the Zambezi (in Zambia) to see the disastrous legacy of nationalization.

If those bearing the brunt of punishment are innocent, then who is the guilty party? Unlike previous trials, the guilty this time are difficult to define, let alone apprehend.
The current economic challenges have no domicilium citandi to raid, no physical persona to arrest, but nevertheless remain very real. This is probably why the authorities appear baffled. It all puts one in mind of that scene in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath where the banker comes to take away the tenant farmer’s home and the tenant threatens to shoot the banker. The banker says it is not his fault, he’s just working for the big corporation. And the farmer asks, “Who can we shoot?” And the banker says, “I don’t know, maybe there is nobody to shoot.”

Contrary to popular belief, the problem is not just an individual. Several countries in Africa and beyond have fallen into this pitfall which I will call the limited view syndrome. Each time inordinate preoccupation with the removal of an individual crowded out comprehensive recovery planning.

“For every complex problem there are solutions that are simple, easy and wrong.” H.L. Mencken.

With each passing day, layers of ramifications continue to calcify into a labyrinth of complications. Problems of this nature usually have many layers needing to be addressed. They are a cumulative function of mistakes made over decades, and a very complex function at that.

It hurts to be forced to sell stock at a loss. However, it helps to spare a thought for others who have lost a lot more than us. Makro (a wholesale giant) were forced to sell television sets for a song leaving a forlorn showroom (PHOTO 3). On the afternoon of 13 July 2007 I drove up that road to the airport that runs behind Makro. I noticed many cars parked all over the grass verges. At the time I just assumed that there was a funeral in the neighbourhood. It was only later in the day that I discovered that there was indeed a funeral, only it was at Makro itself. The wholesale is still open but only as a shadow of its former glory (PHOTO 4). They have not restocked the electrical goods section. I wonder why! Every society has its share of simple people who do not see beyond their noses. Ndivo vainyinura vachidya huku yemazai (Such people are the ones who were hooting excitedly as they proceeded to slaughter and carve up the golden goose). So we thought anyway. Initially, we though it was just the scum of society that participated in the scrums. However respectable people were also seen leading the charge for a bargain. The cars I saw parked outside Makro suggest that if the price is “right”(if that be the right word), even respectable members of society can stoop low.

At a growth point near Harare, the local member of parliament “bought” all the cement at a hardware shop after the price control task force had forced the shop to drop the price per 50kg bag from $1.5million to $170000. The honourable member is not believed to be building anything that requires that much cement. So it would be interesting to see the price at which he disposes it.

The share price of Pretoria Portland Cement (one of Zimbabwe’s large cement manufacturers) has dropped from $1million per share on 13 June 2007 to $700000 per share on 2 August 2007. The PPC share price has been largely sheltered from the effects of price controls because the bulk of the company’s business is in South Africa. They stopped cement production in Zimbabwe citing shortage of clinker. The directors will have to be very cautious because they could easily end up in clink.

Giant retailer OK Zimbabwe Ltd have been less lucky. For a start their chief executive officer has already been arrested. Their share price has plummeted from $1800 per share on 18 June 2007 to $680 per share on 1 August 2007. The loss is much worse in real terms because of high inflation.

Bata (the country’s largest shoe manufacturer) were compelled to drop prices on some of their lines by a factor of more than twenty. Their shops are all but empty now (PHOTO 5 ). In one Bata shop near me, the situation does not look as desperate at first sight. However on close inspection, it is clear that only one shoe type is displayed on all the shelves (PHOTO 6). They have indeed lent new meaning to the phrase “window-dressing”. Prior to all this anyone who had a pair of shoes was a millionaire. Not anymore! So the price blitz has impoverished everyone in more ways than one!

Buying a pair of shoes is now like taking a wife, difficult to find. For those lucky enough to find one, the initial outlay is nothing compared to the hassle factor of accessories required thereafter. Shoe polish is now hard to come by. I tried floor polish but bit did not work too well.

Because of the prevailing stock pressure, TM Supermarkets (PHOTO 7) are rumoured to be contemplating changing their name to MT Supermarkets (thanks Penny for that joke). TM Newlands is so empty it is like a ghost town, verging on the spooky (PHOTO 8).

When I was studying abroad in the eighties, we used to laugh at West Africans who were buying basic groceries to take back home. Seka urema wafa! Now we bring even bread from South Africa.

In the late eighties a colleague who had been working in Zambia related how hard it was to find Coca Cola in Lusaka then. Apparently one needed contacts to buy Coke there. We laughed hard in disbelief. Yesterday I went round looking for Coke in Harare. I could not find any in the shops. Even my contacts could not help! So I tried vendors on the street. It was a cloak and dagger affair there! I understand they are selling it higher than the government stipulated price. So they have to vet potential customers before they unveil their wares. It turned out they did not even have Coke. So much fuss for no fizz!
Manufacturers appear to be producing limited amounts at a loss just to avert nationalization. I should imagine they will charge the losses to their public relations budgets under the subheading, “Appeasement of Politicians Expenses.”

In my youth I watched a documentary on the invention of the transformer. They portrayed it as an unsung cornerstone of civilization. Without it long distance transmission of electricity is not practical. I vividly remember the narrator saying that without the transformer, we would each need to have an electricity generator at the bottom of the garden! In Zimbabwe we have a lot of under-utilized transformers today. We plead poverty but I beg to differ. I suspect we are just badly organized. Anecdotal evidence suggests that the total value of private electricity generators in the country exceeds the cost of building a few power stations. What we need is an entrepreneur who floats a listed power generation company. That way people’s investments in power generation would pay them dividends rather than guzzle their diesel. I suppose the risk of nationalization would be a rub there.

My favourite vice, doughnuts, has been solved for me. It is easy to see why. All the ingredients of a doughnut, including electricity and water, are in short supply. Convenience foods in general are now hard to come by. Everything now has to be done from first principles, including dressing chickens! The silver lining is that opportunities to overeat are much reduced. It is certainly much more work to put a meal together. In times like these it is important to find a wife who commands a reasonable cookery repertoire.

Unfortunately the personal toiletries necessary to attract a wife are gone. Previously the only item of personal toiletries that was difficult to find was dental floss. Now even soap is a problem, never mind anti-perspirant deodorant. This has made queues in confined places unbearable. I feel sorry for the hapless shop assistants who have to endure it all day!

Even car wash is a mission now. At my local car wash, they sometimes have electricity but no water. On other days it is the other way round. More recently they have been known to have both water and electricity but no staff! In another twist of the price control blitz, private minibus operators are incessantly persecuted. Many have parked their vehicles as a result, resulting in a serious shortage of public transport (PHOTO 8).


So workers are rocking up for work anything up to three hours late, which is a considerable improvement on normal.

To find out where all this might lead, I talked to some captains of industry and senior civil servants. To my dismay, they don’t seem to know either! A clue might lie in a conversation I had in the early nineties. I met a German diplomat who had been on tours of duty in West Africa. His wife reckoned Harare was not a typical African city. She said, “Harare is not real Africa. In West Africa everything happens on the street markets.” It appears we have now caught up with real Africa. There is not much in the shops. Yet life goes on! This can only imply that commodities are now changing hands at an informal level. Transactions have devolved from the shops onto the street. This spells bad news for the fiscus. It directly hits VAT collections and indirectly shrinks other taxes. So we may witness yet another wave of money printing.

All in all, the price control blitz has been an economic disaster. From another point of view it has delivered a political reprieve. For how long, nobody knows. Prior to the price control crackdown, we were certainly on the exponential section of the hyperinflation graph. From a political survival viewpoint, empty shops are a lesser evil than a collapsed national currency. By definition, a reprieve has a finite lifespan. A relapse is inevitable, sooner or later. In fact hyperinflation is still there, only covered in thick layers of make-up, much like a girl I used to know. There is still a lot of money in circulation without enough productivity to underpin it.

If things are this bad in Zimbabwe you must be wondering why I am still sticking around. Kwadzinorohwa matumbu ndiko kwadzinomhanyira. Hope is the answer. Zim is like a destitute beauty queen. The beauty is still there in the DNA and no degree of destitution can take it away. With some effort the beauty queen could be rehabilitated to her former glamour or even better. Sooner or later, reconstruction of the country has to begin. I believe I am bound to find a role in that future reconstruction. The worse the decline gets, the greater the opportunity to make a difference. Fortunately I am still socially lean (i.e. no dependents), so I should be able to dig in longer than most. For now just give me sadza and a glimmer of hope in the distance.

The main risk of course is that recovery may not begin during my working life. There are indeed cases in Africa where decay has persisted generation after generation.

Bye for now,
Will.

Africa has Failed - 1 July 2007

Just when we thought we had hit the bottom, shortages of basic commodities in Zimbabwe have got worse. See attached photo of a sugar queue at my local shops yesterday.

It was a tortuous queue but the people in it did not appear to feel the torture. There was no evidence of agitation on their faces, further testimony to Zimbabweans’ outstanding placidity. Whether that is a strength or a weakness only time will tell. Some analysts reckon if we had a temperament similar to that of the Nigerians for instance, we would be on our fifteenth coup by now.


Ironically it is a privilege to be able to join a queue like that. With more than 80% unemployment, many do not have the capacity to join a queue. Just as I was about to drive off, a respectable looking lady came rushing to me and asked for $30000 so she could join the sugar queue. She gave me what I felt was a tall story. However, tall tale or not, one thing was certain. She was desperate. So I gave her the money.
The survival bar continues to rise everyday engulfing more and more respectable individuals who would never have contemplated begging before.

After nearly ten years of belt tightening, most people are now beginning to run out of notches. As someone put it, it is like running a marathon with no defined finishing line. People eventually start to bite the dust one by one. In spite of this, the risk of anarchy or significant mass protests remains negligible. That is my assessment. As a friend put it Zimbabweans, at least the Shonas, are of the extremely docile Rozvi stock that was a walk-over for slave traders and colonizers alike.

I recently had a remarkable realization. The price of a loaf of bread in May 2007 was $6000. If you re-instate the three zeros dropped last year you get $6million. That is exactly what it cost me to buy my house in Harare four years ago. You can view the house on Google Earth* at the following location:
Latitude: 17 49’ 48.55”S
Longitude: 31 04’ 22.25”E
With luck you may even catch a glimpse of me sunbathing in the garden!
The price of a loaf of bread is now $22000 when available.

Q. What has two hundred legs and eats cabbage?
A. A Harare meat queue.

One of the best performing counters on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange is a large brewing concern. Just like the banks, they seem to flourish in all seasons. I guess when people have nothing to celebrate they tend to use the same beer to drown their worries.

Q. What is the difference between Zimbabwean and Eastern culture.
A. In Eastern culture people commit adultery and they get stoned. In Zimbabwe people get stoned first, then commit adultery.


My South African business venture has failed. Maybe I should have gone into brewing instead! The sales never attained critical mass. So it is all but in cold storage now. I may revisit it sometime before I retire. Fortunately there is enough business in Harare to keep body and soul together, so far anyway.

In the early nineties, my employers used to subscribe to a magazine called African Business. In it was a plethora of electricity generator advertisements. At the time I could not fully understand why anyone would want to buy a private generator. Zimbabwe’s electricity supply was that good then! Needless to say I now fully understand.
While I was in South Africa the other week, I was saddened to hear regular adverts for electricity generators on Radio Jacaranda. On a local level, it is an unfortunate sign of resignation, an acknowledgement that the problem is not likely to be solved in the near future. Personally I reckon the sooner they abandon that BEE (affirmative action) business the better.

On a higher level, the unfortunate implication is that Africa has failed to produce a post-independence success story! South Africa was our last hope. However something can still be salvaged, even in Zimbabwe, believe it or not. I hope I am not hoping against hope.


*Appendix: Google Earth is a free Google service that gives you a bird’s eye (or rather satellite) view of any place on earth. To invoke it double click on the Google Earth icon. You should then find yourself on the “Fly to” tab. In the top left hand corner, type in the latitude and longitude of the spot you wish to fly to then click on the magnifying glass. Then hey presto! you are hovering over the spot you selected.

If you do not have Google Earth already, you can download it for free from http://earth.google.com/

I found it quite amusing that the Japanese translation of google is also guguru. I suspect we share a common linguistic root with those guys.

Bye for now,

Will

A New Record - 24 March 2007

A NEW RECORD

While I was traveling abroad a few weeks ago my beloved country Zimbabwe was in the news for all the wrong reasons yet again.

So when I came back to Harare the other day I felt a vague emotion that I had never felt before. It was a murky blend of apprehension and curiosity against a backdrop of ambivalence. At Harare Airport a multitude of dubious looking characters lining the pier from the aircraft to the immigration hall did not help the tension. Fortunately, the tear gas dust had all but settled. The only incident reported in the media since I got back is a petrol bomb attack on a police station in Mutare.

Physical confrontations appear sporadic but there is a more immediate problem confronting everybody everyday. It is inflation. Prices of some commodities that I buy are going up by as much as 30% a day. Curiously toilet paper is one of the worst offenders. I told a friend Matt that I had stopped buying luxury toilet paper, at which he retorted, “You are lucky, I stopped buying The Herald ages ago!” (The Herald is a newspaper).

Then Sandy gave me a very practical definition of hyperinflation, “Hyperinflation is when you could afford the item when you joined the queue, but by the time you got to the front of the queue, you could no longer.”

True to Zimbabwean nature, there is now a well established survival support network to help navigate the ever harsher economic environment. Here are a few extracts from the annals of the network:
When you go to a restaurant in Harare, it pays to pay before you eat.
When in Zimbabwe, use both sides of each piece of toilet paper. This should stretch not only the imagination but also the budget.

The bar continues to rise everyday. Melancholy is written all over people’s faces as they pace up and down supermarket aisles agonizing over which essential to forgo next. A much more poignant tragedy is unfolding in the form of a crisis of expectations. The country is setting itself up for major disillusionment. We are pinning all our hopes on the retirement of one man. In a sense I can identify with that.

In the early days of my business I admitted a venture capital company. They brought in much needed capital and they were indeed an asset. We initially had a superb relationship. However as time went on they metamorphosed into a liability. In the end I was so determined to buy them out I was prepared to pay any price. Fortunately my brother saw through my emotions and came to my rescue. If it were not for his mentorship, I could have easily paid a disproportionately high price for their shares. My determination to see their back was so intense that it assumed a life of its own. It became an end in itself, to the exclusion of all business strategy and common basics. My brother reminded me that buying out an investor was merely a means to an end and did not absolve me of the responsibility to fashion a sustainable business strategy. He was vindicated! When the venture capital guys were out of the picture, Utopia did not materialize. Their departure helped but economic fundamentals such as productivity that I had neglected in my blinkered determination were still there, now beckoning with a vengeance.

Similarly my countrymen are pinning so much hope on the retirement of one man that they expect it to be an instant panacea for all the country’s ills. This is too limited a view. At best it will lead to disappointment. At worst it could precipitate counter-productive disillusionment. I recently read a book about Zambia’s passage through an analogous journey. It says, “When Kaunda left, the lot of Zambians did not improve much.”

Meanwhile life goes on, so far anyway. Amid all the gloom and doom, I came back to great family news. I have two nieces and a nephew who sat their “O” Level school examinations late last year and their results came out a few weeks ago. They all did exceedingly well. Simba, the nephew, set a new family record. He got eleven grade A’s. In my day we sat only eight subjects and even then I managed only three grade A’s. We knew Simba is bright but did not realize he is that brilliant. However, as they say, no matter how big you get there is always someone somewhere bigger than you. Simba was only the second best student in his school. Apparently the best student pulled off a whopping thirteen grade A’s.

Will.