Thursday 20 December 2007

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.

Sunday 9 December 2007

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