Chapter 3 – Food, Clothing and Shelter
Food
The people of Mufuque have simple diets. A common main dish would be “fungi” (manioc mush) and some gravy made of dried fish. Other foods are “couve” (collards), manioc roots, manioc leaves, game, goat meat, chicken, pork, fish, peanuts, bananas, white beans, corn, squash, sweet potatoes, rice, macaroni, coffee, tea, beer and “jindungu” (a small red-hot pepper that grows well in the forests, Capsicum frutescens, known elsewhere as piri-piri). Some of these foods are rarely to be had.
The food is cooked in the kitchen, a small hut behind the house. This is mainly to keep the smoke out of the house, but it is also a fire precaution. The fire site consists of three stones on which pots are set so that a fire can be built beneath them. It is in the center of the hut. The smoke from the fire goes out through the cracks in the roof and walls—there is no chimney or vent. The kitchen furniture is a few short logs for the cook to sit on and an old box in one corner to set the utensils on. Cooking is done in clay pots or tin cans of various sizes which are gleaned from garbage heaps, although it is not unusual to have enameled cooking pans and dishes. Oil tins are used as buckets, and a couple of forks and an old pocket knife complete the set-up.
Boiling is the chief method of cooking, although meat, fish and roots are often roasted in the coals. Seasonings are simple, being salt, sugar and jindungu. Most of the food is grown or obtained from livestock, with some from hunting, trapping and fishing. The rest is found in the forest or bought at a store in Cambamba, 11 kilometers distant.
Breakfast is coffee, with as much sugar as they can afford. With it is eaten bread, if it is available, but usually roasted manioc root.
Lunch is the big meal, with rice, fungi, or macaroni with meat, greens, or a piece of dried fish. Supper consists of more fungi with some sort of gravy. During the day they eat nuts, fruits, termites and other things they find in the jungle or elsewhere.
Naturally, the people have no refrigerators, so they must have other methods of preserving their food. Meat is their most perishable food, except for fish. The most common method of preserving meat is drying. Soon after the animal is killed, it is cut into strips about one half inch thick and strung up on a vine or string in the sun. After a few days it is so hard and dry that it can be snapped in two. It is prepared for eating by merely boiling it in a little water.
Fish, which are caught in the nearby Swage River, are smoked after being scaled, split and cleaned out. Both fish and meat are sometimes salted. The commonest source of fish is an inexpensive dried type brought in bundles from Luanda.
They are not wasteful. When a buffalo is killed, almost all of it is used. The skin, for example, is cut to strips to use as springs in their beds. They clean out the small intestine and eat it too. The eyes and brains are boiled. The bones are used for soup and later given to the dogs.
If a man can afford it, he often has a soft drink with his lunch. It comes in big brown bottles and is made in Luanda. Various brands are Tropical, Laranja (orange), Limão (lemon), Tangerina (tangerine), Morango (strawberry), Pepsi-Cola, and Sinalco. Many drink Cuca, a beer made in Luanda. It comes in barrels or in bottles. From the barrel, a good-sized mug costs one and a half cents. The most common drink is coffee, which is often home ground.
The food is served in the house on a table in the middle of the room. Sometimes the owner has enameled plates, but more often they all eat from the same tin plate. The men and boys eat first. The women bring in a plate with a huge mound of fungi on it and a tin of gravy. The men pull off a bit with their fingers, dip it in gravy and swallow it. After the men have finished, the women and girls eat, after which they take the utensils down to the steam to wash them. They are kept in a box in a corner of the kitchen.
Clothing
Clothes are one of the peoples’ big problems, as they are one of the things for which they must have money. The bulk of the clothes money goes for the man’s wardrobe. He has to work for months to buy an inexpensive suit, which is the pride of his heart. He also tries to get a pair of shoes. If he is very poor, his best is a clean ragged shirt, a piece of cloth like a kilt serving as pants, and a pair of low-top sneakers. On weekdays they all wear a frayed, patched pair of shorts, an old shirt or undershirt, and no shoes. Sometimes they wear shoes made of old tires and inner tubes. The tread from a piece of tire serves as the sole, and strips of inner tube sewn on it make a serviceable, but rather uncomfortable, sandal. The men’s hats are usually old, beat-up straw hats. The wealthier men wear helmets.
Socks are only worn on Sundays. Sometimes they are only half a sock, just enough to cover the ankle and appear to be the real thing. Belts are often pieces of string, but some men have plastic or leather belts.
The women try to dress like the pastor’s wife, who is considered to be an authority on clothes. She usually wears a simple cotton dress which is out of the range of most women, partly because they do not know how to sew. The majority of the women wear yards and yards of cloth (“panos”) wrapped around themselves, despite the heat. If a woman has a baby, she has an extra loop of cloth around her back to carry it in. The women usually go barefoot. For hats they wear scarves or loop a piece of cloth over their heads.
Many children under three years of age wear no clothes at all except on Sundays, when they wear a ragged dress or a pair of short pants. The children from three to seven years of age usually wear a dress or shirt, and once in a while they wear pants. When the children reach school age, they begin to dress up. A school boy wears a white shirt, short pants, and suspenders or straps. Often he wears shoes. A school girl wears a dress and sometimes wears shoes, usually too small or too large. They wear these clothes only for school and church.
Shelter
The houses in Mufuque are made of mud and stick (“pau a pique”) or of adobe. They are small structures, usually with only one room, about 10 feet by 15 feet. Some of the larger houses have a bedroom on each side of the main room, making it 30 feet by 10 feet. Few are larger than that. The houses are rectangular with gabled roofs. Adobe houses are cool and last longer than mud and stick houses, but they are harder to make.
The first step in building an adobe house is making the adobes, or mud bricks. Water is carried from a stream by the women and poured on hoed-up clay. Then the boys tramp around on it so as to mix it. Chopped grass is added to give the blocks strength. Then the mud is put into rectangular forms and packed down. The forms are wooden boxes six to eight inches wide, 12 to 14 inches long, and six to eight inches high. They have no top or bottom. The excess mud is scraped off with a stick and the form is lifted off, leaving a rectangular block of mud on the ground. Hundreds of these blocks are needed to make a house. Then the blocks are left to dry in the sun. If it should rain before they are dry, all the work is wasted. When the bricks are dry, they are stacked and covered with grass to keep them dry. Then the house is built as any other brick house would be, with mud used as mortar.
Next the roof is put on. Poles are lashed together with strips of bark to make the roof framework, and the grass is put on. The best grass is found in the valleys, right next to the belt of trees that follow the streams. There is only one month in the year that is ideal for cutting grass. At that time the grass is four to six feet high and bone dry. The grass is so much in demand that men go five kilometers away to get it. After cutting it with machetes, they gather it into bundles and carry it home on their backs. The grass is lashed on the roofs about one foot thick. Sometimes the builder makes rough window frames and shutters and door frames. The windows are usually few and small. Doors are sometimes made of woven palm leaves. If the owner has enough money, he may buy corrugated iron roofing or red clay tiles to use instead of grass for his roof.
Mufuque seen from the main road that passes the village
Mud is slapped on the inside and the outside of the house and leveled off like plaster. Sometimes the house is white-washed. The dirt floor is soaked and packed down firmly. Occasionally the owner can afford a cement floor.
The more common type of house is the mud and stick. Long poles are cut from the nearby forest and brought to the building site. Then holes two to four feet deep and six inches wide are dug with a machete (use the end of the machete to loosen the dirt, dig it out by hand, and repeat again and again) to form a rectangle of holes, making the outline of the house. The thickest poles, three to six inches in diameter, are dropped into these holes and dirt is packed around them. Thinner poles are lashed horizontally on the thick poles. Then even thinner poles are lashed over these. The women and boys mix up mud as in the case of the adobe houses and slap it over the framework until it is completely covered. After that dries, another layer is added and the excess mud is scraped off. Then the roof is built as on the adobe house.
The furniture is very simple. The best beds are wooden bunks with strips of buffalo hide strung across the center. On this the sleeper lays his “luando”, a mat made of papyrus reeds. Other people sleep on mats placed on the floor. Bedding consists of a single cotton blanket and a pillow of grass.
Most houses have a table and a couple of chairs. Some have a highly colored table cloth which is brought out for special occasions. Many of the people have a kerosene lamp for light, while others have no light at night. Along the wall are wooden pegs for clothing, and a shelf or two. Pictures torn from magazines are pasted to the walls. Some doors have locks, but they are usually unnecessary because burglary is uncommon. More often, wooden latches are used.
On some houses the roof sticks out to form a front porch. The outsides of the houses are sometimes fantastically painted, which adds a little color to the village. Once a day the house and the surrounding ground are swept with a broom made of grass.
mufuque 