MOZAMBIQUE

 

READ

It took me awhile to get through The First Wife: A Tale of Polygamy, written by Paulina Chiziane and translated by David Brookshaw. The problem wasn’t lack of interest, but the fact that the book was almost five hundred pages long. I guess the author needed that many pages to tell the story of Tony, a police chief in Maputo, and the women and children he accumulated without any thought for the damage caused by his faithlessness.

Tony and his wife Rami have been married for twenty years and have five children. Rami is unhappy that Tony is never home, and she has heard that he has another woman. She goes to confront the other woman, Julieta, and they end up having a brawl, which Julieta wins because she is younger and fitter. Julieta tells Rami that Tony seduced her when she was a young girl, and only after she first became pregnant did he tell her that he was married. He swore he was going to get a divorce, but that never happened. Now Julieta has five children by Tony, and another on the way. What’s worse is that Tony is never around anymore, having moved on to another younger and more beautiful woman.

Rami finds that woman – Luisa – who has two children with Tony. They also get into a brawl, which temporarily lands them in jail. But then Luisa tells Rami that Tony has already moved on to a fourth woman, Saly, and Saly tells her that he has left her for a fifth woman, Mauá. Overwhelmed, Rami first turns to a wizard to help her win back Tony’s love, but doesn’t want to use the witchcraft he prescribes. Then she tries religion, but that doesn’t help either. She comes to a realization: “The worst of it is that God doesn’t appear to have any wife. If he was married, the goddess, his wife, would intercede on our behalf.” She laments the low esteem in which women are held in the part of the country where she lives and tells her herself: “But the goddess must exist, I keep thinking. She must be as invisible as all of us. No doubt her space is limited to the celestial kitchen.”

A man that Rami meets through Luisa tells her, “I think all women should unite with each other against the tyranny of men.” That leads to Rami’s decision to call a meeting of all of Tony’s women to hatch a plan to ensure that they are all protected under the law and that they all have a fair share of Tony’s time. Rami throws a big 50^th birthday party for Tony and invites all the other women, who all dress alike, and all of Tony’s children, who all dress alike as well, so that everyone at the party will know what Tony has done. The upshot is that Tony is forced into polygamous marriage contracts with the four women he’s not legally married to, and now they all have rights that they didn’t have before.

This doesn’t stop Tony from womanizing, but Rami and the other four wives form an alliance and help each other, so that they need Tony less and less. They discover that, “Women should be better friends with each other, show more solidarity. We are the majority, we’ve got strength on our side. If we join hands, we can transform the world.”

There are so many great quotes and insights in this book that I can’t possibly include them all in this post. The First Wife is not only Paulina Chiziane’s first novel, it’s the first novel ever published by a Mozambican woman. I hope she’ll keep writing, as I would love to read more of her work.

COOK

I was getting a little tired of making soups and stews, so I decided to make bolo polana, a Mozambican cake, for this post. This cake contains a couple of unusual ingredients – mashed potatoes and ground cashews – and I had my work cut out for me in trying to veganize this recipe, which I found on the 196 Flavors website. I replaced the butter and eggs with Miyoko’s vegan butter and JUST Egg; used aquafaba made from canned garbanzo bean liquid in place of egg whites; and replaced the heavy cream with Silk Dairy Free Heavy Whipping Cream Alternative. I was a little worried about how the recipe would work with all those substitutions, but it tasted great.

GIVE

There were lots of projects listed for Mozambique on the GlobalGiving website. Since my main focus now is climate change, I chose a fruit tree-planting project from Associação Esmabama. According to the project description: “Extreme climate events such as droughts, floods, and cyclones have been heavily affecting Mozambique in recent years, putting food security at risk. Agriculture is the main source of subsistence for the Mozambican families. However, in the past 3 years the production has been compromised causing famine, malnourishment and low income. Moreover, the access of students and the communities to fruits is insufficient or at unaffordable prices.”

The goal for this project is to plant 1,000 fruit trees, facilitated by the Medium Agrarian Schools. They will train 260 students to plant and nurture the trees, with the hope that the communities that are involved will then be inspired to plant fruit trees of their own, both for sustenance and for income. More information about this project is available at Plant 1,000 fruit trees in Mozambique - GlobalGiving.

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