Tag Archives: Africa

Quick-Rising Bread: Food Uncertainties in 1980s Mozambique

By Kathleen Sheldon

 In 1982 I moved to Mozambique in southern Africa to pursue dissertation research on urban working women. I was a doctoral candidate in African history at the University of California in Los Angeles. I went there with my husband, a pediatrician, who had a two-year contract with the Ministry of Health, and our toddler-aged daughter. We were somewhat prepared for living in a newly independent socialist country that ranked as one of the poorest in the world. Mozambique had gained its independence from Portugal in 1975, after a decade-long liberation struggle. But neighboring South Africa, then under the white-supremacist apartheid regime, funded and supplied weapons to organizations that were anti-socialist or otherwise opposed to Mozambique’s government. By the early 1980s conditions deteriorated as that internal war expanded.[i] Beira, the port city where we lived, suffered from repeated electrical power losses due to sabotage and increasing problems in obtaining food. Devastation in the country as a whole was extreme.[ii]

A colourful book cover of the author's memoir
Fig. 1. Cover of The Mackerel Years, the memoir by the author.

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Access to food was problematic. Most of the shops posted signs in their windows warning, “There is no salt, meat, bread,” sometimes listing a dozen items that were not available. We marveled at the rows of empty shelves, as even so-called supermarkets had only half a shelf of rough gray toilet paper and nothing else. The open-air markets displayed little or no fresh items. If tomatoes or oranges arrived at a shop, boisterous lines would materialize, and the food would quickly run out. The local dollar shop, where we could use foreign currency to buy imported items, had very limited supplies, though we appreciated delicacies like Hero jam from Switzerland. Even Spam, which we had avoided at home in the U.S., proved to be a tasty treat.

When we first arrived, we noticed that a tea shop on the ground floor of our five-story apartment building was closed and dark, though tables and chairs were visible inside. As we stopped to peer through the large dirty windows, a friend told us, “This shop used to serve nice little rolls and tea, up until a few months ago.” “Oh good,” I responded optimistically, “Maybe we’ll be able to buy some bread here.” The tea shop never opened while we were there, though it did occasionally act as a bakery and sell bread rolls, with people lining up around the block to buy a bagful.

I eventually discovered a recipe for a quick-rising yeast bread in a small pamphlet that I had brought from home, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls from the Culinary Arts Institute.[iii]

A loaf cake sites on a yellow platter topped with glazed fruit.
Fig. 2. Cover of 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession.

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Casserole Bread Batter Method

1 cup milk

3 tablespoons sugar

1 teaspoon salt

1½ tablespoons shortening

1 cup warm (not hot) water

2 packages or cakes yeast, active dry or compressed

4½ cups sifted flour

Scald milk; stir in sugar, salt and shortening. Cool to lukewarm. Measure the warm water into a bowl. (Use lukewarm water for compressed yeast). Sprinkle or crumble in the yeast. Stir until softened. Blend in the lukewarm milk mixture. Add flour and stir until well blended, about 2 minutes. Cover; let rise in warm place free from drafts about 40 minutes or until doubled in bulk. Stir batter down. Beat vigorously about ½ minute. Turn into greased 1½-quart casserole. An 8x8x2-inch square pan may be used. Bake uncovered at 375o F. about 1 hour. Makes 1 loaf.

A page of text includes recipes for various breads with yeast, with an accompanying image of bread
Fig. 3. Recipe page from 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls. Image credit, Kathleen Sheldon from pamphlet in author’s possession. Original publisher no longer exists and cannot be contacted for permission.

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Since it could be baked in an eight-inch square pan, I could use our 220-volt toaster oven that we had purchased in Los Angeles before leaving, which was more reliable than the propane gas oven installed in the kitchen. I developed a routine to fit the bread-baking into the on-and-off pattern of our electric power. When the power came on, I would immediately mix up a batch of dough, which then needed less than an hour to rise before baking. I would then beat it down, put it into the pan, and get it into the oven while we still had electricity. Even if we only had three or four hours of power every other day, I could make enough bread to last us for two or three days.

The other constraint was the erratic supply of flour. Once or twice my husband’s co-workers arranged to buy fifty-kilogram sacks and divide the flour among our group. Getting milk was also a group endeavor. We bought it in bulk through a special arrangement from a local dairy. It was delivered to our building in ten-gallon metal milk cans, shared out among our friends, and then we each boiled our share before using it.

That bread became a staple part of our diet. We usually ate it for breakfast, sliced in small squares and spread with White Rhino peanut butter that friends brought back from shopping trips to Zimbabwe or South Africa.

A white rhinoceros features in the center of black text with a red border.
Fig. 4. Label from White Rhino peanut butter, ca. 1983, in author’s possession. Image credit: Kathleen Sheldon.

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In more recent years when I met with a group of friends to discuss a draft of my memoir, one of them baked this bread for our gathering. Baking that bread during the difficult years of living with conflict had felt like a clever, necessary accomplishment, and I had not made it myself since our return to the U.S. My friend’s offering was the first time I had eaten it in forty years, and it was still a good sturdy bread that tasted wonderful with butter and peanut butter.

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[i] Two sources that focus on that conflict are: William Minter, Apartheid’s Contras: An Inquiry into the Roots of War in Angola and Mozambique (London: Zed Books, 1994) and Hilary Andersson, Mozambique: A War Against the People (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992).

[ii] I have written about that experience in The Mackerel Years: A Memoir of War, Hunger, and Women’s History in 1980s Mozambique. This essay shares one story about how we coped.

[iii] Culinary Arts Institute, 250 Breads Biscuits and Rolls (Chicago: Consolidated Book Publishers, 1965). It is out of print, but available at Amazon and EBay. For more information on Culinary Arts Institute cookbooks, see Terri Griffith’s blog, 250 Potato Possibilities.


Kathleen Sheldon is an independent scholar of African women’s history. Her previous books include African Women: Early History to the 21st Century (2017), Pounders of Grain: A History of Women, Work, and Politics in Mozambique (2002), and the Historical Dictionary of Women in Sub-Saharan Africa, 2d ed. (2016). She has also published dozens of articles in journals and edited collections and contributed as an author and editor to many reference works. She has just completed ten years on the editorial board of the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History. She is a founding editor of H-Luso-Africa, an online network about Portuguese-speaking Africa.

Palm Trees and Potions: On Portuguese Pharmacy Signs

By Benjamin Breen

Figure 1. A pharmacy sign in Paris. Photo by Daniel Stockman, 2010.
Figure 1. A pharmacy sign in Paris. Photo by Daniel Stockman, 2010.

Anyone who has walked in a European city at night will be familiar with the glow of them: a vivid and snakelike green, slightly eerie when encountered on a lonely street, beautiful in the rain. They were once neon; now most are arrays of ultra-bright Chinese LEDs that blink on and off in intricate patterns. The glowing emerald cross of the pharmacy is among the most familiar symbols in Europe.

When I moved to Lisbon in 2012, however, I was interested to find that the pharmacy on my street bore a striking variation on the iconic green cross. In Portugal, the green crosses of many farmacias contain a small palm tree with a snake wrapped around it, or inside of it.

Figure 2. Farmácia Moz Teixera, on the Rua do Poço dos Negros, Lisbon.
Figure 2. Farmácia Moz Teixera, on the Rua do Poço dos Negros, Lisbon.

At first glance, there’s a fairly straightforward explanation for this: the iconography seems to owe its origin to the Sociedade Farmaceutica Lusitana (Portuguese Pharmaceutical Society), the emblem of which has featured a variation on the snake + palm tree + cross motif since the 19th century. But as with many explanations in history, this doesn’t really explain much at all. The Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society in London glosses the symbol as simply representing the vegetable, animal and mineral kingdoms.

But this doesn’t satisfy – why a palm tree, in particular? Why Portugal?

As with many things in Lisbon, when we peel back a century or two, we find something surprising. The name of the street on which my local pharmacy was located, Rua do Poço dos Negros, offered a hint: literally translated, it means “The Road of the Pit of the Blacks.” Poço can also be translated as “well,” but as the historian James Sweet notes, this poço was in fact a burial pit, and Rua do Poço dos Negros was the main thoroughfare of a densely populated African neighborhood in sixteenth-century Lisbon known as Mocambo, the Kimbundu word for “hideout.” It was a center for what the Portuguese call feitiçaria, or sorcery, a term that was often employed by Portuguese-speakers in the early modern period to describe the practices of African healers who combined medical cures with religious rites that invoked ancestral spirits and divinities.

The snake and the palm tree were frequent motifs in early modern Portuguese depictions of African and indigenous American medical practices. To a Christian reader, the combination called to mind the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden, thereby flagging the supposedly Satanic origins of cures from the non-Christian world.

But it also functioned as a proxy for the exotic and the tropical, showing up in places like the frontispiece illustrations of early scientific works about Brazil and the religious manuals of Catholic monks in Africa. Whenever early modern Europeans wanted to signify that a place was heathen, tropical and exotic, the trusty serpent and palm could be counted on.

Breen pharmacy 3
Figure 3. Left: an Italian capuchin monk destroys a Congolese “house of a feitiçeiro [casa d’un Faticchiero] filled with diabolical superstitions.” Source: Paolo Collo and Silva Benso, eds., Sogno: Bamba, Pemba, Ovando e altre contrade dei regni di Congo, Angola e adjacenti (Milan: published privately by Franco Maria Ricci, 1986), 163. Right: detail from the frontispiece of Willem Piso and Georg Marcgrave, Historia Naturalis Brasiliae (Amsterdam: Franciscus Hack, 1648).
To be sure, there were many, many ways of symbolizing the exotic and the colonial in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: alligators, dragons, Chinese maidens toting parasols, and mustachioed Turks with enormous turbans, to name a few. My personal favorite is the moose skull, seashell and pineapple combo that adorns this fanciful anonymous painting of an apothecary shop from early eighteenth century France.

Breen pharmacy 4
Figure 4. Anonymous eighteenth-century painting of an apothecary shop, University R. Descartes in the Faculty of Pharmaceutical and Biological Sciences in Paris, France.

 

But the snake and palm showed real longevity in the field of medicine and pharmacy, emerging as a common motif for the ceramic jars used to store drugs. Since at least the late medieval period, these jars had functioned as a form of advertising to display the wealth and judicious taste of the apothecary who dispensed drugs out of them: a shop with a full set of colorful Italian-made Maiolica jars, or with the more austere but beautiful blue-and-white Delftware jars favored in England and the Low Countries, promised to be a well-run establishment.

The introduction of new design motifs into drug jars was thus far from a random process. It was guided by the commercial needs of the drug merchant: how do I advertise the purity and potency of the drugs I have for sale? How do I broadcast my links to the Indies, where the most expensive drugs come from? We shouldn’t be surprised, then, to find our friends the serpent and the palm appearing as a prominent motif on jars containing tropical drugs by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries:

 

Breen Pharmacy 5
Figure 5. Nineteenth century drug jars for Basilicum (Basilicum polystachyon, a medicinal plant native to Africa and South Asia) and “Sapo Animal” (likely meaning “animal soap,” but perhaps the medicinal venom of the Amazonian sapo frog?) showing the serpent and palm motif in exoticized landscapes. Via Aspire Auctions.

The commercial pathways that carried medicinal drugs and recipes from the non-European cultures of Amazonia, Brazil and Africa also carried symbols. Can the palm and serpent motif of Portuguese pharmacies be directly attributed to this colonial-era transfer of materials and ideas between Europe and the tropical world? It certainly seems that way to me, although I acknowledge that the link is largely circumstantial.

What is more certain is that the larger culture of drug use in Portugal and its colonies was strongly shaped by indigenous American and African influences. Although today the contents of a pharmacy are divided from the domain of recreational drug use by formidable cultural and legal boundaries, this was not the case in the seventeenth century. This was a time when apothecaries freely dispensed opium, tobacco, alcohol and even cannabis alongside more familiar remedies like chamomile tea. And it is here, in the etymologies of three familiar words associated with recreational drugs, that the influence of the colonies upon Portuguese drug culture is most apparent.

Unlike other speakers of Romance languages, who typically puff on tubos or pipes, Lusophones smoke from cachimbos, a term derived from the word kixima in the Kimbundu language of West Central Africa. (This is an especially intriguing etymological origin because pipes are typically thought of as being introduced to Europeans via indigenous Americans, not Africans). From colonial times to the present, at least some of those who used cachimbos were filling them not with tobacco but with maconha, i.e. cannabis, derived from the Kimbundu makaña.

And perhaps they washed this down with a fortifying swig of jerebita, now known as cachaça or sugar-cane liquor, which, according to the historian João Azevedo Fernandes, has a not entirely unexpected point of origin: “the word jerebita very probably originated from the Tupi word jeribá, a species of palm tree.”