RKGN

Months ago, while in Southern Africa, I bought two kilograms of beans from the market and carried them back to Germany. This is sound economics when you live alone. You cook a kilo, divide it into small portions, freeze them, and whenever the craving for plant protein strikes, you defrost a portion, make stew, mingle Karo or posho, and dinner is sorted. Yesterday I came home hungry and discovered I had exhausted the frozen supply. I went for the uncooked stock and found weevils. They had moved in, made themselves comfortable, married, reproduced and multiplied inside my own house, inside my own beans, without paying a single euro in rent. Now, I could have boiled them as they were, insects, larvae, eggs and all. We ate worse at Makobore, Muyenga and Kyamakanda. A little extra protein, some wings for texture, character in the broth. But the thought of it sat badly with me, and I was not ready to throw the beans away, and picking the weevils out one by one was beneath my dignity. So I chose a middle path. I spread the beans on an oven tray, set the temperature to 250 degrees Celsius, and watched. Through the oven glass I watched them jump. Little frantic hops as the heat became unbearable, each one leaping and landing and leaping again until it could not. I smiled. That is the price you pay when you invade my food, I told them. I watched each one die and felt nothing but satisfaction, the way it feels when justice, however small, is administered swiftly and without appeal. The problem is that anger is a poor chef. I left the heat running longer than was necessary. I obliterated the weevils completely, yes. Their eggs too. Their larvae. Every last one of them. But I also obliterated my beans. When I washed them and put them on to cook, they sat in boiling water for hours and refused to soften. They remained hard as stones, as though the heat had sealed some kind of stubbornness into them permanently. I eventually threw them out. I have taken losses in this life. Some significant. Some that kept me awake. But those beans hurt me in a specific way that other losses do not. Ugandan beans in exile are not a small thing. You know how they cook, how they smell, the particular softness when they are done right, the way they taste with posho at the end of a long day in a strange country far from home. I had carried them across continents. I had protected them for months. And I threw them away in anger, which is the most Ugandan ending imaginable.

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