'Posho'

Maize(Corn) flour, Nshima or Ugali in Swahili and we Ugandans call it posho, now I cannot take any claim on the legitimacy of what I am about to write but as I have been told by one before me who probable heard from another before him, the story of  posho dates back to the colonial days.

Colonized by the British in 1894, Uganda gained her independence on the 9^th day of October in 1962. The British however would leave us  with maize which is said to have been brought to Africa from the Americas by the Europeans, today corn meal is not only eaten in Uganda but across many African countries it is referred to differently depending on which part of Africa you are from.

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Posho forms the main part of the daily meals for many Ugandans; it can be used to make nutritious porridge for breakfast or cooked into thick bread eaten with a stew at lunch or dinner. It is the most widely served meal in schools and other institutions in Uganda. It also has many other uses; it can also be used to starch belts my sister tells me, for when they run out of starch in high school they used maize flour to starch their belts, I have also known it to be used as glue in nursery school. So that’s how important maize is to Ugandans.

Before I forget, ours is a family were stories were shared by the fire when my dad was a young boy and even though we no longer had the luxury of evening fires by which to tell stories my dad maintained the tradition of story telling, and one evening he says do you know how posho came to be and we all shook our heads to indicate no, with wide eyes depicting our interest, often enough he begun a story this way. So he goes on to say in the colonial days the colonial masters used slaves to do a lot of the work be it farming or in factories and it was the duty of the master to feed his slaves, maize which is high in carbohydrates was a favoured meal to be given to the slaves because it made them strong and was quite filling, and so when the meal break bell was rang the master ordered the slaves to go for their portions, I guess to a Ugandan who spoke no English and heard the master from a distance could not make out the pronounced ‘n’ at the end of the word and that's how the maize meal became posho.

Happy Independence Day to all Ugandans...........the struggle continues!