Rats find a great deal that they like in an African village, and there are usually plenty of them to be hunted by both cats and boys. The people do not raise wheat, but they have other things that they eat as we eat bread. Millet, barley, and maize or “mealies” are cultivated on the farms and ground on stone slabs. The meal is made into mush or into flat cakes baked before the fire like hoecake.
The commonest substitute for bread is manioc or cassava, which was brought from South America about four hundred years ago by Portuguese explorers. The jungle people call it madioka. The making of manioc flour is quite a long and troublesome piece of work. Nine months after planting, the bulblike roots are pulled up and are soaked for a few days in pools or streams. The fresh root is poisonous, and the soaking takes out the poison. After this, the roots are peeled, cut in pieces, and dried in the sun on small platforms or on stones. When they are quite dry, they are laid on shelves over the fire until they are brittle enough to be pounded and sifted and made into flour.
Another way of using manioc is to make kwanga, or native bread. For this, the root is soaked as for making flour, but instead of then being dried, it is kneaded to remove all lumps until it is a kind of dough that can be shaped into rolls or round balls. After being moulded into shape, the rolls are wrapped in large, smooth leaves and steamed until they are cooked.
The taste of manioc prepared in this way is like that of tapioca. In fact, the starch washed out of cassava roots, and dried and packed, is the tapioca found in grocery stores. The fresh tapioca that is eaten in a cassava country is, however, very much better than what is sold in stores.
Kwanga is sold in markets at the rate of a shilling for fifty pounds, and four pounds will last a man a day. When the men of the village went on a trading journey, or into the forest to gather palm nuts or to cut wood, they always took with them a supply of kwanga. The women had been busy making some that very day, for there was to be an expedition down the river which would start the following morning. This was why the rat, in his corner of the granary, had been left to nibble and to gnaw undisturbed.
While the cat enjoyed her well-earned supper, Nkunda sidled up to the Alo Man. She had been thinking that perhaps it was as important to keep the rats out of the grain as to keep the leopards away from the goat pen.
“Is there a story about the cat?” she asked. “She knew that the rat was stealing our grain when no one else did.”
“There is certainly a story about her,” said the Alo Alan. Then he told the story which explains why the Cat and the Rat are enemies.
I often think [said the Alo Man] of the time, very long ago, when the Cat and the Rat were friends and lived together on an island. It was so long ago that they have both forgotten it, but they led a very happy life. There were birds in the trees for the Cat to eat, and there were nuts and manioc roots for the Rat to eat.