Baking Bread Using Brick Ovens and Bread Makers

History of Bread Making and Consumption in Zimbabwe

Aug 10, 2009

Commercial bread, though expensive relative to wages, was a convenient breakfast food for the working urban population during the colonial era in Zimbabwe, then Rhodesia.

Among rural Africans in Rhodesia bread use varied widely depending on region, season and proximity to urban centres which generally correlated with purchasing power and European influences in diet.

The type of bread substitutes used also depended on income, season, region and family preference. Pumpkin, yams, sweet potatoes, boiled dried cowpeas (mutakura wenyemba), roundnuts (mutakura wenyimo). Homemade wheat flour based substitutes were also in common use. In a good rainfall year some villagers substituted bread with fresh boiled maize cobs from February to April.

However, before independence many families had bread at Christmas and New Year except for those in the remotest villages.

After independence the consumption of bread in urban centres rose due to three main factors.

Robert Mugabe's socialist leaning government introduced a minimum wage, food subsidies and prices controls, thus increasing the purchasing power of urban workers in the short term at the expense of wheat farmers, bakers, bread wholesalers and grocery shop owners.

In rural Zimbabwe the standard of living declined in many regions due to the human and economic toll of the 1970’s bush war, the Gukurahundi massacres in Matabeleland and the war in Mozambique which affected Manicaland, drought and government neglect. Reliance on industrial and manufactured commodities, including bread, fell further despite controlled prices.

Wheat Flour Based Bread Substitutes

Makerevengwani (shortened makere) are cooked in an iron cast pot over an open. The simple dough consists of flour, maize meal, baking powder, a little sugar and water. It is a low cost filling because maize is the main ingredient and often comes from the family plot.

Chingwa chemupoto (chimupotohwai or chimondo) is made from flour, water, sugar and salt. Eggs, oil butter or maize meal maybe used to make a variant of corn bread. Quantities are not standardised. Women depend on instinct and experience.

The dough is poured into a pan which is put over hot ashes and covered with a tray of hot coals, creating an oven baking effect.

Bread Making in Rural Areas

From 1980, Mugabe’s government encouraged villagers to form bread making co-operatives among other ventures.

Rural women baked bread in firewood heated drum or brick ovens. Intuition, not recipes, guided them.

However, few co-operatives lasted a few years due to lack of capital, organisational skills and lasting commitment.

African Industrial Bread Making

From the mid-1980s the Zimbabwean economy started showing severe strain. Government introduced International Monetary Fund (IMF) prescribed reforms, commonly called Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP), in 1991. The reforms affected bread making and consumption in various ways.

Firstly, subsidies and price controls on bread and other basic foodstuffs were removed, leaving bread prices to the vagaries of the market.

Africans were licensed to found, buy and operate industrial bakeries. Prior to ESAP, black entrepreneurship was obstructed by the government’s socialist policies aided by a prohibitive culture and structure inherited from racist Rhodesia.

The urban market for bread contracted severly. High inflation eroded wages, so did removal of food subsidies and price control. Drought added pressure on meagre wages. Urban dwellers lost food supplements from their rural homes and were increasingly expected to supplement the food needs of families back in the village with processed goods. In addition, the number of wage earners dipped further due to collapse of the country's manufacturing sector due to ESAP and problems from earlier decades.

By the mid-nineties food riots and industrial action to demand higher wages characterised urban life in Zimbabwe. Bread was still available but not affordable to the majority of workers. The rural population was by now irrelevant as a market for bread.

Severe bread shortages plagued Zimbabwe following commercial farm invasions which disrupted wheat productio. The imposition of economic sanctions against the country worsened the situation.

Kumbirai Mafunda, writing in The Financial Gazette, stated that out of an estimated consumption of 350 00 to 400 000 tonnes, farmers harvested a mere 95 000 tonnes in 2005.

Bakeries made less bread and hyperinflation rendered it unaffordable to most workers.

Urban black Zimbabweans resorted to making makerevengwani and chimupotohai. Those with higher incomes bought bread makers mainly from South Africa to make fresh bread using electricity fired by private electric generators.

The Zimbabwe government, after ignoring the problem for a while, used the Pricing of Goods Act to control prices instead of tackling wheat production and other aspects of the battered economy.

Price controls were enforced before elections and relaxed afterward, supporting the view that government intervention was a vote buying gimmick.

Robert Mugabe increased commercial bread consumption in urban areas in the 80s but destroyed the baking industry in less than two decades.

The copyright of the article Baking Bread Using Brick Ovens and Bread Makers in Indigenous African History is owned by Farai Muchemwa. Permission to republish Baking Bread Using Brick Ovens and Bread Makers in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.