Ugali
type of maize flour porridge made in Africa
Ugali, also known as posho, nsima, papa, pap, bogobe, sadza, isitshwala, akume, amawe, ewokple, akple, and other names, is a type of corn meal made from maize or corn or mahindi flour in several African countries: Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Lesotho, Eswatini, Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Malawi, Botswana and South Africa, and in West Africa by the Ewes of Togo, Ghana, Benin, Nigeria and Ivory Coast. It is cooked in boiling water or milk until it reaches a stiff or firm dough-like consistency. In 2017, the dish was added to the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, one of a few foods on the list.
Names
This dish is eaten widely across Africa, where it has different local names:
Etymology
The word ugali is an African term derived from Swahili; it is also widely known as nsima in Malawian languages such as Chichewa and Chitumbuka. In parts of Kenya, the dish also goes by the informal name of sembe or ugali. In Zimbabwe it is known as sadza in Chishona or isitshwala in Ndebele The Afrikaans name (mielie) pap comes from Dutch, in which the term means "(corn) porridge".
History
Ugali was introduced in Africa shortly after the Portuguese had introduced maize. Maize was introduced to Africa from the Americas between the 16th and 17th centuries. Before this, sorghum and millet were the staple cereals in most of Sub-Saharan Africa. African farmers readily accepted maize as its cultivation was very similar to that of sorghum but with significantly higher yields.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ugali” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.