#56 Rwanda

Rwanda is a little land-locked country in the African Rift Valley and is affectionately known as the “land of a thousand hills”, the landscape being “reminiscent of a tropical Switzerland”. Where the Alps are home to mountain goats, the Volcanoes National Park in northern Rwanda is home to the endangered mountain gorillas. It is possible to buy a permit for a day of tracking a family of mountain gorillas (with a guide), so it’s possible to see these magnificent creatures in the wild if you visit Rwanda. And why not holiday in Rwanda – it’s neither hot nor cold, super-clean (some say it’s "the Singapore of Africa"), and plastic bags are completely banned in a commitment to protect the beautiful natural environment.

Just as the climate is not too hot, the food is also not too hot. Meals revolve around locally grown cereals: corn, sorghum and millet, which are often made into a stiff dough-like porridge called ugali. Meat is rarely consumed in rural areas, but chicken is fairly common in cities and fish is also eaten near Lake Kivu in the west of the country.

If you are lucky enough to find some chicken in Rwanda, it might be served to you in a dish called igisafulya. The naming convention for dishes in Rwanda appears to follow a similar pattern to that in Morocco, where tagine refers both to the vessel in which the food is cooked, and to the food that is cooked in the vessel. In Rwanda, igisafuyla is the local word for ‘pot’, and also the local word for a dish of chicken and vegetables including peppers, tomatoes, celery, spinach and plantain being cooked together in…guess what…in a pot.

For the vast majority of the population living in rural communities with limited access to meat, beans are a vital source of protein. Beans are water-efficient, good for soils and are a nutritional powerhouse of protein, fibre and micronutrients. These sustainable legumes are the primary staple for millions of people in sub-Saharan Africa and are appreciated by nobody more than Rwandans. Rwanda eats more beans per capita than any other country!

A typical lunch or dinner in Rwanda would be boiled beans with boiled and/or mashed sweet potato, cassava, or igitoke, a variety of green banana which is another staple crop in the region. I tried igitoke for the Uganda blog in 2020, where it is called matoke. I didn’t love it.

As well as for direct consumption, bananas in Rwanda are also grown to produce banana beer and banana wine, a snippet of information that offends me greatly.

Another well-known Rwandan dish is isombe, a concoction of pounded cassava leaves mixed in with other vegetables, peanuts and palm oil. It’s similar to the fumbwa I had for Republic of the Congo, which was weirdly tasty.

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Ibihaza

The national language in Rwanda is Kinyarwanda, and given the time of year, what better word to learn than the Kinyarwanda word for ‘pumpkin’: ibihaza. Ibihaza also refers to any dish where pumpkin is the chief ingredient, and usually also involves beans. The ibihaza could be boiled and mashed and served on a plate with separate little piles of beans and vegetables, or boiled together with the beans, or, if you have an oven, roasted to make it extra-delicious.

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From Rwanda, to…MONGOLIA.

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