The Sunday News
ONE freezing evening I was welcomed into Mother’s kitchen by an aroma of fried winged termites (izinhlwa/ishwa).
“At last,” I exclaimed, closed my eyes and sniffed. The aroma caressed my nostrils and spread throughout my body. I licked my lips and salivated. “Yummy, yummy, something tasty to go with my isitshwala.”
From the kitchen corner and standing over her hot Welcome Dover stove, Mother chuckled. “I didn’t know you loved mfushwa that much.”
“I don’t,” I said. “No dried vegetables for me today. I am having those tasty termites.”
Mother frowned. “Termites in June? We only have those during the rain season. Just mfushwa for you my boy.”
“Then where is the termites’ aroma coming from?”
“It could be from cockroaches. A couple of big ones flew in from outside, landed on the stove and got burnt.” I had to struggle through an unappetising meal of isitshwala and umfushwa.
Has anyone ever sniffed the air after cockroaches had been burnt?
Those who have, and also happen to know the aroma of fried termites will confirm that the aroma I picked up in Mother’s kitchen was to be expected. Yes, the two aromas of fried termites and burnt cockroaches are identical.
Why should this be?
Scientists have long known that cockroaches and termites are closely related. In 2007 Dr Paul Eggleton and colleagues at the National History Museum in London carried out the most comprehensive DNA study on the subject. They studied 107 different species of termites, cockroaches and mantis, another group of animals believed to be closely related. The study established that termites evolved from cockroaches. Thus the two are essentially the same. Dr Eggleton concluded that “termites are social cockroaches”. The difference between the two is no more than that between cattle and buffalos.
This conclusion may surprise many who see termites and cockroaches as being worlds apart. Termites are thought to be harmless, edible and even beautiful while cockroaches are viewed as harmful, disgusting and ugly. Really? Dear reader, kindly pause for a minute and closely examine your personal relationship with our friends in the kitchen.
Has the cockroach, like a tsetse fly or wasp ever bitten or stung you? Has it, like a mosquito or bed bug ever cut your skin and sucked your blood? Has it, like a house fly ever spread to you some disease? Has it, like the army worm ever destroyed your crop. Has it, like a weevil ever devoured your precious harvest? Has it, like numerous other insects ever wreaked havoc on your vegetables? If the answer to these questions is no, why then do you consider a cockroach to be a pest?
True, it eats what you eat but the cockroach concentrates on your leftovers. It respectfully waits for you to leave the food before it starts eating it.
The cockroach is not endowed with the well shaped body of a wasp but as they say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. If you keep telling yourself that it’s simple straight figure is beautiful, you will find the cockroach beautiful.
For those who place little value in beauty, cockroaches have a practical use. I will wander a bit before returning to this subject.
Have you noticed that many of our people look up to things from far away and sneer at local produce? For instance fruits like apples and pears are packed in clean transparent papers and sold from fridges in upmarket supermarkets while indigenous fruits like umviyo and umnyii are sold from old upturned cardboard boxes at Egodini and other open spaces. This sends a message — foreign is superior and local is inferior. Yet health personnel keep telling us that our wild fruits are some of the most nutritious foods in the world.
CNN reporter David McKenzie recently reported on his food tasting adventures in China. David visited Wang Fuming, a successful cockroach farmer. David found that Wang kept up to 10 million cockroaches. His cockroaches included a species originally from Africa that he sold to pharmaceutical companies by the tonne.
However, Wang preferred cockroaches as food. “I felt so much better after I started eating cockroaches,” Wang told David. “If you don’t try it, you will regret it for the rest of your life.”
Well fellow Zimbabweans, should we wait for the Chinese to export this food before we benefit from it? Surely it is time we made full use of our resources, starting with the cockroach. It may not be beautiful but it is a goldmine. Let us harvest the proteins and nutrients that lie in our cockroaches. Still in the spirit of promoting our own, let us adorn our supermarkets with chillers brimming with well packaged local fruits.
“Not just plain mfushwa for me,” I should have told Mother on that freezing evening. “I will add those delicious burnt cockroaches.”
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