Recycled papers, tiny glasses and used whisky bottles

I wish I could write the history and the art of ngouba packaging and consumption.  Thirty years ago we used to visit the province of Bas-Zaire (now Bas Congo) and spend the day around the town of Inkisi (also known as Kisantu) past Kasangulu, thirty miles from Kinshasa.  Walking on red dirt roads occupied on both sides by countless “boutiques” and stalls, I would look for ngouba any time I was hungry.

Ngouba here ngouba there symbolized for me a face of Africa I felt comfortable with.  Seeing ngouba in a town or a village made me feel at home. I could relate to the omnipresent ngouba, the familiar African peanut everyone could afford.

The central African ngouba, natural or roasted, shelled or unshelled do not taste the same as the one purchased in the United States superbly packaged, roasted and salted in the best looking shelves of the best looking supermarkets. Our ngouba is a unit of time, a time lived with very little prosperity.

There are many kinds of ngouba, a variety of places one usually sees ngouba being served and consumed, several types of sellers selling these “arachides” as they are often called in French, and many sorts of packaging of these same peanuts. 

The unshelled peanuts ones are natural, roasted or boiled.  The pleasure is in the pealing.  If you shell them and roast them, you can leave the reddish “skin”, or you can remove it.  Once toasted they can be placed in bottles, without salt or with salt.  The aristocratic kind gets sugarcoated. 

During lunchtime they are consumed in offices, and more often than not in bars.  Home consumption is not as popular. Young sellers walk the streets for hours with the offerings in large enamel trays, stopping when called, while hundreds of stalls in many corners offer all the varieties being prepared daily.

The packaging varies from the recycled whisky bottles filled to the brim with salted or unsalted ngouba for one thousand francs cfa, served by “pouring” them in cupped hands and sometimes in one single cupped hand with appreciative smiles during feasts, weddings or other types of gathering.

Sellers sell small and larger quantities in paper cones made from newspapers or printed computer paper from discarded and “recycled” private and public sector institutions.  They make good reading if any one bothers to spend time to read them in public. Sometimes you can see numbers and calculations and even purchase orders, or listings of all sorts,  once the last peanut is gone and the paper unfolds.

One can even buy those nuts in tiny quantities in tiny liquor glasses offered for pennies, or in tight miniature bundles tightly packed in a transparent thin plastic sheet, to be extracted diligently using your teeth to loosen those ngouba pearls that keep reminding us of the small joys of daily life under some African skies.