HOUSEKEEPING IN UGANDA.

Bush Advocate, Volume XXI, Issue 146, 19 December 1908, Page 6

HOUSEKEEPING IN UGANDA.

Housekeeping in Uganda, as described in the latest book on the. interesting persons "The Baganda at Home," possesses a certain -easy charm. If you have a garden, there is no need to exercise your mind or muscles in securing a good soil. CaulifloAvers, when too kindly treated, shoot up like so many Alices in Wonderland, to six feet high— in fact, become cabbage trees instead of cauliflowers. Pineapples and lemons must also bo grown on soil of no great quantity, or they run to magnificent leaves and no supply of frjiit. Apples only arrive now and then, and are thought cheap at fourpence apiece, while plums aroa penny each; but then you get half a hundredweight of bananas for twopence,, and the Baganda people sometime succeed in bringing up their babies upon banana pulp and banana beer — though it is an unfortunate fact that over 80 per cent, depart in early infancy. The white man lives much upon fowls at twopence or fourpence each, but when eaten steadily at the rate of three hundred and sixty-five fowls a year, this diet is looked Upon less as a luxury than as a trial. The natives vary their banana meals with the flesh of the edible rat, a strictly vegetarian animal, which grows harmlessly fat on the roots of trees. Chiefs keep special hitntsmen, whose duty it is to provide a regal supply of rat. But like all native races, the Baganda soon grow into appreciating the European imported foods. After the Katikiro, or Prime Minister, paid his visit to England, the native dinner was the only thing ho found , it hard to return to. /'Ho much prefers English food, whenever ho can gei it." The English food in Uganda comes chiefly in tins — "tinned foods of every kind, even to oysters,

shrimps, fish, meat — in fact everything" — though, markets are gradually being established for goat's flesh and mutton, and the market-gar-dening native is beginning a useful career. The American tinned-uieat scare gave a great shock to domestic happiness. One Uganda resident went s<^ far as to return a consignment of biscuits, with fhe remark that no tinned stuff was to be sent again. This was an extreme case, however, even amongst the English, while nOjScare could shako the Baganda's firm conviction that the two happiest things in life are, first, to walk into church in a pair of squeaking boots (the louder the squeak the more distinguished you are), and second, to sit completing a native feast with English biscuts and tea.