Afternoon Tea

One thing I have really come to love lately is afternoon tea. The ritual goes something like this:

Once the sun starts to set, around 5pm, I start to heat the water. If I’m going to cook dinner at home that night, I use my charcoal stove. When I first got here I absolutely dreaded lighting the charcoal because it got my hands dirty, took forever, and had a very high failed-first-attempt rate. By now, I’m a charcoal-lighting pro. I’ve discovered that the best way to do it by using a dustpan to scoop the charcoal into the stove, and then use roof thatch the get the flame going. The entire process, which used to take about half an hour, has decreased to just five minutes. If I’m not going to cook dinner here, I just use my gas stove, which is much easier in the short term, but more expensive and inconvenient in the long term because it’s difficult and pricey to get the tank refilled.

Well, I get the flame going and put the teapot on the stove. While the water’s heating, I roll out a reed mat on my porch. I bring the teacups, teabags, sugar, and best of all, limes. The tea is Mozambican tea, from the tea fields in Gurue, in Zambezia province. The sugar, which is of course brown sugar, is also a Mozambican product, and the limes are literally fresh off the tree. Like you literally send a student or other kid to go climb the tree and take down the limes so you can cut them and hand-squeeze the juice into the tea. Flavored teabags don’t exist here, except for in the expensive South African stores, but during lime season there isn’t a flavored teabag I’d rather have.

In Mozambique, everyone drinks tea; it’s not primarily for women as it is in the US. And tea, in Mozambique, is to be drunk piping hot. My two-year-old neighbor can tolerate hotter tea than I can. (I think that this must lead to taste bud damage, because Mozambicans like to put a lot of salt on everything.) Sambo can down an entire cup while it’s still too hot for me to comfortably sip. Morning tea is also a must, according to all Mozambicans, but I don’t always have time for that (What do I mean not have time? I’m so white. Why don’t I just go to work late like most other people here?), and it’s definitely not ritualized like afternoon tea.

A peculiarity about tea in Mozambique is that a thermos is a must. You can’t boil the water in the teapot and pour it directly into the teacups. It must go from the teapot, to the thermos, and then to the teacups. I’m not sure of the exact reason, but I think it must have something to do with the fact that a woman must have morning tea ready by the time her husband wakes up, and afternoon tea ready by the time he gets home from work. A thermos allows her to make sure the tea is ready in time, but doesn’t proceed to waste charcoal or occupy the stove after the water’s ready. It also guarantees that if he dilly-dallies for two minutes the water won’t cool down to an unsatisfactory temperature. And the thermoses here are of optimum quality. You can boil water at night, and it’s still piping hot for morning tea, or morning bath. They also come in all sizes, up to 3 liters, which is almost a gallon.