Smoky, succulent, fall-off-the-bone meat served with guava jelly and roast potatoes. Earlier in our relationship, when I began conjuring up recipes using wild food, I’d told Chris about a roast leg of pork Tom had cooked in a hole in the ground while on safari with my parents in the 1980s. It was my partner, Chris, who suggested I invite Tom to our farm in the Zambezi Valley to teach me all he knew about cooking in the bush. Tom had traveled by bus all the way from the rural area in which I grew up in Zimbabwe Adelina was my Zambian sous chef.
I’d asked both of them to help me cook an outdoor gourmet lunch, set amongst a resident herd of orphaned and rescued elephants. Adelina has lived in Livingstone near the Zambezi River for much of her life. Tom repositioned the site for his oven next to Adelina Banda’s mbaula, a small charcoal-filled metal brazier.
“We have an eighteen-foot resident crocodile living near there. “I think your oven may be a little too close to the water,” she warned. Slightly stooped, a well-worn white uniform flapping loose on his thin frame, Tom concentrated on measuring the hole exactly, using black sisal string, but was interrupted by Clover, a manager at Zambezi Elephant Trails, who’d watched him with a look of concern. Tom Chavakho, his salt-and-pepper hair hidden under a modish felt trilby, bent down slowly to mark out the piece of ground he’d dug for his bush oven using the sharp end of his jamba.
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