3. The Cooking Pot
Aluminium cooking pots are omnipresent in Goudoubo and Kakuma camps. They can be found perched on rooftops, stacked in narrow doorways and perched atop the wood fires burning in countless households. These pots come in all shapes and sizes; some are an arms-length across and deep, others the size of a small dish. Some are dimpled and indented from heavy use or blackened with soot. Others shine smooth and metallic, brightly juxtaposed against the muted tones of the earthen household floors and walls.
Some of these pots have been purchased in local markets, and some were given to people on their arrival as part of the humanitarian distribution of non-food items.17 Many were counted among the few possessions people were carrying with them when they first arrived in these camps.
While much attention has been given to the role of so-called ‘clean’ or improved cooking technologies in the energy sector, the role of established artefacts in people’s everyday lives, such as the aluminium cooking pot, is often overlooked.18 Yet cooking pots are a vital part of people’s experience of and engagement with food preparation, storage and distribution, as well as with the ritual of cooking. In contexts of forced displacement, these everyday things can become important symbols of identity and heritage.
Vessels of life
In crises many refugees anticipate possible future energy needs and pack accordingly. In Goudoubo and Kakuma, people described the cooking pot as one of the few belongings that had been carried with them when leaving homes in Mali, Congo, Sudan and Somalia. One of the translators in Goudoubo, Karim, said that, when they left Mali, he, his wife and children brought nothing but ‘two bags of clothing, a small mattress, some money and a two-kilogramme cooking pot’. Though heavy and cumbersome, the pot was brought because it was deemed essential for the family’s survival on the journey and for sustaining their life upon arrival in Burkina Faso.
Because of the haste with which they left or their mode of transport, some refugees from Mali in Goudoubo were not able to carry their cooking pots with them. One woman recalled how she had arrived in the camp without anything to cook with. Her sister, who had already arrived previously, gave her a standard, ready-made aluminium vessel distributed by UNHCR. But the quality of the pot and the food that came out of it left the woman distressed. At home in Mali, she had run a restaurant. The flat-bottomed UNHCR pots just were not the same as the aluminium vessels with the rounded bottom that she was accustomed to cooking with. She persuaded her brother to return to their home in Mali and track down the large vessels she had used in her restaurant. When he returned, successful, she set up a kitchen in the camp and re-established her business.
Such stories are testament not just to the distinct qualities of a particular cooking vessel for the taste of food, but also to the feelings of belonging and well-being that everyday material objects can invoke. The research teams encountered similar references to the significance and importance of cooking pots across Goudoubo and Kakuma. People attached particular memories of the places and homes they had left behind to specific types of vessel.19 It is perhaps not surprising that these everyday things become even more significant in moments of heightened anxiety, stress and tension.
Pots, people and things
During the 20th century, aluminium pots replaced earthenware vessels across sub-Saharan Africa and proliferated as a normal piece of everyday cooking equipment. However, earthenware vessels remain in use. As noted in Chapter 1, in Goudoubo clay pots or canari are a preferred technology for cooling water, but the cooking pots most frequently encountered in Goudoubo and Kakuma are made from aluminium.
In or around Kakuma and Goudoubo camps, ready-made or mass-produced aluminium pots can be found for sale on market stalls and in small shops. There are two kinds of commonly used mass-produced aluminium pots. Those with flat bottoms are sometimes referred to using the French word ‘casserole’ in Burkina Faso and the Swahili word sufuria in Kenya, while deep-sided pots with a rounded base are sometimes referred to as ‘marmite’ in Burkina Faso and chungu in Kenya.
Like other energy objects, cooking pots have utility or ‘value’ in their relationship to other things. As a cooking vessel, they become useful in conjunction with other technologies and materials.
These pots can also be locally manufactured. Aluminium pots are produced in Goudoubo camp itself, where they are highly desired objects. The time-intensive production process involves sand casting, whereby a sand mould is made in earth and molten aluminium is then poured into it. As discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, aluminium can be sourced in the camp from abandoned solar cookers and forged using a pair of locally made bellows.20 Locally made pots are typically more expensive than ready-made ones and more highly valued. In households that have a locally made pot, women prefer to use this vessel to prepare daily staples, placing it on a three-stone fire rather than on an improved cookstove.
Like other energy objects, cooking pots have utility or ‘value’ in their relationship to other things. As a cooking vessel, they become useful in conjunction with other technologies and materials. Some form of cookstove is needed for pots to cook food. Fuel, such as firewood or charcoal, is required to fuel the fire. Matches are needed to light the fire. A hand, a piece of cardboard, or a pair of bellows is needed to control the circulation of air. Food and water is needed to fill the pot. A spoon is needed to stir. Lids must cover the content to keep it hot and to make it cook faster. Handles may be attached to transport the heavier pots.
Among these elements, the simple cooking pot is uniquely valued because it can serve multiple uses. The same pot can be used to transport firewood, used as a storage container for ingredients in households and shops, or filled with soapy water and used as a washing tub.
In moments of technological scarcity, the cooking pot can fill other gaps. For example, in the absence of weighing scales, which are not widely available in either camp, the cooking pot can also be used as a unit of measurement. During a trade interaction witnessed between a Congolese woman and Turkana women in Kakuma, a small aluminium pot was used to measure out three portions of sorghum and one of yellow peas that were traded for one plastic basin of charcoal.
The story of the cooking pot is also a story about its unique capacity to make and sustain social relationships among people. Nobody in Goudoubo or Kakuma uses a cooking pot to prepare food for themselves alone.21 The stories of displacement that people in Goudoubo and Kakuma shared included repeated accounts of hospitality. People’s accounts of their journey to the camp often included descriptions of households and communities that had invited them to share cooked food or borrow extra pots. Accounts of arrival in the camp often included descriptions of the multiple social and economic exchanges through which people acquired the objects and fuels needed to make their cooking pots useful. The fire itself can also have positive benefits. Soot (more specifically tar) helps seal leaks in thatched roofs. Smoke repels insects. It can keep weevils out of food stored above the hearth. It may have ripening effects on food hung over the fireplace. In this sense, the contents of the pot provide a range of uses, as well as sustaining and nourishing forms of friendship and kinship, and social ties between individuals and families.
The ‘shame’ of soot
Cooking with wood produces soot that sticks to cooking pots. Across Kakuma and Goudoubo, soot is both seen and unseen, produced in countless wood fires and lifted on the arid wind, settling on surfaces and breathed into lungs. It lays claim to all surfaces in its vicinity, stubbornly sticking and leaving smudges in its wake.
In both camps the collection, transportation and usage of wood fuels is, almost exclusively, undertaken by young girls and women. This gendered division of labour is widely acknowledged by the humanitarian energy community. Less widely acknowledged is the deeply gendered presence of soot in everyday life. Its management consumes hours each day for women within the camps, who toil to scrub it clean from their skin and cooking pots.
Across both camps women report a preference for fuels that do not leave residues. One Malian woman in Goudoubo said ‘it is easier to cook with gas, as the pots stay clean and do not blacken. We don’t need to spend time to clean the pot.’ Likewise, in Kakuma, women describe their preference for using charcoal over firewood, despite it being more expensive, in part because this means less time is needed to clean soot from their pots after cooking.
For many women, soot produces shame. Some people described their dirty pots as a source of embarrassment. One Congolese woman in Kakuma said that she spent hours each day scrubbing the outside of her cooking pots because ‘it is very shameful to have pots that are blackened by soot.’
Soot is not equal. Cooking residues do not stick to all pots in equivalent ways, and the shame of soot is not universal. Within each camp there are significant variations in cooking technologies and fuels. Many women cover their cooking pots with a mixture of ash and mud; after cooking they peel off that mixture, revealing a clean pot. The stain of soot on pots and hands, therefore, is a social signifier – one more material identifier of economic status within the refugee camps.
Many local conceptualizations of energy materials may be too diverse across Goudoubo and Kakuma to be generalized. But in both contexts people’s concern with removing soot from cooking pots are a commentary on the complex social and power relations in which they are embedded. As discussed in the following chapter, the top-down labelling of technologies as ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’ can create or reinforce stigma that are already being felt keenly by refugees.
17 UNHCR (1997), Commodity Distribution: The handover of commodities to the intended beneficiaries, fairly, according to specified rations, selection criteria and priorities, http://www.unhcr.org/3c4d44554.pdf; UNHCR (2017), Burkina Faso: Operational Update September 2017, http://reporting.unhcr.org/sites/default/files/UNHCR%20Burkina%20Faso%20Operational%20Update%20-%20September%202017.pdf.
18 Ray, C., Sesan, T., Clifford, M. and Jewitt, S. (2017), ‘From Barriers to Enablers: Where next for Improved Cookstoves?’ Boiling Point, 69, 2–5.
19 Nathani-Wane, N. (2014), Indigenous African Knowledge Production: Food-Processing Practices among Kenyan Rural Women, University of Toronto Press.
20 Osborn, E. L. (2009), ‘Casting aluminium cooking pots: labour, migration and artisan production in West Africa’s informal sector, 1945–2005’, African Identities, 7(3).
21 Although it must also be noted that humanitarian interventions in ‘communal cooking’ have not had a great deal of success. For example, Bellanca reports on the situation in Haiti where displaced people rejected communal cooking sites on the basis of safety and being unsure what was going into the cooking pot. For more see, Bellanca, R. (2014), Sustainable Energy Provision Among Displaced Populations: Policy and Practice.