Dagaa

Feeding cats is fairly straightforward in most places. You buy some dry cat food kibbles in a big sack or get them lots of little cans of potent-smelling meat and dump some in their bowl every day. In Tanzania, however, cat food requires creativity.

For starters, Tanzanians don't feed their cats, except perhaps some leftovers of their own ugali (stiff porridge usually made out of corn), so it's not like we can run downtown and get some cat food. Clive and Betsy do hunt a bit and particularly enjoy birds and geckos, but they need more than that.

Since Musoma is right on Lake Victoria, fish are sold here in great abundance. There are huge (sometimes up to six feet long!) Nile perch, big tilapia, little tilapia, and dagaa. Dagaa is a Swahili word; I don't know if there is a word for those kind of fish in English. Maybe they are called minnows, sardines, or wee little fishies... we call them dagaa. Dagaa are the cheapest form of fish. They are caught in great quantity and then laid out to dry in the sun. When they get to be a bit crispy, they are sold by the bucketful.

As you can see from this picture, there are some very little dagaa, and some that are a bit larger. They are dry and crunchy in the form in which they are sold. Tanzanians break off the heads and fry them up with some tomato and salt and serve them over rice or ugali as a cheap form of protein. They are mostly tiny bones, silvery skin, and big eyes; I don't think there is much meat on the fish. One does not clean the insides out of dagaa and filet them!

We freeze them, because they go bad if left out, and they smell rather potent. The cats don't seem to care if they are cold, and they don't freeze solid, since there is no liquid in them. We jokingly call them "fishsicles". Clive and Betsy go through about 3/4 gallon of dagaa a week, which costs about $2.00. Additionally, sometimes we make ugali and mix a bit of that in with their dagaa, and we usually give them the end of bread loaves. To fulfill his taste for getting in trouble, Clive steals every human food item he can, from raw papaya to stirfry to banana bread dough. He's particularly fond of cooked pumpkin and pasta (and of course anything with a hint of meat). But dagaa is what they are actually fed, and fed in great quantity. Several times a day we pull the dagaa Tupperware out of the freezer and toss a handful into their bowl, and the fishsicle chow-down begins.