Muamba nsusu Period COrigin theory BVerified

Muamba nsusu is a one-pot stew of central Africa, centered on the Republic of the Congo. Chicken is simmered in a thick sauce of ground peanuts and served at home tables and at feasts alike. The Kikongo word for chicken, nsusu, sits right in the dish's name.

The dish is a relative of muamba, the palm-nut stew of the Congo River basin. The oil palm is native to central Africa, and muamba is chicken cooked in the pulp of its fruit. In the Republic of the Congo, the version made with peanut paste goes by the name muamba nsusu, and the two stand side by side as different versions of the same stew. The peanut version comes out rich and toasty: the same family of stew, with an altogether different flavor.

The peanut itself is a South American crop. It reached the Congo and Angola through Portuguese trade from the sixteenth century on, once the transatlantic slave trade had begun. No record has yet been found of when it settled onto Congolese tables. But Cavazzi, a missionary who spent years in the Congo and Angola, saw peanuts there in the mid-seventeenth century and later wrote them into his book. The chicken-and-peanut stew likely took shape somewhere between the legume's arrival and the dish's first appearance in modern records, worked out in the pots of ordinary households.

Muamba nsusu carries no founder's name, no year of origin, no tale of how it began. It is a home stew handed down by word of mouth across generations, and every written trace of it dates from modern times. So there is no story to tell of a particular person inventing it in a particular year, and no folk tradition claims one.

Muamba made with palm-nut pulp is said to be an indigenous stew that has been in the region since before the colonial era. But that version and the one made with peanut paste are different versions of the same stew, and no record has yet been found showing which came first. However old the palm-nut version may be, its age is no evidence for the age of muamba nsusu as it is cooked today.

The peanut at the heart of the pot is a South American crop. Cavazzi, who lived in the Congo and Angola from 1654 to 1667, saw peanuts there and set them down in his Historical Description of the Three Kingdoms of Congo, Matamba and Angola, published in 1687. Earlier accounts of the Congo show no clear trace of the peanut, and his is the earliest record of it in the region confirmed so far. At some point, that bean from the New World was ground into a pot of chicken and became a dish of its own. Who did it first, and when, has not come down to us.