Becoming The Muse

Coffee With Baobab

If you were having coffee with me, I would welcome you to my tangle of words, and offer you a cup of baobab coffee. As we wait for the weather to make up its mind on if it wants to be hot and burn us all to ashes, turn us into icicles or drown us, maybe all three….heatwaves, cold snaps and thunder showers.

Anyway baobab coffee ☕

Did you know you could make “coffee” out of roasted and crushed baobab seeds? Baobab fruit is considered a super food, rich in vitamin C as well as other valuable micronutrients including zinc, potassium, magnesium, iron and calcium. This gives it a long list of health benefits which include: immune boosting, managing blood sugar levels, enhancing iron absorption, aiding digestion as well as antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and antioxidant properties.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that baobab trees grow naturally in 32 African countries, and are also found in some regions of Madagascar, Australia, and the Arabian Peninsula. They can live for 5 000 years, grow to 30 metres in height and upto an enormous 50 metres in circumference. Despite the weird upside-down look, the baobab is a tree of multiple uses that it is dubbed the Tree of life.

Folklore has it that long ago, it was a majestic tree one of the first created and would spend hours gazing at its reflection in the river, however it annoyed its Creator with its arrogance and complaints. Thus it was plucked from the ground and planted upside down as a lesson in humility and so it learnt the wisdom of silence and grew to be useful to others.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that every the part of baobab tree has value, the bark can be pounded into fibres for rope, mats and clothes, the leaves and roots have medicinal properties and the fruit pulp can be eaten or made into powder that can be mixed into juice or as a nutrient additive in other meals and essential oils can be pressed from the seeds.

The seeds can be roasted and crushed to make a caffeine-free, coffee substitute. Baobab coffee has the aroma and flavour that is exactly quite unlike a medium roast. I want to imagine that baobab coffee is infused with ancient wisdom and each sip makes us better creations…. Imagine if additionally they gave off wifi how different we would treat them.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that the first batch of Starlink kits arrived in Zimbabwe and deliveries are being made. There has been such a surge in orders that DHL is swamped in doing door to door deliveries that people are being offered the option for in-person collection at their local depots.

I havent seen any conclusive information on how many kits have been ordered or delivered to Zimbabwe, but I suspect Zimbabwe might have had one of the highest demands for Starlink or to be precise for affordable internet solutions.

Currently, trying to order a residential plan Starlink Kit, using a service address for anywhere in Harare will return the notification that the area is at capacity. Have you any idea how much capacity a service area has? It might vary with region but clearly Starlink had underestimated the uptake of their services in Zimbabwe.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that this all signifies that our Internet Service Providers have been giving us a rather bad deal. Powertel recently announced that they could match Starlink speeds and costs unveiling a competitive package set. While that’s a great move, it has the implication that they could always offer these packages but instead chose to throttle speeds while maximising their profits.

If you were having coffee with me, I would tell you that I hope baobab coffee is infused with the resilience of the baobab trees which can withstand harsh conditions. So remember our gold-backed ZIG Currency, last week the government quietly devalued it by 43%. I thought it was gold-backed, isn’t the value of gold going up, which should mean the ZIG ought too… I am no economist but that cant be right.

Since we have so much lithium maybe we should consider a lithium backed currency and call it the ZIL where the L could stand for lithium and lies. How about a tobacco based currency, I mean tobacco is considered Zimbabwe’s green gold?

And while we are experimenting how about a baobab backed currency, they have been here for thousands of years and they will be here long after us, if anything is a symbol of stability and prosperity it would be the baobab.

Whats been going in your neck of the woods?

~B