Backyard Ritual (Tanzania, Zanzibar)

In Swahili homes, cooking is often done outside, in a side courtyard or a sheltered corridor between the walls. These semi-open spaces are at once domestic workshops , places of transmission, speech and passage. Cooking is a discreet ritual, made up of precise, repeated, shared gestures.

At the center, the jiko —a traditional charcoal stove—remains the central element. Made of metal or terracotta, depending on the household's resources, it allows for slow or vigorous cooking, suitable for fresh fish, rice, chapatis, and sauces. The charcoal is rekindled by hand, using improvised tools, often a spoon or a recycled box.

Here, each object tells the story of an economy of reuse : metal basins, transformed cans, woks blackened by use. Cooking is done by smell and gesture: we learn by looking, by tasting, by listening to the crackling of the oil or the way the smoke curls.

This type of cuisine, invisible in tourist stories, carries a collective memory: that of women, lineages, neighborhoods , where cooking becomes a knowledge passed down from generation to generation. A memory nourished by fire, patience and silence.