Word: manioc
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Gang. When a team fresh from Vung Tau in their black pajamas and black berets arrived in Binh Phuoc, an inland hamlet of rice and manioc farmers, they started from the ground up-and slowly-to win the confidence of the villagers. First project: drawing a crude map of the village, its homes and road accesses. They ate in the local restaurants as a means of getting acquainted, took guard duty at night, began a census, used part of their first paychecks to buy cigarettes to give away. Working in three-man cells, they visited huts during the day, passing...
Sunday, September 5--Yesterday the old man took me to see his fields of manioc and coffe, at my request. Most of the fields are simply stretches of forest that have been laboriously cleared by hand, with hoe and machete. The beautiful, even rows of corps in dark earth that one sees in American farms don't exist here...
...that had been under the cut. We sat in the shade and drank the palm wine. One of the men explained to me, half joking, the importance of this drink to village life. It's cheap--25 francs for a groundful. In the morning, the men eat a little manioc, and empty a gourd of palm wine. Then, juiced up, they take a machete and go off to the fields to work all day. At night they come back, eat some foutou, and empty another gourd of palm wine. Then they are happy--and sleep well. The sub prefect once...
...behind Hanoi in the hope of developing new agricultural land, but the million who have been forcibly moved complain of ghosts and malaria. This year North Viet Nam will fall 2,500,000 tons short of its programmed rice-production level, forcing the people to eat corn, millet and manioc-hardly favorites of the Asian palate...
Back to the Manioc. The men of Katanga, particularly those in government, have no greater desire than to appear évolués (progressive) in the eyes of visiting African and European dignitaries. But they learned long ago that their wives would be no help. Usually married by 15 and quickly saddled with the burdens of multiple motherhood, the Katangese wife has no time to acquire social graces. At a formal affair, she usually sits immobile, responding to conversational gambits with an agonized oui or non, counting the minutes until she can return to her manioc masher...