Market Day

Today is market day at Tengeru. It is Wednesday, so when I come to the main road in the morning it is already beginning to come alive. By 8 am, the daladalas (minibuses) are filling up with people who have bought their goods and are leaving: a woman with a giant stalk of plantains, green and seeping glue onto your clothes if you sit too close; a young man with an armful of shoes, hanging by their laces in a cascading display—I could go shopping right there, on the bus to work; an old man with two hens in his lap; someone in the front seat with a tower of eggs on trays; a bucket of milk under every seat, making for awkward leg-space; large baskets of vegetables or grains or beans, covered with bright green banana leaves. On mornings like this, the daladala smells green.

In the early afternoon, when I come back from town, the market is loud and bright. There is the shoe section: rectangles of tarp laid out on the ground forming narrow paths. Some have heaps of shiny new plastic slippers straight from China; some have heaps of very used shoes, probably also from China, but via USA or Europe—you have to bend over double to search for matching pairs, women’s backsides jutting up and creating traffic jams on the narrow paths; some have carefully cleaned and polished pairs of used shoes, displayed in neat rows on their tarps. Beyond the shoe section, once you have navigated the butts-up-heads-down shoe shoppers, you get to the clothes. Here again, there are neat displays of pants and shirts, folded and sorted, but there are also piles. Giant mountains of clothes with the sellers lounging within them, sing-songing like autioneers, “Three hundred children’s clothes; children’s clothes three hundred; three hundred is the price; three hundred children’s clothes…”, “Shiiirts five hundred, five-five-five, five hundred shirtssss”. You have to listen carefully, because what was clearly “mia tatu, mia tatu” (three hundred) at 7 am has by 1 pm morphed into something like “mmmtatatata”. (By 5 pm, the sellers are often sleeping in their mountains, and you have to wake them up to ask the price.)

On the other side of the shoes is the vegetable market, with the less aggressive, more business-as-usual women, and the young boys who follow shoppers around with their assortment of plastic bags for sale. And after that is the road home, lined with clusters of women sitting, resting abit before their return home, maybe waiting for the last of their party to sell the last of her stuff. Everywhere, women, walking to the market with heavy sacks of maize on their heads. Walking back home, with children on their backs and whole plantain stalks on their heads. Women carry home food for the week or month, for the family. A man ride past them on a black Chinese bicycles with a single avocado strapped on the back—a snack, perhaps, for one?