Sambaza is not easy to describe to someone that does not know it already. But I will try. Let me try:Its a kind of fish that is endemic to Lake Kivu; the fish is small but not very small either. Sambaza may also be described as a kind of fish that is slightly bigger in size than Indagara, and slightly smaller than sardines, but tastier than both sardines and indagara combined. In fact, so tasty is sambaza, it is much more than just taste to the buds: It’s a feeling! This should be the reason it costs an arm and a leg, because can you imagine that in Kigali, one sambaza costs Rwf25, meaning you will get only four of them for Rwf100? But the problem I have with sambaza is the same problem that I have always held against my favorite passion fruit drink, Agashya. This is because whenever the urge for Agashya hits me, I always have to make my way through the thick of human traffic in Nyabugogo, hop onto a bus, and head north-wards, to Nyirangarama, home of Agashya. Agashya is not easy to find in Kigali, much less here in my neighborhood in Kacyiru, where not many shopkeepers even know it exists. The story is the same for sambaza. Everybody that knows the culinary secret in this fish also knows that one has to cast a net far and wide to chance upon it. Like Agashya, which I first encountered at its home in Nyirangarama, the first time I had my sambaza feast, I did it at the source, in Rubavusometime last year. Prior to that, I had only encountered the word on brochures from tour operators proclaiming the different goodies that awaited tourists in the lake area. Obviously, I had decided to view sambaza with a tinge of suspicion – as some kind of fancy, over-priced food that only the tourist dollar could obtain. I was wrong. In Gisenyi where I stayed four nights, sambaza soon became a buzzword. “Have you tasted sambaza?” the waiters at the hotel where I stayed asked whenever they served me food that wasn’t sambaza. It was becoming quite clear that to them, my stay (or any visitor’s stay for that matter) would never be complete without sambaza in the picture. So on the second day, I took a gamble and ordered for some: My sambaza arrived neatly lined headlong on wooden platters, accompanied with chips and lots of onion and lemon slices. I had it as a snack over very chilled Primus. And I did not complain. Neither did I see the need for any leftovers on my platter. On the third day of my visit, when curiosity led me to wander off to the local fishing communities around Lake Kivu, I encountered the same queries. When I told the boatmen I had sampled sambaza at the Paradis Malahide Hotel the previous night, they assured me that that was the basic sambaza treat; that I was yet to discover the grand sambaza feast. That whereas I had eaten it in snack form at the hotel, they wanted me to sample it in stew form, accompanied with the all-dependable ubugari of myumbati.
