Today the mnada came to town. Today I made my journey to the open field in the late afternoon, filing into the stream of people going and returning, bibis covered in khangas, men herding goats and sheep all tied together with one rope, and women balancing basins full of plastic cups and fruit on their heads. The bright sun, just beginning to make its way to the horizon, beat down on hundreds of merchants and shoppers and dozens of livestock scattered across the field. Everything from secondhand socks and sweaters, sandals fashioned from car tires, aluminum pots, to woven baskets, ropes, fruit juice, tobacco, and Maasai beads were for sale, goods scattered about the ground on rolled out mats or opened up maize sacks.
Mnada means auction sale, and is really like one big market. Karatu’s happens the 7th of every month and merchants travel from Arusha and the surrounding area to sell their goods for cheap. T-shirts which usually go for 2000/- are dropped to 500/-, tomatoes are 4 for 100/- instead of 100/- each. And this is where people come to buy and sell livestock, to get a pig to fatten up or to buy a goat to share with another family for a good meal. It goes from morning to evening and tents are set up serving nyama choma, soda, and maandazi, vitumbua, and chapati, all the the typical tea room snacks.
The day before Karatu market day many merchants come to a village not far from my own and hold sort of a mini-market. The field is a bit smaller and there are less things to buy, but still fair prices and yummy snacks, including sukari gumu, a hard, dried, crumbly, and sweet snack made from sugar cane. At the end of the day everyone packs up, heads into town, and unpacks it all again the very next morning. Market day in Karatu is bigger, better, and more eventful — there was even a performace by a dance troupe who included skits and performances on HIV/AIDS, a dance troupe similar to the one who performed at our site announcement ceremony in Morogoro.
In most towns market day happens once per week — why Karatu’s is only monthly I’m not sure, but it makes it more exciting to me that way. Less frequent markets means that it’s something to look forward to, that if I miss this next one it’ll be a whole month before I can return, before I can replace a broken pair of tire sandals or finally purchase that woven mat I’ve been wanting for my sitting room. Each mnada day is a day when villagers emerge from the bush, meet on the big field, buying and selling all kinds of things, and each day is an event of its own.
