Walking through parts of the city after dusk, especially streets in lower- and middle-income neighborhoods, one will often find groups of people eating mutura. The setup is normally the same: Mr. Mutura Server (almost always mister, for reasons I don’t fully understand), clad in a white lab coat with flecks of blood on it (anything less cannot be trusted) and gumboots, works on a grill, atop which are placed rolls of mutura. Sometimes, there is soup nearby, the soup being a liquid made from crushed goat and cow hooves that are boiled—an acclaimed hangover cure, according to mutura enthusiasts. Coalesced around the mutura server is a crowd of people, maybe three people, maybe eight people for the very popular mutura sellers. Behind them, there is always a road, because mutura is always eaten amid a cacophony of vehicular sounds and dust. Sometimes mara. Nowadays they don’t do ten bob. But it also depends on the type of mutuch [mutura]. There’s the really thick ones that are filling and then the slim ones, the ones that crumble when you try to cut. I can do for sixty those.”
