Building a cob oven

Day 1
The day started out sunny and on my walk around the garden just after sunrise I spotted a beautiful little Southern Collared Sunbird skipping from branch to branch in one of the wild plum trees. The weather was boding well for our first ever cob experiment, a bread-baking oven.

Kenneth told me it would be far too far for us to walk to the home of the local pottery lady. On quizzing him further, however, it turned out to be about two kilometres, and, despite the fact that a white lady obviously shouldn’t walk such an appalling distance on foot, we set off with the haggardy old wheelbarrow to fetch clay.

Only the pottery lady’s stoned old husband was at home, and it took a fair few ‘hello’s and ‘excuse me’s of increasing volume before he woke out of his drug-infused mid-morning slumber. Once awake and more or less functioning, and despite numerous interruptions of the giggles, he finally managed to show us around his compound.

His wife fetched the clay from a riverbed down the hill and worked up pots by hand before burning them on a fire behind the compound. His personal role in the household seemed confined to chamba-smoking and mid-morning and –afternoon naps.

I bought a large pot and his wife’s full stash of clay very cheaply for 500 kwacha, which produced another giggling attack before the old man happily collapsed on the stamped earth and returned to his previous occupation.

After lunch Christian and I started breaking down an old brick wall which is due to be pulled down anyway. Despite the midday sun, we made steady progress with our hammers and chisels, and within an hour we had enough recyclable bricks for our cob oven foundations. Most of them were of shockingly inferior quality, but they would serve their new purpose well enough. Meanwhile, the guys returned from the forest with bucketfuls of good, grainy sand.

Getting the guys involved in mixing cob mixing with their feet made for an entertaining afternoon, and I’m still not sure if they thought it was quite a normal thing to do or completely mad. But they seemed to take a keen interest in my cob-building book and the drawings of the oven that would soon rise from the earth.

We managed to finish the brickwork for the foundations on day 1, using cob as mortar (a touch I haven’t read about in the book, but we didn’t have any cement – I wonder if it will work). Tomorrow morning Kenneth will visit Father Chamba and get some more clay, which will hopefully be enough for the rest of the oven.

Day 2
Lefson is a very quiet man, especially in English. In fact I thought for a long time that he didn’t speak any English at all, and I used a translator whenever I spoke with him. But it soon turned out that his English is very good. During the cob building process, which clearly had caught his imagination by now, he would break his habitual silence and start asking lots of questions about the cob mix, how the oven would work, and whether we were really going to build our own house from this stuff. He’s a thorough guy and has shown a lot of care and interest in this project, which has been a real pleasure to see.

Kenneth arrived with more clay, and we all happily started mixing another load of cob from sand and clay and formed little balls that we used to build up the oven on top of my large half-ball of sand that would be used to hold the shape until the cob was dry. But when we were about to start mixing the outer layer – the straw-rich mix – I got a few doubting, even shocked, looks, and I’d clearly lost them for a bit.

I even started getting worried myself, for the straw we used was old thatch, with stems so thick and hard that they cut the hands and feet to shreds. And the damn things wouldn’t mix with the clay. But the breakthrough came suddenly, after some tense, coordinated tarp-pulling, and we suddenly had a coherent and really strong mix. Everyone had come round, it seemed, from the looks on their faces.

We all had a coke – clearly not something they had experienced before from an employer either – and finished building up the oven with the last of the mix. Unfortunately we just fell short of cob mix, and I was most disappointed to have to leave our unfinished work for the day, but decided that a hot shower would be welcome. I had rarely been that dirty, and that’s saying something.

Perhaps it was fate, but the water was not yet hot at six o’clock, and I was impatiently circling the Rhodesian donkey to check on the fire under the hot water drum. It was starting to get cold as well, but my thorough coating of mud prevented me from putting on a jumper.

And then suddenly, as dusk was falling, Mika, our 14-year-old orphaned holiday helper, arrived with clay. Christian and I obviously jumped at it, and in our rush to get the mix finished while there was still a trace of light in the sky, we ended up smothered in clay from head to foot. The oven was soon completed by the aid of a couple of candles, and then we were so ready for the hot shower!

The big test
Before leaving Ntchisi and Christian going home to Denmark, we made a beautiful door for the cob oven from a half ‘slice’ of a tree trunk, with a home-made handle on it. But unfortunately we had to leave the cob oven to dry, until earlier this week when we came back to test it.

It had cracked a bit, both the inner and outer layers. I guess we must have put too much clay in the mix? I made a big deal out of the test with the staff and subsequently got really worried that the thing wouldn’t work. But after having the fire burning for a couple of hours, the oven seemed to stay hot nevertheless. The buns went in, and 20 minutes later we had beautiful hot rolls for everybody! All in all a successful first experiment.