Throughout the world, considerable effort has been put into improving the domestic cooking stove for use in developing countries, both to improve indoor air quality and to make more efficient use of fuel. Many of the 'improved stoves' that have been designed, though often meeting these two objectives, have not been adopted by the people who were intended to benefit from them. The failure of good ideas like this to be accepted by the intended beneficiaries is often the result of a lack of consultation with the beneficiaries themselves during the development of new techniques and a disregard for local knowledge, traditions and  aspirations.

The importance of the traditional cooking stove in many societies, and the expert knowledge that people have of the resources needed for their use (in this case fuel wood), is clearly illustrated in the poem The Mother Stone has a Hollow Stomach, from the Song of Lawino by Okot p'Bitek (East African Publishing House, Nairobi, 1966; translated from the original Acoli by the author):

"... I confess,
I do not deny!
I do not know
How to cook like a white woman.

I cannot use the primus stove
I do not know
How to light it,
And when it gets blocked
How can I prick it?
The thing roars
Like a male lion
It frightens me!

They say
It once burst
And the flame burnt
A goat to death!

I really hate
The charcoal stove!
Your hand is always
Charcoal-dirty
And anything you touch
Is blackened;
And your finger nails
Resemble those of the poison woman.
It is so difficult to start:
You wait for the winds
To blow,
But whenever you are in a hurry
The winds go off to visit
Their mothers-in-law.

The electric fire kills people.
They say
It is lightening.
They say
The white man has trapped
And caught the Rain-Cock^[1]
And imprisoned it
In a heavy steel house.

The wonders of the white man
Are many!
They leave me speechless!

They say
When the Rain-Cock
Opens its wings
The blinding light
And the deadly fire
Flow through the wires
And lighten the streets
And the houses;
And the fire
Goes into the electric stove.

If you touch it
It runs through you
And cuts the heart string
As they cut the umbilical cord,
And you stand there, dead,
A standing corpse!

I am terribly afraid
Of the electric stove,
And I do not like using it
Because you stand up
When you cook.
Who ever cooked standing up?
And the stove
Has many eyes.
I do not know
Which eye to prick
So that the stove
May vomit fire
And I cannot tell
Which eye to prick
So that fire is vomited
In one and not another plate.

And I am afraid
That I may touch
The deadly tongue
Of the Rain-Cock.

O! I do not like
Using the electric stove,
I cannot cook anything well
When you give me
The Rain-Cock stove.

*

The white man's stoves
Are good for cooking
White men's food:
For cooking the tasteless
Bloodless meat of cows
That were killed many years ago
And left in the ice
to rot!
For frying an egg
Which when ready
Is slimy like mucus.

For boiling hairy chicken
In saltless water.
You think you are chewing paper!
And the bones of the leg
Contain only clotted blod
And when you bite
It makes no crackling sound,
It tastes lke earth!

The white man's stoves
Are for boiling cabbages
And for baking the light spongy thing
They call bread.

They are for warming up
Tinned beef, tinned fish,
Tinned frogs, tinned snakes,
Tinned peas, tinned beans,
Big broad neans
Tasteless like the cooro!

They are for preparing
Foods for the toothless,
For infants and invalids.
It is for making tea or coffee!

You use the saucepan
And the frying pan
And other flat-bottomed things,
Because the stoves are flat
Like the face of a drum.

The earthen vegetable pot
Cannot sit on it,
There are no stones
On which to place
The pot for making millet bread."
 

"On your left
Above the grinding stone
Stacked right to the roof
Is the firewood.

If you ask me
About firewood
I can describe them to you in detail
I know their names
And their leaves
And seeds and barks.

Oywelo^[2] and lucoro^[3] and kituba^[4]
Are no use as firewood,
They burn like paper
They are like pawpaw
Their fires are cold
Like the firefly's fire.

Labwori^[5] is alright
If it is perfectly dry.
But if it is still green
The smoke it produces
Is like a spear!

It is useful for chasing men from the hut
men who sit too close
To the cooking place
Their eyes fixed on the pot!
Odure^[6] who does not
Listen when others sing

Odure, come out
From the kitchen
Fire from the stove
Will burn your penis!

"... I do not know
How to cook
Like white women;
I do not enjoy
White men's foods;
And how they eat -
How could I know?
And why should I know it?

White men's stoves
Are for cooking
White men's foods.
They are not suitable
For cooking
Acoli foods
And I am afraid of them.

Ocol says
Black people's foods are primitive,
But what is backward about them?
He says
Black people's foods are dirty;
He means,
Some clumsy and dirty black women
Prepare food clumsily
And put them
In dirty containers... "

"... My husband,
I do not complain
That you eat
White men's foods.
If you enjoy them
Go ahead!
Shall we just agree
To have freedom
To eat what one likes?"
 

[1] It is believed that lightening and thunder are caused by a giant reddish-brown bird that is almost identical with the domestic fowl. When it opens its wings lightening flashes and thunder is caused when it strikes with its powerful bolt.
[2] Oywelo (Oyelo?): Vitex doniana (Black Plum)
[3] Lucoro (Lochoro?): Erythrina abyssinica (Red Hot Poker Tree; Uganda Coral)
[4] Kituba: Ficus natalensis (Bark Cloth Tree)
[5] Labwori (Labori?): Vernonia amygdalina
[6] Odure is the nickname for small boys who are fond of sitting in the house when mother is cooking. It was derived from a small boy of that name whose penis was burnt by the fire from the stove.
[7] Opok: Terminalia macroptera and Terminalia torulosa
[8] Yaa : Vitellaria paradoxa (Shea Butter Tree)
[9] Poi (Opo?): Dalbergia melanoxylon (African Blackwood, Poyi)

Thanks to Gerald Eilu, University of Makerere, for identifying the firewood species (eilu@forest.mak.ac.ug)

Stoves represent an important development issue and many new designs have appeared in recent years aimed at improving fuel efficiency (thus reducing demands on environmental resources like forests) and reducing indoor air pollution (cooking smoke commonly dispersing within the kitchen itself). Gaining acceptance of improved cooking stoves is very difficult, however, as, like Lawino, people become accustomed to doing things the traditional way and are sometimes reluctant to accept anything new, though there are success stories:

Communication seems to be the key to success here: 'participation' (of the beneficiaries) would be the development term used. In the absence of this participation, new technologies will not be taken up by the people who, in principle, would benefit from them:

In this Bangladeshi village, new houses constructed after floods were provided with an improved stove (above) which burns wood more efficiently and discharges smoke away from the kitchen through a chimney. The traditional fuel burnt by villagers is straw, however, which is easier to obtain than wood but burns too quickly in the new stove; moreover, the chimney discharges smoke at the front of the house where villagers traditionally grow a papaya tree. In any case, most of the women of the village prefer cooking on the stove they are used to, so most households build their own traditional stove outside the house (below) or in a separate kitchen, leaving the new improved stove unused.