Rwanda maize mill

I finally arrived in Rwanda sometime late Monday night/Tuesday morning.  We had an opportunity today to visit the largest maize mill in Rwanda.  This mill is unique in that they have technology that I’ve seen before, at the Quaker dry corn milling plant in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, though on a slightly smaller scale here.  Maize (corn), almost exclusively white, is consumed here in Africa mostly as a very fine flour that is cooked into a very stiff porridge.  It is eaten with the fingers and is stiff enough to form a kind of small, edible scoop for whatever stew or sauce it is served with.  Now the dry milling equipment in the US and Europe, a type of roller mill, is used to make corn meal and grits.  Typical corn mills here in Africa are small hammer mills, which will crush just about anything into a very fine flour, but you can’t get varied grits yields from them.  The mill has ordered new rollers to facilitate a finer meal to suit local consumer tastes.  This is quite the facility to find here, though running under capacity.

Here is the inventory of unmilled corn in the warehouse.

The miller, a Kenyan, showing the grain in process: