WHE TS TO N E
Tunde Wey On Nigerian Food, Identity ILLUSTRATION
Nigerian food is a misnomer, an unfortunate if helpful characterization of a melange of cuisines. Nigeria, a colonial construct only five decades removed from pale faced administration, has managed a national identity despite holding 500 smaller nation states—a warmly contested womb with a half century children, each kicking mostly in chorus. The diversity of Nigerian cuisine reveals a desperate commonality present in all the different uses. We need to be together unless things fall apart, and our food gums. Our food rejects colonial imposition, stubbornly refusing taxonomy while also nodding in the direction of nationhood. There is indeed a Nigerian food recognizable as ours despite the different us~es. Just as our skins are each Black and our features stout, and yet that melanin and anatomical architecture are distributed differently across each group of us~es, each playing with their ingredients in interesting ways. The nomadic herding Hausa and Fulani of the North are lean in most things, angular ascetics with narrow noses, skin dark like old smooth black leather. They are lean like Suya, the thinly sliced, spicy, skewered, open flame grilled meats they conjure. This is what Suya does to you: it hurts you. Literally. Your jaw aches from the smell of ginger and peanut, taught a lesson by fire, which coats the sizzling meat. It sizzles fat right into the necromantic fire which offers it back to the meat, a closed loop of sacrifice. The taste of suya is not describable but if it was the body then maybe char grilled oysters is its umbra. No, even that isn’t right. Yaji, the dry spice rub which marinates the raw meat and is later sprinkled on the finished and grilled product, is a secret to everyone. So there are as many variations of it as there are Mallams, who make it. Yet Suya is Suya everywhere, no matter who holds the secret. Because it is at least ginger, dehydrated peanut brittle, fermented locust bean discs and a teaching fire. The Igbos, Ijaws, Efiks, Ibibios in the South and Delta areas of Nigeria are many things but it must be the verdant water that makes them robust in body and sparkling in mind. Like them their food is lubricious and sensual. There is much sucking and slurping because delicious things plucked from their waters and pinched from their dirt beg to be sucked, slurped and swallowed noisily. Mucilaginous and unctuous foods are what make their skin glow, smooth and bright. Their patience, tempered by unhurried time at sea or farming cycles, is the rationale behind their cooking style: things stew. Otherwise how else do people prepare Isi Ewu, goat head stew, if not with stamina. You cook that head until the bones break like soft biscuits but the brains are protected, steamed into a
58
R .S . Wh i p p l e
fluffy scramble. That takes a while. You painstakingly pick the tender flesh off the face, and you appreciate the good time’s passing does to all things, event tough tongues. They are tough no more, what a tender breakdown. Ngo, is the yellow sauce that makes Isi Ewu possible, ironically it takes seconds to prepare. A lengthy foreplay and a short consummation, that seems practical in these dewy parts. Ngo is palm oil and kaun, edible potash, mixed. Of course you need your fresh hot peppers, ehuru, calabash nutmeg, which is neither of the two things mentioned in its name, added to the Ngo. Salt and pepper, and sensibly some chiffonade Utazi, bitter leaves, to bring some calm to the lustful devouring. Add ogiri—fermented seeds made into paste. The Yorubas of the South are practical, conniving, with awesome appetites. Their bodies morph with the circumstance. Their muscles can be molded taut by exertion but they are also happy to lay atrophied from luxury. They are made ready for either, toil or recumbency. And their foods either give you strength or put you to sleep. They are adaptable, so adaptable that they spread far and in each new territory modified their ancient language into more nasal dialects and engineered even more pungent iterations of their starch based staples. Amala, Lafun, Iyan, Semo, Eba, are some of the different dialects of starches. Made from African yams, cassava and other root vegetables, they are processed to be stored dry and powdered, for later revival with hot water and a deft paddle. The Yorubas serve these thick dough in attractive balls with stewed soups of all sorts. At the meal, they break small pieces of the starch, dimple them with hungry thumbs to scoop the stew, making sure to carry with it pieces of the various animal flotsam: offal, seafood fresh and seafood fer mented. Each handful a heterodoxy. Back and forth between the starch and the stew hands go, pausing only to lick sticky debris off fingers are inured to the heat from both steadily diminishing sides. Nigerian food is hearty all the time, even our thin soups stay long after they’ve had their say. Nigerian food is never subtle. But the brashness of the dish is a front, just a front. It is all complexity. It is one pot cooking, stewing and hard learnt mercies delivered at the right time so the textures are just perfect. The flavors, like uneven but compatible logs, are stacked, fermented atop smokey atop air dried, and what you have is us. This is true for all the different us~es that are from this place. As for me? I am a Nigerian food traditionalist, a cut-out paper man, linked to uncountable other cut-out paper people, similar and playing with similar ingredients in different ways, but it’s all Nigerian no matter how hard I play.
59