It never occurred to me that
something as basic and simple as food and eating it could provide an education in
culture, sociology, history, psychology, and any other -ology social scientists
have made up recently.
I am an African. But I spent my
primary years in America.
When I came back to Nigeria I had a
lot to learn. One of those lessons has
been about food and feeding etiquette.
The Parents were foreign students in
the U.S.
and I grew up moving from one campus to the other with them. I’m not sure why
they moved around so much. Anyway it wasn’t your typical working class or
middle class or anything class home. Step-Mother (a white 40 year old female
with a white middle class mentality) did her best to teach me good manners and
always insisted we live in ‘good neighborhoods’. That usually meant white
neighborhoods. Unfortunately nothing she taught me prepared me for the return
to Africa.
Up till now my eating experience was
with The Parents each of us with individual plates round the table once a day at
dinner (except on Sundays when we had two meals together). If visitors arrived during a meal they usually
waited till we finished eating. Invitations
to eat were issued only out of courtesy (a quintessentially oyibo virtue) and
not accepted by equally courteous guests unless of course they had been invited
at least a week before to share this particular meal in which case Step-Mother
usually brought out the good china. Bad manners were accepting an invitation to
a meal to which you had not been previously invited.
It was therefore a surprise when during
my first meal in my fathers’ village after the great homecoming my aunt
unleashed a scathing attack on me in Ibo, a language that at the time I barely
understood! But I got the gist! I was a terribly bad mannered child for not
inviting her to come and eat when she met me eating. Ground open and let me
fall in! The last thing on my mind was to offend her. Please eat it all!
But that is not the point. In
Ibo-Nigeria food is shared, sharing is caring. Even if it is a spoonful of rice
it is obligatory to share with who ever is in the vicinity. Children will share
the spoonful one grain of rice at a time! Meat is shredded and shared. Now that
is good manners in Africa.
I always forget even 30 years
later; just like I sometimes forget that elders are supposed to leave food on
the plate for the juniors that will wash them. (Step-Mother and co taught me to
take only as much as I can eat and eat everything that I took. Gluttony was one
of the 7 Cardinal Sins.)
All leftover food on a plate will
be eaten and therefore it is equally good manners not to mess the food around on
the plate. I was once told that I eat like a dog, because I messed the food
around my plate, making it unappealing for someone else.
Meanwhile I always left food on the
plate, the only person my age that did. Most children licked theirs clean,
literally, no matter how much food was on it. Then again I was usually the only
one that had my own plate of food. Children usually ate together so there could
be seven eating from one plate. Food served separately for one person was only
for the Big Man. Eventually someone noticed that I could not keep up with the scurry
for food. Imagine half a dozen hands scrambling in one big bowl. I was used to
eating slowly and not competing for my portion with several others! Here the fast
and furious ate the most! The slow and weak starved! The bullies got all the
meat! But it was also custom for the youngest to get the last morsel of food and
the pleasure of licking the bowl clean after which the youngest had to wash the
plate. Washing plates was a privilege.
After the licking there wasn’t much to wash!
In boarding school it was a major
struggle for first second and third place in the food liner and so on till the
last. I always found myself last! It
wasn’t polite to push and shove now was it?
But they pushed and shoved me right out of the way. If you are last in line you do not get the
best part of the food you get the charred scrapings off the bottom. Your growth
is stunted and you become a moron because your brain does not receive
sufficient nutrients and iodine.
The food is pathetic at its best so
you do want to get the ‘bottom part.’
The meat was the size of a very small sugar cube, an ounce of fish was
shared by ten. And you never got more than a tablespoon of soup till you were a
senior.
Amazingly my school was reputed to
be one of the best in the state. They
didn’t even have pipe borne water or flush toilets. Anyway as I was saying…
My education in African food
etiquette continued into my teenage years. I got married early to escape my fathers’
tyranny, only to discover that all Igbo-Nigerian men are tyrants. And I did not
have just one husband. According to the Igbo rules all my husbands’ relatives
were my husbands! Considering that his relatives numbered in the hundreds I was
quite worried by the implications!
Thankfully it had nothing to do
with sex but it did mean that my house was actually their house and every time I
made dinner it was supposed to be for at least ten. I was the glorified
housekeeper/ cook/nanny/ butler/ valet, every one expected to be served. The
worst of the lot were my husbands’ sisters, I thought of them as the Three
Witches and myself as poor Cinderella. My propensity for melodrama began quite
early.
Anyway before I learnt my lesson many
a household quarrel had ensued over the fact that I had failed to distribute some
dish I cooked to all my numerous ‘husbands’. Now mind you I did not begrudge any
one the food it’s just that it never occurred to me to cook for ten when the
size of my family (as I saw it) was three. And it did not matter to them that there was
food somewhere else enough to feed a football team. It was the ‘principle’ of
the thing. I wasn’t ‘sharing’. The Three Witches took sharing very seriously.
Cooking itself was a horrid
experience, done over a saw dust and wood fire in a poorly ventilated smoky
soot covered room (reminiscent of the Dark Ages). Some friends of mine and I
were discussing our ‘first’ kitchens. One said hers had been red and white,
another said hers had been green and yellow, I paused a minute before I said
black. Everything was black and covered in soot. Every time I went into the kitchen
I came out looking like a chimney sweep. And the aroma! Eau de wood smoke, like
a well cured shank of ham, until a shower and shampoo.
Did I say shower? One took a ‘baf’
with a bucket of water. That is another one of those quaintly Nigerian innovations;
the ‘baf’. It’s an acquired skill greatly helped by the use of a plastic scoop
instead of just the hands. But that’s another story. Right now we are
discussing food etiquette.
No morsel of food goes to waste in
an African kitchen. Not a grain of rice! I used to find it absurd the way they
would chase after the last grain of rice to add to the pot. I would always
think to myself, like that really makes a difference, or the last piece of
crayfish in the washing bowl on its way into the soup pot. Never mind if it
found its way to the soot covered floor it would be picked up, washed with
great care and put in the pot! And who the hell taught them to use fish and
meat in the same pot of soup!! And not just fish and meat sometimes snails and
bush meat too. Gastronomic overload! It was all supposed to be a sign of
affluence and helped create and maintain those huge pot bellies that are
considered the ultimate sign of wealth.
I was less careful during food
preparation, I was used to wasting food, I grew up in prosperous overfed America.
It didn’t matter if a few grains of rice fed the ants and the flies and the cockroaches,
there was lots of food to go round and what's more they were God creatures too
and also had the right to live and eat! Besides I was in too much of a hurry to
finish cooking and go do important things, like listen to music and write songs
and read books and write stories, to obsess over a few grains of rice. Or just
stare into space and day dream about when this horrible nightmare would be over
and I could finally start My Life.
Food is shared according to a very
rigid hierarchy. In a domestic unit The Man gets the best part of the food and
most of the protein in the pot. The woman is next followed by the children who
get to eat whatever is left over. In some homes food for The Man is cooked differently
from the rest of the household’s and tends to be more nutritious. Mostly it’s
out of fear of poisoning. The more prosperous a man the more people want to
kill him and poisoning is the method of choice.
If you live with your husband’s
relatives they’ll try to take the best parts of the meat in whatever you are
cooking. Should you attempt to stop them they will retort that it is after all
their ‘brothers’
. In
order to preserve the integrity of your soup pot you must be able to fight with
them and win. To avoid the possible indignity of getting your ass whipped or in
the event that you are not ready to engage in daily war fare, physical or
verbal; you either resign yourself to cooking for ten and serving them personally
or cook so badly no one wants to eat your food. Do not bother to complain to
your husband he is helpless to do anything other than make ineffectual noises. Matter
o fact African men secretly desire strong wives to battle their sisters and
keep them out of the soup pot.
Moving far away from the in-laws
does not solve the problem. In Africa not
cooking for any one of your ‘husbands’ if they took it upon themselves to visit
you was enough grounds for divorce. It is very important to know which of the
myriad of relatives merited your retiring immediately to the kitchen to
slaughter the fattest chicken and prepare pounded yam and soup from scratch and
those that could be served yesterdays leftovers. Such knowledge could be the
difference between I am married and I was married. Village meetings have been
summoned as a consequence!
“Okoro can you imagine! I went to
my grandfathers’ brothers’ cousins sons house uninvited in the middle of the
week and his wife who was leaving for work refused to make pounded yam and afang
soup from scratch for me saying she was late and sending her house girl to give
me 2 slices of bread and an egg with tea. Please we must call a village meeting
immediately and send her back to her father. What kind of wife is that!”
I’m extremely lazy and self
centered that means that when in-laws come I don’t even remember to ask them
about their families and events in the village. That of itself is bad manners.
But then I really don’t care and in my oyibo way I don’t care if they think I’m
bad mannered. After all coming to my house uninvited with enough luggage for a
month is bad manners in my book, I’m not complaining. As for rushing off to
cook for them or even warm the leftovers, they just have to wait till mealtime.
The most I could do was offer a drink. Asking them to go is out of the question
(grounds for divorce) though I did often want to just say “Please leave, you
are a nuisance and I got more significant things to do right now!”
Another unique aspect of food
culture in Africa is the attitudes and conventions
about large scale feasts. There are only feasts in Africa,
nothing like inviting ten for dinner that is an oyibo convention practiced only
by the elite as part of their elitism. Anything worth celebrating deserves a
feast and whether you invite them or not the whole village will come so plan to
cook for several hundreds. A catering nightmare I hear you think (I got ESP how
else) . The African solved the problem long ago; collective solidarity.
I never quite understood all those
people in Africa and in the West that glorify collective
living. Collective living is not as great as it sounds, among other things it
means that you have to get up at the crack of dawn, when you might just rather
be sleeping, every time there is need for large scale cooking together with all
the other married women, mind you never the married daughters, they just sit
around on their fat asses waiting for you to finish cooking and serve them!
Fine, you might say that this is good and after all they’ll help you when you
need to feed a lot of people. Well maybe so but them what happened to professional
caterers? The caterers have to work or do we want to make them redundant? And
for those that want to rant about capitalism and imperialism, please give me a
break.
I have been to those cookouts and
the amount of acrimony and conflict they generate is not worth whatever advantage
the sociologists think come from collective living (not to mention the amount
of sweat that streamed straight into the food). As a matter of fact these
enforced mass cookouts are a strain on human relations, a definite diplomatic
failure. (I’m thinking labor camp!) The same people in the village hyping the virtues
of the traditional collective life hire caterers once they have enough money to
behave like a ‘Big Man’.
I avoided being conscripted into
this forced labor as tactfully as possible, or if I did go I’d act completely incompetent,
the oyibo that didn’t know how to peel an onion. It always worked. Some sucker
would invariably come, take over the chore assigned to me and shoo me
away. After awhile sitting around doing
nothing I’d be told I could go home. Did I mind? Of course not! I did not find
it particularly crucial to socialize with all those village women. Associating
with them was an embarrassment and an ordeal. They did not shave, they did not
use deodorant or perfume, I was not always certain that they used soap. What could
I possibly discuss with them? The arrival of the newest variety of disease
resistant cassava cuttings? The proper way to balance ten pounds on my head on
a 10 kilometer journey? How to make Mr. Husband happy or how to wean a baby? How
could an unwashed, smelly, hairy, illiterate village woman possibly give me advice
about my husband or my baby. I was completely superficial. Then again I was
just 17 and a hopeless romantic. I was certain this was not My Life.
The other side of cooking for a
multitude was being the multitude that was being fed. Each person that came was
another mouth and stomach. You were supposed to eat and eat like a pig. The
whole idea was to eat so much collectively that afterwards you and your kin
could brag that the host were stingy and did not cook enough or that they were openhanded
and cooked so much that you and the rest of the guests couldn’t finish the food!
Eat till you drop, it’s the closest thing to an eat-all-you-can buffet that you
can find in rural Africa! I used to get
seriously harangued for not eating or not eating enough! “Eat more girl you and
you alone got to finish all the food.” Everyone took a doggy bag home, big
handbags were very popular. Mine was the biggest, I actually had dogs, and most
of the time the food as only fit for dogs anyway, delicately flavored with eau
de perspiration.
Sharing the food to the collective generated
a lot of commotion, the eldest got food before the youngest and if you let
someone younger than you take food or drink before you, you would quickly lose
respect so you had to make a big fuss if such a gross breach of protocol
occurred. I had always exercised the advantage of being oyibo to get the best
food and getting it first when with my own patri-kin. Here I had to wait my
turn but I never ate the food anyway. Seeing it prepared was enough to put me
off for life. At least the caterers try to maintain some hygienic standards.
When I got my share I always gave it to one of the other wives. One in
particular who was big and bad and mean. This way I ensured her allegiance and
if someone attacked me she would leap to my defense. My evolutionary reaction
has been flight not fight, I’m complete chicken shit when it comes to getting
violently physical. I’m terrified of being scarred for life.
The size of the food box used to
bring food to your group and the amount of drinks you got was also a measure of
respect so if someone thought that what they received as a group was not
commensurate to their status there were very vocal complaints, threats and no
consumption until more was provided. If no more is forth coming them the group
would quietly eat what they got and then yap the hosts for the next year or so
at every given opportunity. “Humph, there’s Beatrice trying to look important.
Don’t mind her, do you now that when we went for her daughters wedding last
year she couldn’t even feed us.”
My efforts at staying slim were
scorned mostly. Being a wife fat was good because fat exhibited your husbands
prosperity, it meant he fed you well. They are not joking when they show them
African mammies! Such logic survived the fact that one of the fattest wives in
my kin group was married to one of my poorest ‘husbands’. This guy as so poor
he made the hero in Les Misérables look like a king. They had six or seven
children, I stopped counting. My attempts to talk to them about the virtues of
contraception were dismissed with a casual “That is oyibo thing”. It’s for
oyibo, not a self respecting Igbo man and his wife. Children are riches you
know, you can never tell what they will be tomorrow. Oh yeah, well if you don’t
feed them well, and take them to the hospital when they need it and give them a
good quality education I bet you I can tell what they will be tomorrow! Nowadays
they spend their time moaning about how nobody wants to help them send their
children to school. Indeed.
Before I end this interesting essay
(I wonder why any one would find this interesting, my writing is completely ego
centric navel picking, arrogant and rude.) I must make mention of food
prohibitions that applied to women and children. First a woman could not eat
the gizzard of a chicken. It was reserved for The Man, and if she ate it she
would become a man (but never The Man). Children meanwhile were not as a matter
of course given meat or fish except as a reward, like some people give kids
candy; and never ever were they allowed to eat eggs for a child that ate eggs
would grow up to be thief as surely as the sun will rise tomorrow.
Food and feeding practices provide
an education all on their own. A whole diploma in social relations! All the
while I have been engaged in active social research, how else can one possibly
survive the experience.
It was a relief to leave the
restrictions of my Ibo-Nigeria family and finally have some freedom to express
myself. Never to have to compete with half a dozen other brats for food! Never
to have to share every morsel of anything! Never to have to invite anyone to
share my meal again! Or cook for ten! Or twenty!! Or fifty!!! Ahhhhh, bliss!
3/2/2006
