1.
Mixing
It was not consensual. In 1884, the British arrive at your doorstep, pretend they want to be friends, pretend they see your people as equals, then realize that your land has palm oil, palm kernel, tin, cotton, things they want, things they need, so they take over by force, by fire, sword and gunpowder. Your people die screaming, resisting. They are outgunned, so they give in.
This was your parents’ parents’ parents’ time. You will never know them, only your parents’ parents. One of your grandmothers will be a strong woman who farms the land and walks great distances to sell her produce. She will never go to the white man’s school, so they will call her illiterate even though some of her knowledge has descended generations, even though her and her people had a whole system of governance, of economy, before white feet dawned on their doorsteps. She will have eight healthy children, beautiful children, willful children. Your mother will be one of them and, because the British have already started molding the land into their image, squeezing with both hands so the earth and people take their shape, your mother will go to the white man’s school to learn to read and write and how to behave “properly.” Some of the generations of knowledge your grandmother held will be among the first things to die – how to make plants root early, how to cultivate medicine. These cannot compare to the white man’s accounting and numbers. Your mother will be taught that the old ways are the old ways, so she will eschew them, at least some of them, preferring to go off into the bright new future. When you are grown you will see a picture of your mother as a young woman: deep purple lipstick, an unruly afro, a skirt suit. She has, by this time, dropped the wrappers of her mother for the modern, the western, and look, she is brandishing a Coke on top of that!
You will come after your mother, an end-of-the-century baby. Colonization seems so far behind you that you can’t even imagine it. The colonization of your time is globalization, at least in some of its material effects. Your throat will be stuffed with western television, western books, western modes of behavior. You will come to use slangs like chillax and bling bling and wassup. You will gorge your mouth with cereal and pancakes and have no palate for the foods of your ancestors. You will wear crop tops and jeans and headbands. These are not all bad things, but they will subsume your own culture, swallow them whole like some kind of greedy ogre. You will not know your own language, except by ear – that is, you won’t be able to speak it – but your vocabulary in English will be pristine. Your accent will come to approximate American because you’ve been exposed to their media so much. These are just some of the ways you will be colonized in the modern age without even knowing it.
2.
Rising
Your relationship to food has always been complex. You have never had a palate for local food, as you’ve said: madidi, your grandmother’s favorite meal, a thick, dark-colored porridge made from millet and paired with leafy soups, or moi moi, a mixture of ground beans steamed in rich banana leaves and eaten with stews or paps or alone. You have never had a palate for them, so it is ironic that it is food that brings you into a consciousness of your own imperialized mental state.
You go to dinner with a friend, an Italian restaurant in the heart of Abuja, your capital city, and they serve you a thick crusted pizza, dripping with cheese. Your friend comments on how this is the best food in the world, how nothing in your culture compares to this. You like pizza too, but it strikes something in the pit of your stomach that makes you uncomfortable. How can he say that nothing in your culture comes close to this? Has he tried puff puff, deep fried and light as an angel’s feather? Has he tried gizdodo, the sweetness of the plantain and spiciness of the gizzard competing for attention on your tongue, but both ultimately winning? Has he freaking tried jollof rice, a cliché in the Nigerian imagination, but the complementary nature of the flavors and perfectly smoky base are worth its hype. You thought you didn’t have a palate for your local foods, but it turns out you did. You ask yourself, when you leave, why he would think that other foods were better than yours, what brought him to this assumption.
You realize all the ways you have both been trained by school, by the media, by the internet, by everything in existence to believe that all parts of your culture are inferior to others, inferior to the parts of the world that colonized you and steeped you in systemic poverty and struggle while they continued to reap the fruits of their plunder. You catalogue the ways in which this is unfair. So many of your people will never know the knowledge of your ancestors. So many people will never let their children dress in the ways that kept them safe from the elements for centuries and which have beautiful meaning attached to them. So many of your people are fleeing the country because they believe other places are better, because other places have been made better by what was taken from your shores. So many of your people are dying in their attempts to get out, are being roped into situations so dangerous and soul-breaking they wish they were dead. There is no excusing this imperialism and you don’t want it to live in your head.
3.
Frying
Food is a kind of resistance, you decide. The thing that showed you that there was something wrong is the thing that has the potential to liberate you, liberate others. Food can become the way you say that there are good things about this part of the world where you were born and raised, that there have always been good things in this part of the world where your ancestors walked, and look, here is an example: a steaming plate of bean porridge.
In England, on your first visit there, you go to the African store where you pick up thick tubers of yam, packs of Maggi seasoning cubes, stock fish, palm oil, Indomie (because you can’t resist), crayfish. You supplement this with packs of spinach and bags of rice from regular stores. You make jollof rice, first for yourself and then for the white faces around you, serve them with instructions to savor. You are not trying to prove anything to them but give them a chance to see because most of them will never have the option, or willingness even, of finding out from anywhere else. You see on their faces they don’t get it. That’s fine. They don’t have to, there is no coercion here – you give them the benefit their people didn’t give to yours.
You keep cooking, even after you come back and even after you travel to other places. You make fried rice, a perfect yellow color immersed with seasoning and bursting with meat and carrots and green beans. You make yam and egg sauce, an easy one, but the juiciness of the tomato sauce soaked up by the eggs makes it worth it. You make pepper soup, the spicy savory taste remaining on your tongue long after it’s been consumed. You are not always a good cook, or even an enthusiastic one, but this is a form of resistance. Cooking this, eating this, you are declaring that your foods and way of life are worthy even in the face of others that the world chooses to validate as being superior. You decide that one day you will write about this, burn, fry, light up their ideas of you through your food. This too is an act of resistance. You will tell them that in your country are a people who know their worth, who have always known their worth, even if some of them have forgotten. You will scream to them that you, the collective you, are incandescent.
A Jollof Rice Recipe ((This recipe is courtesy of Ronke Edoho, a sublime Nigerian chef. Her work is available at https://9jafoodie.com/))
What you need:
- 2/3 cup of oil
- Small onion (chopped)
- 4 cups of rice
- 4 cups of broth (stock, omi eran)
- 2 cups of parboiled blended stew base
- 3 tablespoons of tomato paste
- A teaspoon each of curry, thyme, white pepper
- 2 bay leaves
- Salt (to taste)
- Seasoning cubes (2-3)
- Sliced tomato and onions (to taste)
- 2 tablespoons of butter
How to make it:
- Place a pot on medium heat. Heat up oil.
- Add in sliced onion. Fry until slightly brown. Add in spices and bay leaf. Stir.
- Add in tomato paste. Stir fry. Cover and cook for 2-3 mins.
- Add in pepper mixture. Stir fry. Cover and cook for 5 mins.
- Add in stock, seasoning cube and salt. Stir. Cover and simmer for 15 mins. Taste and adjust for seasoning.
- Stir in drained washed rice. Reduce heat to medium low (2-3 on marked cooker). Seal pot with foil then cover with lead.
- Leave to cook for 30 mins. No need to stir or open. LET IT GO.
- Stir in butter, sliced tomatoes and onions. Increase heat to high (this is where the smokiness happens). Leave for 5-8 minutes or just until you can smell the burn. Turn off heat. Leave to rest covered for 10 minutes before serving. ▪