A Tribute to Hunger: 4 Nigerian Cities Seen Through the Imagination of a Wandering Stomach

By Tolu Ogunlesi

[1]Orisa bi ofun ko si, ojojumo lo n gbebo lowo eni – Yoruba proverb
 
Not many people would know Wole Soyinka (Africa’s first – and Nigeria’s only – Nobel Laureate for Literature) for an essay, Salutation to the Gut, a paean to the culinary culture of the Yoruba people of Southwestern Nigeria. One reviewer called it “[a] tribute to hunger”; which I find a very striking description, especially considering the fact that I would have far more easily imagined a tribute to “food”, and not to its “absence.”

A tribute to hunger. Hunger, the unacknowledged god; the totalitarian regime of the lifeless (plate) over the restless (man).

You must have heard the statistics that Bob Geldof and his ilk like to bandy about (in very concerned voices), concerning the number of Africans who go to bed on empty stomachs; figures that tempt us to come to the conclusion that hunger is an African thing. 

 My take on this is that it is unfair to leave the argument at that point. We need to go a step further and boldly assert that, while hunger may be arguably be an African, so also is the capacity to fight it in a manner touched by wonder and skill, the capacity to create delightsome cuisine out of the humdrum of nature’s edibles.

I have that nagging feeling that while you may easily cram the cuisines of Europe (French, Italian, English etc) into the pages of a five-star carte du jour, you would need at the least a couple of encyclopedias to do justice to their African counterparts. Take McDonalds and its greasy, assembly-line offerings off the face of America, what do you have left?

The concept of “fast-food” is alien to African culture; an insult to the sublime sacredness of the stomach. If it’s fast then it’s not food. Like someone said, the African mind could never have invented the sandwich. “What is worth cooking is worth cooking unhurried” would perhaps be found hanging invisibly atop every cooking place in this part of the world:

Asaba: The Madam

Madam
 – from Dictionary.com:
1) The woman in charge of a household. 
2) The woman in charge of a house of prostitution.  
 
I spent almost year in Asaba (October 2005 to August 2006), in the oil-rich delta region of Nigeria (six hours away from home and from the “tyranny of the familiar”), serving Nigeria on the mandatory National Youth Service Corps scheme.

For much of that year, my fingers engaged in endless conversation with the plates and bowls of strange women, because my own plates and bowls remained behind at home. I had taken a vow of culinary chastity; I would not soil my hands with the soot of cooking pots in a strange land.
I call them (the “strange” women) the queens of the stomach, wielding supreme power from behind thrones of steam, soot and smoke. They all go by the generic name of “Madam”, and in turn inflict revenge-anonymity on their patrons by tagging them all “Customer”. But the generic-ness in my opinion suits the Madams better. If you have seen one Madam you have seen all Madams:

Buxom, with fat buttocks that you, in one absurd flight of the imagination, decide are layered in the way that critics say a well-written short story should be layered; soup-stained blouses and wrappers (fresher stains dissociating themselves visibly from the older, much-scrubbed ones), bare-feet (long, painted nails pouting from them) sewed onto charcoaled soles, forearms powerfully built from the endless motions of scooping out plate upon plate of Akpu and garri and rice from blackened pots over the course of a kitchen-based lifetime; upper-arms shaped as fluidly flabby counterpoints to their heavily muscled forearms.

Whatever the truth of the matter is, these women approach their vocation with a skill and a work ethic that would make the young, rat-racing, upwardly mobile clan look like a bunch of truants.
 
Abeokuta: The Mother

She gets up while it is still dark; she provides food for her family and portions for her servant girls. – Proverbs 31: 15

Abeokuta is where I consider HOME, even though I stopped living there in the real sense of it sixteen years ago, when I left for Ibadan to attend The International School for my secondary education. Abeokuta was where I grew up. East, West, home is the best, they say.

Home is where you eat without needing to have your wallet nearby. Home is where you can keep your mouth busy permanently, where there need not be any "between-meals" time because every time is potentially mealtime – an on-the-hour munching cycle (more reliable, chronology-wise, than CNN’s world news) where the slots have been programmed to constantly process garri, groundnut, chinchin, popcorn and biscuits, amongst many other fillers from the kitchen cupboard.

Home is where you get the best value – for money not spent.

The name Abeokuta means "Under the Rock", an allusion to Olumo Rock, the outcrop of stones sentinelled precariously over the city. It was Olumo Rock that provided a safe haven for the inhabitants of Abeokuta in the 19th century when enemies besieged the city. Today, Olumo Rock's caves and tunnels are devoid of terrified refugees, basking instead in a spiritual/mythical significance, and providing tourists and fun seekers with a stunning view of the city, and an opportunity to imagine what it was to be saved by stone.

Mine, like many others, was a childhood nourished by the tasty rivers that flowed forth from a mother's kitchen – and, occasionally, in my case, even Father's kitchen. 
 
Lagos: The Mistress:

A mistress seduces. A housefrau submits. We all know who gets the most goodies.”
– Lois Bird
 
Cumulatively I have lived about nineteen months in Lagos, spread out over three “missionary journeys” – October to December 2001, August 2005 to August 2006, and then September 2006 till date.

Lagos is a city whose mammoth population (estimated to be between ten and fifteen million – larger than many so-called countries) and the attendant scramble for survival have supposedly stripped it of a soul and a conscience.

I have eaten in, at the most, only a handful of them, which I reckon might constitute 0.000001% of the number of eating-joints in Lagos.

There is the Ghana High Commission in Yaba, tucked somewhere behind the popular Tejuoso Market. There you will get what I presume is a Ghanaian staple – Cassava and ripe plantains pounded together (in a mortar by a bare-chested man dripping sweat) and served with soup in large earthenware calabashes. There is a second Ghana High Commission, this time so-called not because Ghanaian food is served, but simply because of the proximity of the joint to the actual (“diplomatic”) High Commission. Located along King George V road in Onikan, on Lagos Island, ten minutes walk from the (in)famous Obalende, it is thronged daily by rice-obsessed suit-and-skirt-suit types.

Many of Lagos’ [2]bukas are of the roadside variety, erected on the sidewalks, or atop vacant drainages; anywhere a few feet of space can be squeezed out. They are makeshift affairs – wooden poles holding up rusted aluminium roofing sheets, curtained off from the road by sheets of plastic.
Then there are the bukas you will find at Lagos’ busiest spots – beneath the overhead bridges of Ojuelegba and Obalende, to mention just two. These are usually open-air affairs, where you tuck into your meal under the watchful eyes of a thousand people milling around, pickpocketing, touting, hawking, or going to work or to job interviews.

In Lagos, variety is King. The aim is to lose the customer in a Samarkand of kitchen delight, to confound him with choice, to mollycoddle him with attention, to belittle him with variety, to intimidate him with the worldly wisdom of food – and to bring out the finest specimens of greed within.

Ibadan: The Mrs.

“It’s only when a woman surrenders her life to her husband, reveres and worships him and is willing to serve him, that she becomes really beautiful to him. She becomes a priceless jewel, the glory of femininity, his queen!”
– Marabel Morgan
 
I spent thirteen years in Ibadan , my entire teenagehood, and then some. It was in my days at the University of Ibadan that I ate the cheapest meals I have ever eaten in my entire life. Where I would walk into “ Lower Mellanby ” or “Tedder” or “Mama Anat(omy)”, and on an impossibly low budget (at least by the standards of richer students) emerge with a full tummy and a smiling face.

Ibadan is the longsuffering wife, the patient dog that never gets the fattest bone and yet hardly utters a murmur of protest. Ibadan is the city where, no matter how long I’ve stayed away, on arrival I can simply pick up where I “paused” my love. Ibadan is where the largest chunk of my heart lies, even when my stomach has now somehow willed itself to other, more “domineering” cities.
---------------------------------------------------------------

[1] (Translates roughly to mean “There is no deity like the throat, it is never satisfied with appeasement.”)
[2] Cafeteria.

 Tolu Ogunlesi was born in 1982. He graduated from the University of Ibadan in July 2004. He performed his poetry at the African Weerword 05 in Amsterdam and at Denachten 2005 in Antwerp. He is the author of a collection of poems LISTEN TO THE GECKOS SINGING FROM A BALCONY (Bewrite Books, UK, 2004). His poems and stories have appeared in Wasafiri, Pindeldyboz, Sable, Pyramid, Carribean Writing Today, The Vocabula Review, Parameter, amongst many others and are forthcoming in the Poesia, JellyPaint, and On Broken Wings (anthology of new Nigerian poetry). He also writes for Farafina, Xclusive and MADE Magazines. In 2007 he was awarded a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize.

He lives in Lagos, Nigeria and can be reached at to4ogunlesi@yahoo.com.

Comments

[Elie Smith]

It is refreshing reading your article. But I want to point out that, Mr Soyinka is not Africa's first Nobel Laureate for Literature. Yes, he is Nigeria's first and only Nobel Laureate for Literature for now. But it doesn't mean another Nigerian won't be awarded, given Nigeria's many talented authors, it won't be long before another Nigerian is graced with the title. But to claim that, Mr Soyinka is the only African to be awarded the Nobel Laureate for Literature, is totally untrue. We have had an Eygptian and several South Africans who have been bestowed with the Nobel Laureate for Literature title. And they are equally Africans.

[Palapala]

Wole Soyinka-1986 (Nigeria)
Naguib Mahfouz-1988 (Egypt)
Nadine Gordimer-1991 (S.A)
J.M. Coetzee-2003 (S.A)

Soyinka is indeed Africa's first nobel laureate.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/

[Wrndzerem G. Barfee]

Tolu Ogunlesi is a young poet/writer that has just really enchanted me with his fine, subtle, nuanced and stratified writing - crafting from an inspiration and expression that is a preserve of the unequivocally talented! His highly appetizing tribute to hunger reveals a treat that transcends gastronomic tables and hearths to distil this paean into films and realms of a socio-anthropological aesthetic: such fine mix of style, nostalgia, socio-anthropology and politics of food and hunger(s). The sub-layered feminist politics is not to be missed in this reading in order to identify and savour the undercurrent hungers as mapped by Tosi's geo-sexual and gendered matrices: mother(home/Abeokuta) and the relation to sympathetic/oedipean/positive maternal matrice; Mrs (Ibadan)indicates the matrimonial matrice which maps complexes of transitions/intersections of the 'secure(d)'as it grows from or shares with some conventional maternal valences. Then the negative
mondane seductions of Mistress Lagos and its libertinous/whorish matrices...are these indicative tropes of forbiden fruits/foods eaten by the voice in his peregrinations! What is the Asaba Madam? Is it a metaphorism of an initiating/baptismal experience of estrangement from the familiar maternal foods of home to the new foods and new hunger(s)? What patterns of alliances/parallels of places, experiences and values do surface in the end? Abeokuta/Ibadan and Asaba/Lagos? Ogunlesi in this satiating slice of a literary loaf throws to the critical table more than we may have bargained for...the delectation continues!
Wirndzerem G. Barfee.
.

[denja abdullahi]

Let me do you a poem i have on Iyan(pounded yam)still in the Soyinkian tradition of paying homage to the god of the gut:

Iyan,hard as stone in the land of the Tivs,
sleek and supple like a maiden in Idomaland,
fermented for three days before being eaten in Ekiti land,
a food warriors severed heads for in Igbo history,
Unknown in Hausaland yet given a sweet-sounding name,sakwarra!

[WGB]

Have Ogunlesi and other Nigerian writers embarked on a genre of nigerian cartographic aesthetics/poetics? Read this complementarily with Ogunlesi's piece:

NIGERIA RONU!

Aba:
It takes less the time in light years
From my evolving words to you
To find an Hausa bukateria in Ama Awusa
Serving tuwo shinkafi twice as good as any
Far away in Kano, Sokoto and Maiduguri
In worth, quality, semblance and content.
Yet come a swimsuit pageant in London
The proprietors and patrons are abandoned
At the mercy of their hosts’ inflexible ability
To turn their other cheeks to provocations
Concocted in the hotbed of blind faith
According to the dictates of a foreign belief
Even for the sake of the random slaughter
Of their brothers by relatives of a different type …

Lagos:
Just enough Yoruba
To find your way to the park
And you are at the doorsteps
Of the best akpu and bitter-leaf soup
In the good old protectorate
Where now only the sons of the soil
Are immune from property tax
Arrived at with unmitigated hatred
For the many stubborn immigrants
Who dared cross the Niger again
After the cannons fired their last
Because what they left as they fled
Were not also declared abandoned
Like somewhere else closer to them…

Kano:
You’d a thought you were lost
From the train station wading in
Up until the gates into Sabon Geri
From where latent brotherhood
Rekindled by stretched distances
Enacted in lukewarm embraces
End with the inevitable sit out.
Never mind that alcohol is anathema
In the other parts of this walless city
Where god’s policemen are on prowl
Arresting believer and unbeliever alike
Here where laws are applicable to all
Irrespective of stand: left, right or centre
In the eternal Supreme-Being debate

Onitsha:
First time around in this mercantile mess
You’d barely have crossed the bridge all
Or Azikiwe’s abandoned mausoleum
Than the tang of fellow strangers
In their country of birth
Brought you back to reality...
You are not alone, after all
In this land of wanderers
Who’d cast the first stone
At a competitor for their position
In this land as divided and standing
As none has ever managed
Since the annotated fall
Of the Holy Roman Empire…

By Isidore Emeka Uzoatu