Oyibo in Africa

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’[1]. 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[2] 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

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[1] Know it is important to note that in Africa ‘brother’ refers to not only your male sibling of the same paternity or maternity but all your male kin three four generations removed and all other of the community that you are not allowed to marry for some vague relationship that even the person explaining to you is not always sure of; but that does not matter, they have known each other as brothers all their life. Now before you get all sentimental about this all it means is they can’t have sex with each others sisters and they can’t kill each other. It doe not impose love or for that matter friendship and some of the greatest community and family feuds are between ‘brothers’.

[2] Afang is a vegetable soup that takes a couple of woman hours to make.