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In strong contrast to the wishy-washy speculation that a bowl of
simple fish stew can be used to bewitch a man, is the notoriety of a
potent love charm or potion that guarantees total infatuation from the
object of one’s affections; if indeed affection is the right word. It
facilitates the creation of a love slave or fawning fool, or it tames
straying husbands, or gives a woman the compelling ability to have any
man that she likes or wants.

The muscle that such a charm carries cannot be overstated not only in
Nigeria where men in relationships tend to be all powerful, but in
Africa,
where women are always getting slapped in the face by cultures that
allow their men to marry many wives and keep many more mistresses.
African women are (supposedly) always outwardly shrugging at their
“predicament”, at their alleged underdog positions in marriages.
If a Nigerian woman’s husband cheats on her, and she is asked to give a
response, there is a strong likelihood that she won’t do a Sandra
Bullock.

That response of giving up a man, divorcing him and moving on
with one’s life does not altogether make sense in the context of
Nigeria or Africa. A Nigerian woman never wins by pouting and being
nonsensical …when she can dig her heels in and really win by lassoing
him back in. The winner is the woman who gets to keep the man, or a
part of him, (if he must be shared) no matter how dog-eared, how
rickety, how completely unsavoury the man is:
A great irony if ever there was one.
But what has this got to do with food? It is a question that I myself
am always asking. Why is the typical Nigerian or African love charm
ingested?

Why are all the symbolisms, the figures of speech centered on
food and drink?
Gbelekokomiyo that central Niger Delta phenomenon that casts strong
shadows of self-doubt in the hearts of Nigerian men is a complex, mind
bending, dynamic thing. The strongest symbolism as well as the Constant
is not sex but food. A man eats food or drinks drink laced with
“something”. That something is strong medicine and only the Lord knows
what it is. No one really seems to know what Gbelekokomiyo as ominous
as it sounds means.
It appears the onomatopoeic knocks in the syllables are engineered to
strike fear in the hearts of men and women.
Ikhide Ikheloa gave me a definition that works well because of its
simplicity.

He says it stands for a man drinking his wife’s “Kool Aid”
And supposedly, after drinking said Kool Aid he does her bidding for
the rest of his bewildered life. It of course works not only for wives,
but for any woman who has the access the willingness and the stomach to
spiritually override a man’s will. The end result interestingly is not
the undying love of an individual with all his senses intact.
It is not really the advertised product. It is not a peeling away of
layers, allowing the man to see the intrinsic value in the woman who
has gone to the effort of charming him. It is adding on more layers,
with strains of deep painful self-hatred, retribution, diabolic
mischief,
death. It is like the devotion of a zombie to its master.

Why would
anyone want to be loved by a zombie?
If Kool Aid is too foreign a concept, then perhaps African peppersoup
is more apt. African peppersoup has as many versions as the idea of
Africa allows, and the same can be said for the love charm. Every
dialect of every language of every village in every African country has
its own name for Gbelekokomiyo. Gabonese love charms are famed as some
of the strongest.
Togo’s version echoes the Yoruba language word for word. It is called
“Gbo temi”. Moving East in the Niger Delta, one inevitably runs into
the Efik “Kop mo mi” which translates simply as “gree for me”.
These charms are all administered, stirred in, spooned into the mouth,
eaten.
Some people say that it is best administered in “soups that draw” or
mixed in with cooked snails, or fish stews, or whatever. Some say the
failsafe recipe is for a woman to bend over her cooking pot and wash
“parts of her anatomy” into it. Or at least that is what it sounds like
when it is transliterated.
The million Naira question is does it work? If Nigerian men believe it
does and Nigerian women believe it does, then in a fashion, it does
work.
Almost all the Nigerian men and women that I asked admitted that they
believe that putting something in someone’s food can make them love
you, and that this is usually the craft of women.
Do I believe it works? The very fact that one has to make another
person love one has already negated love. Love is foremost an act of
the will.

I do believe in foods being aphrodisiacs because here the mouth
is eating and the brain is thinking and consenting, and observing
psychological and cultural rites, and there is proof that some foods
regarded as aphrodisiacs produce true biological reactions in the body.
But that I can be forced against my will to love someone by simply
eating food… this I consider completely impossible.

Right after a JetBlue flight attendant, Steven Slater, plunged down an emergency chute last week with beers in hand, Rene Foss started thinking about working the escapade into a song for the next edition of her musical revue, “Around the World in a Bad Mood.”

“Not a lot you can do with rhyming JetBlue. But chute, that has possibilities. Chute, cute, beaut,” she said appraisingly. “Beer is too easy. Slater? Well, how about, ‘See ya later?”‘ Foss has been a flight attendant for 26 years for a major airline. Her mother was also a flight attendant. Eight years ago, she wrote a humorous book about the travails of the job that bears the same title as the revue.

The book sprang from the show, which she has staged for 10 years in theatres around the nation during her time off. The shows are sometimes a one-woman performance and sometimes a musical revue with a cast of three, plus accompanist.

These days, a flight attendant’s career, once celebrated as glamorous, has become a very tough proposition. Over the last decade, salaries and pensions have been cut while air travel has become increasingly irritating to all.

As more people flew (769.6 million boarded domestic carriers in 2009, up from 629 million in 2000), airlines cut costs by eliminating jobs. This June, domestic airlines employed 462,977 full-time workers, compared with 607,387 in June 2000, the Transportation Department reports.

Like most flight attendants, Foss was riveted by the story of Slater, who gained international fame last week after a JetBlue flight reached the gate at John F. Kennedy International Airport. As the story is told, after announcing to passengers that he’d finally had it, Slater grabbed two cans of beer from the galley, activated the aircraft’s emergency inflatable slide, rode it down to the tarmac and ran off. He was arrested hours later on charges of criminal mischief and reckless endangerment that carry a penalty of up to seven years in jail.

Initially, news accounts depicted Slater as a heroic Everyman protesting the indignities of contemporary air travel. Soon, though, the story became less clear-cut after some passengers were said to have told the authorities that Slater had been acting aggressively and strangely throughout the flight. Slater suffered a facial cut at some point, perhaps as a result of an injury caused by that bane of flight attendants, a heavy bag tumbling from a jam-packed overhead bin.

At first, “he was absolutely a kind of hero, perhaps acting on things that many flight attendants may have felt at one time or another,” said Foss. She said stressed-out flight attendants began jokingly warning one another, “‘I’m about to pull a Slater!’ or ‘If this keeps up, I’m gonna go JetBlue!”‘

With planes now mostly full, the toll on flight attendants has been tremendous. But after the initial chuckles died down, many flight attendants assessed the Slater incident and worried about the perilous precedent set by a flight crewmember throwing a tantrum. “Blowing the slide,” as activating the emergency chute is called, is a very serious matter. Anyone on the tarmac below the plane who is hit by a slide can be seriously injured. “That’s one great big airbag, right smack in the kisser,” one pilot told me. On the plane, the potential for passenger panic is real.

“The poor guy was probably at his wit’s end,” Foss said. “He’s caring for an elderly mother, meaning he’s commuting all the way across the country. And then, beyond that, he apparently has a very bad day.” She added, “Fortunately, what Slater did didn’t hurt or kill somebody.”

Whatever other consequences it may have, the case highlights the rising tensions on airplanes, including those involving stowing carry-on bags in bin space that was never designed to handle the current volume. The overhead-bin wars have become the worst part of any flight attendant’s day and a very unpleasant part of most passengers’ journeys as well.

Meanwhile, Foss remains intrigued by Slater and hopes she can entice him into a guest appearance in the next performance of her revue. “Assuming he’s available,” she said. “But who knows? Maybe he’ll get a sitcom or a reality show. Or seven years.”

©2010 New York Times News Service

Years
ago, or should I be more honest and say decades ago, since at my age
that is the unit in which I now count the passage of time, a group of
friends, consisting of three married couples watched a young and
foolish man insinuate himself into an argument between a husband and
wife. This was a seriously married couple; their union had endured for
more than a piddling decade or two.

In
fact they had been married for longer than this young man had been
alive, but such was the “undue radicalism” of this youth that he took
no note of the calm disinterest of those of us who knew that it was
more profitable to continue our own conversation and leave our two
friends to sort themselves out.

The
young fool ignored our efforts to draw him away and then like an idiot
followed the couple over to the table where they had moved for more
privacy. There was some kind of family crisis brewing, the kind that
outsiders would consider a minor hiccup but insiders know can easily
get to ground zero. Young Galahad thought he could offer comfort and
solace to the lady he imagined to be in distress, and addressed himself
to her, in front of her very longstanding husband, who knowing he was
traversing familiar territory was limiting his answers to
monosyllables. The response Galahad got for his troubles is not one I
can repeat in a family paper.

The
lesson has been repeated throughout history: never embroil yourself in
a quarrel between people in a particular type of relationship; you will
get mangled! But this is the fun part that we can all identify with. No
law has been broken, no crimes committed, no person’s rights denied.

Barely
two months have passed since former Olori Bolanle Adepoju had more than
a few Nigerians railing at her husband the now deposed Deji of Akure,
Oluwadare Adepoju for physically assaulting his wife and behaving most
unroyally, like a person with no sense of propriety and no evidence of
good breeding. The Ondo State government and the royal fathers took the
matter in hand and separated the man from his throne. I mean the
accusations that flew to and fro were most scandalous and deeply
wounding of the kind that you make when you suddenly can’t stand the
feel of the noose you have put around your own neck.

Such
is the nature of marriage sometimes and in the typical Nigerian
setting, the recourse is to approach family and seek to settle the
matter quietly and privately.

But there is no being queen without a king, such is the reality of being deposed.

Politics always rears its ugly head doesn’t it?

The
Adepojus have apparently now made up, the families of each spouse are
now reconciled and there was no confusion about the paternity of the
children. Bolanle Adepoju has appealed to the Ondo government to
rescind the deposition of her husband and asked for him to be forgiven
arguing that the fight was a family issue.

But
it was not just a family issue. Clearly Oluwadare Adepoju forgot to
remember his status when he went publicly a quarrelling with his wife,
entourage in tow and attacked her. It can be argued that he probably
did not think he was doing anything wrong. The fact is that he has
sullied his office, unless of course this is the kind of behaviour to
be expected of Ondo royalty, and while the larger traditional family
can forgive him there is the wider aspect that he has offended against
the state by assaulting another person. The victim’s status as his wife
does not give him the power to trammel her rights as a human being,
even if she decides she is not going to lay charges, as is her
prerogative.

This
issue is beyond let’s all forgive each other and be one big cultural
happy family. It is after all part of the reason why many are offended
at Senator Sanni Yerima’s marriage to an underage girl, and why the
public was outraged at the gang rape and murder of youth corper Grace
Ushang Adie in Maiduguri.

A
neighbour sexually abuses a girl child and the parents find it in their
hearts to forgive and forget because it is ‘easier’ for them.
Kidnappers make off with our loved ones and we prefer to pay quietly.
Turai Yar’Adua has the nation’s sympathy while she is in mourning but
are we going to forgive and forget what she put this country through,
so that some future first lady can build on the precedent she set?
Where do we draw the line on anything?

Why
don’t we just forgive Cecilia Ibru and dissolve the EFCC so that Farida
Waziri can find something else to do? Why bother with a Police Force if
certain people, the ones whose actions will always get media coverage,
can just come and ask for forgiveness for whatever they did and get it;
and sometimes even when they do not ask.

The cause of the Sunday morning accident in which 20 people died on the Lagos Ibadan Expressway is still a matter of debate. Going by the accounts of most eyewitnesses, the incident leading up to the tragedy started when a team of police officers decided to mount an illegal checkpoint on a part of the road. This led to a traffic snarl and when the driver of an articulated lorry reached the scene, he could not control his vehicle, which ran into other cars causing an explosion that consumed tens of hapless Nigerians in public buses and private cars.

Adding to the misery of the victims, angry witnesses started attacking security officials seen around the area. This hampered rescue efforts for a while until a police detachment restored order and created a safe environment for other agencies to work. Naturally, attention has been focused on the officers who set up the checkpoint – and the police authorities are not amused.

Both the commissioner of the Lagos State police command, Marvel Akpoyibo and the command’s spokesperson, Frank Mba have rushed to defend their men and deny any police culpability in this tragic incident. The police command gave its own rendition of what caused the accident and placed the blame on the driver of the trailer – and the victims whose slow driving must have caused the traffic snafu. What is more wondrous, the police said since none of their officers died in the incident, they could not have been at the scene.

But then the police command has also said it is investigating the incident. We wonder why this is still necessary, since the police leadership appears to have summarily dismissed the possible link between the actions of its men and the accident.

Perhaps the most positive thing that could be said about this rush to judgement by police leadership is that it was meant to control tempers and calm fevered nerves so the work of attending to the injured and bereaved could go on. But even this is hard to swallow.

The truth is the victims of this tragedy and their relatives – not to talk of the generality of Nigerians – would be hard pressed to have much confidence in the outcome of the police investigation into the situation that led to the accident. If past experience is anything to go by it is almost impossible to expect the police to castigate any of its own for this.

Before Lagos, there was Anambra. Last May, an eerily similar accident occurred at a police checkpoint at Awka, leading to the death of close to 15 people. The

police did little other than to proffer the usual mea culpa – and a defiant statement that the checkpoint would not be moved in spite of the tragedy.

No one was queried, apparently; no one was penalised. The bugbear of civil society activists and some senior police officers is the culture of impunity that has eaten deep into the policing system. The default action seems to be to cover up genuine mistakes officers make along with some of their more egregious actions such as shooting unarmed citizens and mounting unregulated and unapproved checkpoints.

Little wonder then that despite the gallantry and sense of dedication of thousands of its officers, the Force has always found itself swimming against the tide of public opinion. Impunity and a sense of inviolability ultimately bring rot into a system – no matter how well run. The leadership of the police might have the best intentions in trying to shield its officers.

That is done across the world. But a little accountability could only strengthen the system. It would turn the officers into better professionals and restore public confidence in the men and women who often risk their lives to protect others.

The police leadership is already dealing with many challenges as they seek to reposition the force. Muddying the waters for their subordinates, as they did over the recent accident, is a distraction that leads them in the wrong direction.