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In other cultures, flour immediately brings to
mind bread; the process of adding a leavening agent to finely ground
grain, with skilful handling and patience. Again this foreign concept
of allowing food to “rest”, allowing a slow chemical reaction that
produces something that rises and expands, is full of air, cooked with
trapped air. Air baked into the fabric of the flour and other
ingredients, the desired end result being the precise textural balance
of crumb and crust…In our culture it is certainly not so. When
presented with flour made from ground dried cassava or yams or
plantains or wheat we do not instinctively think of bread or things
that rise or are left to the will of yeast spores. We do not think of
air, not yeast, but water, not cold water but boiling water, and a
beating stick. Not therapeutic kneading but hard urgent turning. The
Yoruba idiomatically suggest that if you do not take charge of the
flour and water, it turns aggressively on you sensing your weakness,
and wrestles the stick from your hand. It turns you! For us, the
desired end result is a mound, a solid hard mass that has had all the
air beaten out of it: Matter that fills and bursts the seams of the
stomach.

I have been wondering how the word Okele came to
being. The Yoruba word for a morsel when divided into “oke” and “le”
sounds like picking up a small hill with the fingers, separating the
little hill from the big one. It is not the only question in my mind.
Why for example must our flours be made into hard mounds that accompany
oily soups?

Why are they instinctively made into savoury foods and not sweet? Why do we eat them hot and heavy? Why not cold?

The most popular answer to these questions is that
eating heavy starches is carried over from farming community style
eating. If one eats a bowl of fufu first thing in the morning and goes
to the farm, the fufu provides slow burning energy for the hard work of
the day. Not many of us are farmers, yet we crave our fufu and gari and
semovita and pounded yam and Akpu. We eat them in the morning, in the
heat of the day, at night before we roll into bed. We eat them as a
main meal, after a first course of Jollof rice! After about three years
of marriage, my mother -in-law demanded that I start to feed my husband
gari for dinner. Why?

Because after three years, it was not apparent
from just looking at him that he was a married man, that’s why! There
is a Nigerian physique that coerces respect, and it has nothing to do
with muscularity or neat lines in a European suit. I know men who have
cultivated that gari-in-the-gut look to match their political
aspirations, especially if they are running for local government
chairman back in their village or for a position in the house of reps.
Looking like a well-toned and wiry Obama is not the way forward. I’ve
heard Nigerians disdain that look as “The hungry look” “The man looks
hungry!” The Nigerian man in authority is filled out: his stomach rubs
even-if-just-ever-so-slightly against the front of his buba. That look,
that authoritative physique, that signature posture of well taken care
of married men and women who the Yoruba say life begins and ends at
their “Ibadi” (“Ibadi” in this context is that notable backside of
notable proportions) is only achievable from eating mounds of pounded
yam and gari and fufu. From as often as possible bulldozing hills of
ground grain and wading through rivers of soup. These things are
intrinsic. I am not the slimmest of women, but I have noted the disdain
with which I have been regarded in some circles, for being too slim.
(Please Lagos does not count!) As my husband succinctly put it, “No
Efik man will have you!” We are not completely out of touch with food
trends, or ignorant of the fact that the world is talking about cutting
calories, demonizing hydrogenated fats and castigating palm oil as
being the river of blood that flows through hell. My mother recently
spent a few months in Houston, Texas and noted that many Nigerians
living there no longer romanticize the pot bellies, rubbing thighs and
rotating bottoms that are the sure end result of swallowing gari and
soup every day. How have they managed to balance that intrinsic need,
that comforting rolling of morsels between fingers before dipping in
hot soups with keeping up with the West’s obsessive counting of
calories?

Oats is the answer. Rather than give up our
beloved “swallow”, we buy a tin of Quaker oats,run it through the
blender, douse it in hot water and yes as usual, turn it,

beat it, subdue it into swallow. This is called
the new Amala. Its complexion is beige, so perhaps “Lafu” white Amala
is the more appropriate comparison. Nigerian food specialty shops in
America are now brimming with bags of oats sold as the new and
improved, not so bulge inducing swallow.

It is clear that no health fad is going to rescue us any time soon from devouring our Okeles.

As illogical as it is to consume such a high
allowance of starch when one is not doing any manual labour or body
building or indeed going to the farm, eating starchy foods goes beyond
comfort.

It is who we are, what we like.

It is an anchor so familiar, so necessary to
physically feeling “as one should” and even sometimes looking
respectable and well that we will be climbing those hills of grain and
swimming in rivers of soup for a long time to come.