FOOD MATTERS: Kanda for Christmas

Kanda is hardly appropriate Christmas fare, yet Kanda for Christmas is more than apt as the title of an article about Christmas food in Nigeria in 2009.

My neighbour's husband came round to express nervous concern on the morning of Christmas eve. He had opened his wife's pots and found nothing but Kanda (Pomo, cow hide) there. Was he to take this as a sign of what Christmas day held? Everyone found his concern hilarious, but we were all laughing so hard because we were as nervous as he was. The misery this Christmas has been deep and wide and tall and all encompassing even if not experienced in equal degrees by everyone.

From the mean food hampers (someone brought one round and came back for it a few hours later; he'd made a mistake. It was for someone else, not for us) to the tense haggling in the market place to the shell-shocked look in people's faces, to the sound of generators boring into our exhausted brains attempting to multitask everything from keeping sanity to keeping count of diesel running,to the heartbreakingly profuse gratitude over the simplest of gifts.

But I promised not to complain because I who have had so much to eat this Christmas, and have eaten it with such an unrepentant hoggish spread of Christmas entitlement cannot with any integrity complain. The spirit of Christmas entitlement has entirely failed Nigerians this year, and perhaps if it was not for her we might have eaten Kanda and been merry.

My neighbour's wife's love for Kanda is that passionate, but especially at Christmas, that love is abruptly recognised as inordinate, and replaced with pleas of "God, in your infinite mercy, don't let Kanda be what is on the menu this Christmas!" It makes writing a Christmas food column difficult, even callous: If writing about food is irritatingly elitist, it is more so at times like Christmas when even those who hate clichés like "Life is not fair" know keenly why clichés endure.

What did I eat at Christmas? Absolutely everything! If it was possible to eat the sofa, I would have done so. Slow-roasted chicken marinated with coriander, cloves, cardamom, hot pepper, garlic, ginger, raisins and coconut milk; aromatic he-goat cooked with garam masala spices, and fluffy bowls of basmati rice.

Barbecued pork cooked with Cameroonian pepper on an outside grill, the aroma of charred meat and pepper carried all the way to Akpabuyo; the built up anticipation while waiting for the barbecue, food in itself. Potato salad, sweet robust plantains, freshly juiced pineapples with ginger root served chilled with sprigs of mint, and supple fufu eaten with briskly cooked afang and kundi (dried beef).

Then there were huge mugs of peppermint Milo and staggeringly drunk Christmas cake; Cameroonian coffee made in a cafeteria laced with Irish cream accompanied with Almond raisin and coconut flapjacks. And like the icing on an indulgent cake bought on credit, there were lazy mornings highlighted by hot puff-puff fried in chilli-pepper infused oil.

In other words, my cup ran well over this Christmas. The puff-puffs, Cameroonian coffee, barbecued pork and potato salad were courtesy of my neighbours whose pots had hitherto only exhibited Kanda till Christmas eve. The more I thought of world hunger and local hunger and recessions, the more I ate.

Don't you just hate the food columnist at Christmas! All that contemplating, eating and intellectualizing of gluttony in times of want is simply disgusting. The most interesting aspect of Christmas fare for me is the snubbing of the food we would normally eat, for food that we consider festive. The preferred foods make no festive sense. Even if you served the most spectacular afang soup at Christmas, it would still come second place to a mediocre plate of rice and chicken, especially chicken, that faithful object of our sense of Christmas entitlement. Like the Christmas carols that we sing (deck the halls with boughs of holly,) I wonder why we agree to suspend reality thus and then consider it a festival that represents God.

Perhaps I am not the only one who owns all these Christmas hang-ups; who suspends commonsense to eat like a glutton, and then pays for it in the days to come in unwanted weight, feelings of guilt and self-reproach. Never mind, another mug of peppermint Milo will dull the snags in my brain.

Merry Christmas and may God in his infinite mercy not let Kanda be the highlight of your festive season menu.