FOOD MATTERS: Sweet riddles

A sweet is nothing really. Not sustenance. Not particularly good for you. Boiled sugar! We give sweets to children to reward them or to pacify them but their efficiency in both those capacities is questionable. If one really wanted to reward a child, would it not make more sense to give him some broccoli? Has a child ever been pacified by a sweet or is he made ten times more mobile? Don't worry; this article is not about the moral standing of sweets. The human race's need to put something sweet in the mouth is not going to be reprimanded by a petty philosopher like myself. I myself have an irrepressible sweet tooth.

My real motivation for talking about sweets is to revisit some capsule of a memory I have from when I was about my daughter's age. I was standing next to the dining table in the evening after school engrossed with the black minty lollipop in my mouth. My mother came into the room and asked me what I was eating.

"Oko Mala" I said. And I remember that once the words left my lips, I knew that I had committed the quintessential faux pas of my life. What was I thinking? How could I have forgotten myself so completely....allowed playground lingo to creep into the tightly guarded language that my mother and I spoke.

"What Was That?" She asked. Silence, resounding silence on my part.

A more conciliatory "what was that" To which I responded with terrified, frantic please God, let the ground open up silence.

"I'm not going to punish you" my mother bargained "I just want to know what you said" ...Before you knew it, this negotiation had been going on for thirty minutes. I was standing, she was sitting. I was born in 1973. My mother was not one of these modern "I am talking you are talking" kind of mothers, so how could I believe my life was not over. I hated the sweet in my hand so much, I could have impaled myself on it.

She was the one who lost the battle because she got no response from me. She didn't need it. She had heard me clearly, so she attempted to tidy up the matter as neatly and with as little fuss as possible.

"Oko mala means the mala's penis!" she said "Why would anyone call a sweet that!" That was what everyone called it! I wanted to yell at her. Call me an oversensitive child but after that, I wanted nothing more to do with black minty lollipops called Oko mala. But the playground dictionary was not torn up for the sake of my humiliation.

Everyone I knew for as long as I remember called the lollipop that unsavoury appellation without thinking about it. It was of course as far as we were concerned completely benign. If someone came up behind you and yelled, "bum bum" you would laugh. Not because it meant anything, but because those silly grown -ups had so many hang-ups about those matters.

There is nothing of course benign about an appellation probably conceived by a sexually perverse adult, or the derogatory "mala" connoting all manner of things from our bias against our own dark skin to our innate tribalism to all the narrow-minded things we believe about people from the northern states, to our denigration of the religious appellation of "malam". All that negativity and stinking prejudice in something as trivial as a sweet...

Not all the sweets of my childhood were as controversial. The most popular was the long sticky chewy "Goody goody" wrapped in "red for danger" red cellophane and then of course there were Cadbury's Buttermints and malted sweets.

There were some other ones called "flat chested lady" "sisi pelebe" but I can't bring up a clear image of what they looked like.

If I successfully stole some kobos from my parent's room, I would most likely spend them on an "ekono Gowan". They were made from the most basic sweet recipe: boiling sugar and water past the soft crack stage of 270 degrees F, poured into cone moulds, wrapped in bits of newspaper. What was so special about these sweets? Nothing! Absolutely nothing! But I loved everything about them from handing over the ‘stolen' money to the sweet-seller, hearing that familiar scraping of rusty tin cover against glass that was the eternally recycled jar for sweets being opened, to the untwisting of greasy newspaper and unveiling of the golden caramel sweet with cracked pathways on the inside like a beautiful sunset coloured marble...to the exhausting popping of lips till they are bruised against said sweet.

Ekono Gowan was certainly not named by chance.

The year was probably 1978 or 1979, two or three years after Gowon's cloak and dagger role in Lt. Col Buka Suka Dimka's coup and the murder of Gen Murtala Mohammed. Our sweet stood for the puppeteer's nail from which Dimka hung, and Nigeria's wonderfully complex and bizarre way of coping with our political realities; our resilience, our shrugging off of the most earth shattering occurrences like nothing happened. We haven't changed much.

So much for sweets being rewards for the innocent...