In 2000, I walked into a buka in Enugu and asked for “Eba”. The request seemed to make time stand still. The askance look on the server’s face prompted a quick embarrassed retreat on my part: “Gari!” The man who drove me there said there was something the Igbos called someone like myself, someone who comes from the part of Nigeria that I come from, walks into a local buka and doesn’t know to ask for gari; the word is “ofemanu.” By definition, I was from a people famed for greasy stews i.e. the Yoruba.
Even then, it struck me as a somewhat makeshift appellation. In comparison to fang or edi ka ikong cooked in half-an-eva-water-bottle of palm oil, the Yoruba pot of stew with its paltry three cooking spoons of groundnut oil is lean cuisine.
However, did we legitimately earn that disingenuous title? It became apparent that ofemanu was like the aj’okuta ma mu’mi that the Yoruba use to describe the Igbos, literally translating as: that person that eats rocks and needs no water to push them down. Ultimately these terms are an informal disdain of otherness.
Nothing out of the ordinary, except that it is interesting that the disdain is directed at and through what “others” are eating. The French call the British “roast beef”.
The British return the honour by calling the French “froggies” or something along that line. “Roast beef” means the British can’t be bothered to make an effort about their food. They are food plebs who after all the years that culture and food have been intricately intertwined in Europe are unrepentantly uncivilized, unprogressive.
“Froggies” means that though French cuisine has been described as the most progressive in the world, to the British, all it boils down to is the eating of frog legs; which really must be just a national pretension. The Yoruba and Igbo are supposedly living in the same country but geographically we are very like the French and British, and worse; no Euro channel.
Nigeria may well divide along the lines of eba and gari. There are intrinsic differences, which I will describe with a recap of my first attempt at making gari for my parents-in-law. By the way, my in-laws are not Igbos, they are from Ikom LGA in Cross River State. But as I was solicitously advised by a Yoruba male relative, everyone from Ore upwards is “Igbo” and anyone from Kwara upwards is a “Mala”, and insisting that my husband is not from Calabar, but from Northern Cross River, makes things altogether more dicey since everyone knows “they” eat people from Ugep upwards! My in-laws requested for gari, I made preparations for eba. I put a little water in a pot and set it to boil. I got out a little teacup and measured some gari into the boiling water. I stirred it, leaving it on the fire. I took it off the fire and presented it to my in-laws.
They were not impressed. My mother-in-law was unequivocal in her comments about my cooking. I did not understand what her problem was as she did not understand mine. Here was how to make proper gari: one boiled the water and took it off the fire; one immediately filled the boiling water with sufficient amounts of gari. One stirred and turned the mixture until it was a smooth solid mound.
It was hardly rocket science! I did not say that it was not the way we made eba where I came from. I did not say that my mother used to call out from the next room “...leave that eba on the fire, I didn’t tell you I wanted eba Igbo!” The desired end product of making eba was not solid but precarious, almost sludge. It would appear I had crossed the border, no use protesting when we were speaking different languages.
The bone of contention was clearly the consistency of the cooked gari and to a lesser extent the quantity. In retrospect, I must also have insulted my mother-in-law by the quantity of eba that I made that day, and left some suspicion of innate stinginess.
“Aj’okuta ma mu’mi,” the title that the Yoruba have given everyone from Ore to Kwara, would appear to be even more disingenuous than ofemanu. This is something I did not fully understand till my thirties; the distinction between eating gari and drinking gari where the Yoruba eat and drink the same gari.
For my husband’s people, eating-gari is yellow gari, which is the descriptive colour by virtue of the addition of palm oil. And palm oil is a lubricant that helps the so-called rocks pass comfortably down through the oesophagus down to the stomach.
The Yoruba gari, which is fermented far longer, is reserved mainly for drinking and interestingly is something of a delicacy. In the South-South, both raw gari and cooked gari are called gari. To the Yoruba, raw gari is gari and cooked gari is eba. So the joke is on the Yoruba who do not understand that there is an art to the eating of rocks.
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