My Igbo Connection (Part 1)
By Mohammed Adamu
He is about my bosommest Igbo friend. Or not to bruise sore friendship edges, I should say ‘one of’ -or at least one fit to wear the scriptural suffix ‘with whom I am well pleased’. Often we share what only nearest of kin are better at sharing: -namely trust, protection and care.
Mr. Onuzuruike Ikeokwu and I greet by the pet-most of first or last names: I say to him ‘Onu, my friend ke kwanu’ and he replies “I greet you my friend, Dankande”. By the way the ‘Dan-Kande’ (meaning ‘Son of Kande), happens to be my email name, created from my late mother’s pet name, Kande.
Onu, knowing the depth of my preoccupation with the memory of my late mother, remembers always to serenade me with this pet-salute (‘my friend Dan-kande’ or ‘DanKande my friend’), which he knows to always have a pleasantly humbling effect on me.
And by a pleasant twist of irony too, Onu’s wife’s pet name, ‘Beke’, sit so comfortably well on my flippant tongue you’d think that I originally pet-named her so. Whenever, especially my wife and I, go visiting the Ikeokwus, you bet the entire family are always on hand to attend to our every culinary and other delights.
By the way, ‘oha’ -or is it ‘ora’- soup is always my favorite, as Barrister Nnenna (Beke) and her team of beautiful daughters, shuttle the kitchen endlessly until they get the DanKandes to tender a plea of ‘eri jigom oo’ Beke! Or Beke, ‘afe jigom’!
Now these two were the august visitors that called at our Abuja residence a few days ago, in arrears of our recent house-warming: Mr. and Mrs. Onuzuruike Ikeokwu -both retired Senior bankers at Unity Bank. The last time we had the pleasure of hosting them it was in our Minna residence, after they had driven four hours on our once terribly-potholed road, from Abuja. And you bet we really spoilt them more than a ‘little’.
And although on this last visit of theirs, my wife was unavailably not around to fete the Ikeokwus, our two kitchen-savvy daughters were fully on ground to give them a test of their sumptuous medicine. I had earlier put Onu on notice that my daughters would be preparing a Northern delicacy -masaa- and he had assured me their anxious Igbo taste buds would be ready for all culinary surprises!
And because whenever we visit each other, we make sure to be famished enough for the task we know to be ahead, my daughters and I had fun watching especially Onu shredding masa with both hands and with the utmost gluttonous abandon, swiftly dunking them into a bowl of chicken soup, while Beke delicately knifed, forked, ferreted and shovelled them pass her red lips with cosmeticized ease.
By now Onu was already tongue-over-lips, telling us some ‘okuko-and-bull’ story about how the first time he ate massa was as a ‘starter’ to a grill of chicken suya garnished with onions and cabbage, and that he never knew that massa itself was a stand-alone delicacy. This kind of unsolicited dinner-table tale, we call ‘santi’ -when the taste of good pudding evoke unwarranted culinary anecdote.
And even as my daughters and I were seeing the Ikeakwus off, Onu, while giving them fatherly pep talk about ‘education’, again strayed into some ‘beefy’ Igbo parabola about the ‘good’ students being those who know the occasion to pull out the cow’s ‘horn’ (for special drinks), and when to brandish its ‘tail’ at the appropriate dancing arena. The message being: there should be occasion for everything!
By the way, I am still working on a new proverb which should be saying something to the effect: ‘give an Igbo man some homemade masaa and he’ll be ‘talking a donkey’s hind legs off’ the table telling you how the ‘forbidden fruit’ that Eve seduced Adam to eat at Eden, was not actually a ‘fruit’. It was ‘masa’!
