Food

“In Africa, you just reach out and grab a banana to eat” – that’s what many people think. That’s not completely true. In the first place, Africans eat next to no fruit – they consider pineapples, mangoes, papaya and our “sweet bananas” foolish, unimportant food. In the second place, bananas are mostly eaten fried or pounded in a mortar to make a thick porridge – but it is a special kind of banana, “plantain”. In the third place, it’s not easy for an African to feed his family: revealingly, every other African fairy tale starts with the coming of hunger.

A European might think that African cooking is monotonous: in the forest areas there’s just manioc, plantain and yams; in the savannas there’s just couscous, and sometimes rice or beans. All of the variety is in the different kinds of sauce: peanut, oil palm nut, baobab or manioc leaves … At big parties, they can sometimes eat meat which is any African’s favorite treat. Only rich people eat meat more often, and if you go to an African village and say that in Europe, people eat meat daily, nobody will believe you. Even the nomad cattlemen very seldom eat meat: the Fulbe drink curdled milk, the Maasai and the Hima drink milk with cows’ blood, but not even the cattlemen are familiar with cheese, sour cream and cottage cheese.

The Manding people eat in groups, with their hands, out of communal pots: one for the men and another one for the women. A well-bred adult won’t scrub food off the bottom, he will leave it for the children. The people of the Ivory Coast will present their guest with a treat in a separate calabash – the more honorable the guest, the more abundant the food. However, a courteous guest won’t eat it all up, but leave some for the host’s children. With the Nigeria’s Kirfi, a mother would serve a separate calabash or little pot to each child, so later they can compare who got more.
They eat almost any game: not just monkeys and antelopes, but also fat Gaboon vipers, snails, hairy caterpillars and flying termites… Only a totem animal can’t be eaten. At hungry times that can last for months, they eat everything: herbs, roots and bark.

You should not be surprised if you see the following billboard in an African capital: “Want to put on weight? Ask me how!” Every African woman wants to be fat and beautiful, so dieting and medical fasting are unpopular here.

As a rule, African cooks have neither cook-table, nor cutting board.  Cote d'Ivoire. The Gban. A. Yu. Zheltov. 2002		Ma-Sha, the youngest wife of the head of the local Catholic community, is spreading out the pounded cassava to dry. Côte d’Ivoire. Santa. The Kla-Dan. Vydrin V., 2002		Festive meal in a church. Ethiopia (Abyssinia), Zarema. The Tigray. Gervers M.
Tea ceremony. Mali. 2002. Vydrin V.