Exploring Nigerian Folktales, Food Myths & Taboos
Written by Ozoz Sokoh
If I remember one animal from my childhood, it was the Tortoise. Not because we had one - we didn’t till many years later - but because he (not she) was a star in Nigerian folklore. From Tales by Moonlight in the 1980s to the stories my aunties and uncles told us, almost every folktale featured food.
In one version of ‘How the Tortoise Got His Crooked Shell’ story, there’s no food in the animal kingdom due to a drought- everyone is starving except Ehoro, the rabbit. Tortoise - Ijapa - notices and convinces Ehoro to let him in on the secret.
Ehoro doesn’t trust him but gives him ‘one last chance’ and takes him to the source - his mother, where a feast awaits. They eat to their hearts’ content and the tortoise thanks them and heads home to sleep. When he gets out of bed the following morning, he thinks of a way to deceive Ehoro’s mother so he can feast again and is halfway into the plan when he’s caught and has an accident which results in his shell shattering.
Food stories have always been the vehicle to get us to go places - in our imagination, consciousness, behaviour. Folktales, myths, taboos are complex constructs that have a deeper purpose - to get us to toe the line, to be better, more considerate, helpful, careful and all other desires of that nature.
Sometimes though, they are laced with fearful elements to force our compliance, to get us in line quicker than if left to our own devices.
Folk tale
Definition: A story originating in popular culture typically passed on by word of mouth.
Growing up, the threats we got from adults and parents when we attempted to eat the oranges that were so vital for our health, oranges that they had given us themselves to protect us against scurvy and the like...those same oranges were now the reason for making us panic - ‘Don’t swallow the seed o, or a tree will grow out of your head or belly. And honestly, is there a Nigerian child somewhere, anywhere who didn’t hear this myth?
Do you also remember the warning not to swallow chewing gum, whether bazooka or gum made from agbalumo, because it would cause your intestines to stick/ glue/ gum together?
Myth
Definition: A widely held but false belief or idea
Photo by Ozoz Sokoh
Oranges were the fruits of choice of many Nigerian childhoods and I can bet you, many ate in silence, in terror of roots and branches, shiny leafy, fragrant leaves suddenly bursting through skull and brain like some terror-filled crown of foliage, all because you swallowed a seed! Did that keep us in check? Get us to be more obedient? Because it was so easy to swallow a seed and also if this was true, wasn’t everything else our elders said true too?
I grew up and was shocked it was all a lie until the seventh season of an old favourite show, Grey’s Anatomy. A patient, Raul Arand a, comes in coughing up blood and is diagnosed to have a mini fir tree growing in his lungs. It turns out that he and his family had been cutting down trees at home and he must have inhaled a seed without knowing. Thankfully, the 2-inch tree is removed and he goes home, hale and hearty with his family.
So were our parents right all along? Granted, Grey’s Anatomy is fiction but was this an example of life imitating art? In my search for answers, I discovered that in April 2009, while operating on a man for suspected cancer, Russian surgeons found a 2-inch fir tree growing in his lungs.
However, Dr Ai-Ping Chua in an October 2009 article for the Chestnet Journal titled ‘Trees Don't Grow in the Lungs!’ dares say they don’t and writes ‘We would like to bring to the attention of readers that trees do not grow in humans. To the best of our knowledge, there has never been a single report in the medical literature of seeds and/or plants growing in humans. If they did, watermelon seeds and peanuts which are the most commonly aspirated foreign bodies would be growing out of control from our lungs. Moreover, it makes no biological sense that in the absence of sunlight and appropriate nutrient medium, photosynthesis and germination of seed can take place’ ...
Fear has always been a powerful deterrent in Nigeria’s culinary canon. And it is fear that has sustained folklore, myths and taboos. Fear in Nigeria is often about protection, preservation. Unfortunately, it is almost always masked as “I know more than you, I’m older than you, respect me, I’ve seen more than you have in your short life”. Very rarely do ‘elders’ admit to fear even when they don’t know. Fear - at the root of every taboo and forbidden thing there ever was.
Taboo
Definition: A social or religious custom prohibiting or forbidding discussion of a particular practise or forbidding association with a particular person, place, or thing.
Photo by Ozoz Sokoh
Growing up, I saw my Isoko mother eat snails, as did my Edo dad and all of us but whenever my mum’s brothers visited and we cooked for them, we made sure to do it without snails because they forbade it - Isoko men absolutely rejected eating snails. Nigerian land snails are considered a delicacy across much of the country, prized for their deliciousness and enjoyed especially in the rainy season when they are abundant. If there’s one thing you should know about Nigerians, it’s that taste ranks high on the indices of what makes food worth it.
Cleaning snails, ridding them of the slime which makes it easy for them to play hide and seek is hard work and it is this slime which folklore believes will cause men who eat snails to be slower and weaker during war. When I asked my mum about it, she said historically Isoko and Urhobo men had access to fish from the Delta and couldn’t be bothered with the cleaning.
While women aren’t forbidden to eat snails in Isoko land and other parts of Edo, one group is exempt - pregnant women. They are forbidden from eating snails because it’s believed that the slime would lead to the child producing excess saliva production (which could be dangerous) plus it would make the child sluggish.
While some men forbid snails, others enjoy the singular gizzard only the ‘men of the house’ are entitled to. Or used to because now - unlike in the past - you can buy gizzards by the kilo. It’s hard to find the origin of this and for some, it’s a suggested call for respect.
While the men/ senior male leader gets the gizzard, heart, liver, leg and tail end, the woman gets the pelvic region and the youngest child, the head. Many believe that these parts are symbolic and that as the man is the head of the family, his effectiveness is as a result of partaking in these eating fests which bring life, sustenance and ritual power.
There are numerous stories told about food - couched in tales or simplified into one-liners - with the same goal: be careful what you eat and don’t be greedy - like the tortoise. Everything else? Fair game :).
Ozoz Sokoh is a Nigerian food explorer and ‘Traveller by plate’, passionate about food in its entirety – cooking, eating, dreaming, writing and photographing it especially on her blog, Kitchen Butterfly and using foodways – the social, cultural and economic practices relating to the production and consumption of food to explore the world because ‘Food is more than eating’. You'll find her on her Kitchen Butterfly Blog, Instagram, Twitter.