Does this Communicate Anything?

This is supposed to be a signpost of a 'ministries' (not munistrys) somewhere in Nigeria. I welcome your comments

FOOD MATTERS: The Freezer Angst

There are many stories behind some people's hatred for the deep freezer, perhaps I should tell you the one told me by a lady:

'When I first married, I had a beautiful olive green deep freezer. It was one of those necessities on the giddy new bride’s list. Our first home was in Victoria Garden City and our electricity supply was close to perfect until one day when it went away and didn’t return for a month.

We had no generator. We couldn’t afford one, and if our electricity was relatively good, we didn’t need one; or so we thought until the days in that month rolled darkly and oppressively past. That lovely olive green freezer that I had stocked high with legs and arms and body parts of bush and farm animals, with left-overs and plastic containers and black cellophane bags and six month old puff-puffs and bags of egusi soup that my mother cooked for me... in a matter of days became an oozing stinking nightmare that broke my heart.

The experience made me reminisce about one year at Obafemi Awolowo University when a group of engineering students worked on building a freezer that ran on pig’s dung.

I remember the names of two friends who were involved: Aman Junaid and Lanre Oke. We thought it was hilarious then. As my defrosting freezer broke my heart, I realised how foolish I’d been not to recognise strains of genius when they were staring me in the face. A Pig’s dung freezer would have been perfect in my present situation. I would have built a shack in the backyard with a big padlock on the door, my bags of pig’s dung and my freezer safely ensconced, hidden from the disdain of urban snobbishness. Never mind the smell.'

Aman and Lanre’s pig’s dung freezer is of course now interred in the Nigerian museum of antiquities and quaint ideas. Nevertheless, I swore never to own another deep freezer, and I have kept that promise to myself till this day.

Who needs that humming receptacle of dead things anyway; that glorified morgue, that bottomless pit for food that we really really don’t want to eat; or shall I speak for myself? Who was it that said very astutely that the deep freezer is that place where good food goes to die!

If most people are like myself, the freezer gets stocked not out of necessity but out of some neurosis that comes on one when one buys a deep freezer. The freezer is there, so we stock it with more and more food and really what we want is something fresh to eat. There is something also about the typical Nigerian woman’s freezer; the cheap black cellophane twisted round defrosted ice; that ugly messy carnivorous collection of items made uglier by our, no–light- then- few- hours- of -grudging –light, Nigerian situation.

I am sure that I can only really love a vegetarian’s deep freezer.

An earlier story is about how my very first days in school coincided with my mother’s purchase of an impaled smoked bush rat; that most revered of delicacies. My mother said she noticed that I kept circumventing the freezer; going the long way round the furniture not to have to go anywhere near it.

I had of course seen the animal brought home and lovingly tucked into the freezer. My mother picked me up from school on one of those days and was queried by the teacher about whether we ate cats, and if so, if we had recently bought one and kept it in the deep freezer. I’m not sure that at that time, my mother put two and two together and understood that the cat being referred to was her delicacy being hoarded in the deep freeze for a very luxurious future meal.

Anyway, it soon all came together when one school day, my mother turned up in school and found I had disappeared into thin air. My poor brother who is only two years older than I am got his ears properly and viciously twisted but could only confess that I had entered the car with some other children, and ignoring all his pleadings and warnings gone home with them.

My distraught mother took my brother home and came back to wait in the school in the hope that I would turn up. I did turn up later that evening, returned by parents who came home after work and found some strange child sitting among their children eating gari and pretending to be one of them. My mother then realised that I had fled home on account of the cat (or rat) in the deep freezer.

The morbidity of it still makes sense to me. From a child’s point of view, here is this deep cold box kilometres taller than the child, sitting in the middle of the room, and in it there is a dead something stretched out on bits of wood. Even as an adult, I can deeply relate to the revulsion and fear it creates. I think I’ll keep my freezer small, at eye level; filled with beans, pasta and Oka baba.

culled from Yemisi Ogbe (2011), www.234next.com

February 2, 2011 11:56PMT