The roots ferment and then are taken out and dried. Cassava has an odour. Flora admires even the odour. She writes:

The he-goat smells
The she-goat smells
You smell
Great Mother
You too must have
An identity
The leopard too
He has an identity
So we don't mind
Great Mother
Your odour
It does not matter

Then the cassava is pounded in a mortar and made into balls and put in boiling water using a large wooden spoon. When it is ready, it is taken out and pounded again and placed again in the furnace to cook. While it cooks, the other ingredients of the soup are got ready. "There may not be fish in the soup, but cassava is plenty" says Flora. Even a small child can eat it. Who is now going to wash the pot?

"Never mind"
Mother says quietly,
"I'll wash to pot
Mother and Cassava are one."

Cassava is naturally preserved and can stay for days. But it was not a cash crop. So slowly it was ignored. Flora urges a return to the eating of cassava. She explains:

You don't fetch
The All Mighty foreign exchange
But you feed
All your children

She says, punning with the word "roots" and adds:

We must go back
To the roots
To your roots
Oh Mother Cassava

And the "Rice Song" begins with this question:

In the days gone by
Before the white men came
To our shore to trade in slaves
To colonize our country
Before they imposed their
Strange government on us;
Who south of the Niger
Heard about Rice?

She calls rice "bird-like" food unknown to their great grand- parents. In the good old days, the mothers prepared cassava, yam and maize fufu with okra and ogbono soups with fresh and dried fish. Many different herbs went into the food and it was washed down with palm wine brought fresh from the tree every morning.

Then the white man came. Rice was not the white man's staple food. Nor was it that of the Nigerians. And yet it became the food of the rich. "A poor man does not eat rice" became a well- known proverb. Rice became a status symbol. And beer replaced palm wine.

Flora pleads for a ban on imported rice and for incentives to rice growers. In 1984, the papers said that in the 18 months between 1982 and 1984, Nigeria had spent a staggering 600 million naira on rice importation. If one supposes that it was a nation of 600 million people it meant that each one had consumed one million naira worth of rice in eighteen months! Flora makes her demand:

Naira in cash
For I am one of the population
And I don't care about rice
I am an adult, a wife and
A mother
So, can you give me
My share which is
Approximately one million naira?

Flora's impassioned poetry must have reached the ears of some Nigerians at least. May be those of us who want to bring up our children on McDonalds food and Coca-Cola must read it too. So that we can experience once again the taste of millet and homegrown vegetables.

C. S. LAKSHMI

C. S. Lakshmi is an independent researcher and a writer. She writes in Tamil under the presudonym Ambai. She has two short story collections and a translated one in English called A Purple Sea to her credit. She is the founder-trustee and director of SPARROW (Sound and Picture Archives for Researches on Women).