Homecoming - An Ode to Amala
By Oyindamola Depo Oyedokun
Artist: Rasheed Amodu
I knew I was home when the brown morsel dipped in a confluence of green and red landed in my mouth, hot and delicious, unlike anything else I could ever eat on foreign shores. When I swallowed, it was soothing, like a long last found balm for my insides. After I cleared the plate, I was full, the kind of full that did not just mean my stomach could take no more, but that it had known the very essence of satisfaction. I knew I was home when I ate my mother’s Amala and Ewedu for the first time in over a year.
This had become my homecoming tradition, downing a bowl of my mother’s Amala and Ewedu. To her and my father, it was an almost everyday meal. Ordinary. But to me, it was nothing short of extraordinary.
Yet I had not always seen it that way. I grew up in a very Yoruba home, even though it was in Abuja, an eight-hour drive from Ibadan, my hometown. The years that formed my childhood were lived, for the most part, in Abuja, a city that remains a true testament of Nigeria’s diversity, a potpourri of all sorts of cultures and tongues and faces on a bedrock of northernisms. Yet there was not a week that went by without me eating my mother’s Amala and Ewedu before I went off to the boarding house in my first year of secondary school. In boarding school, there was no Amala and Ewedu; it was not a meal that was central enough to the whole country. Instead, they served meals like Eba and Egusi. But even then, that absence did not make my heart grow fonder for Amala and Ewedu.
Eba is also in the “swallow” category of Nigerian meals, a mound of moulded cassava flour (garri), sometimes white and sometimes yellow—depending on the oil the garri was made with. And Egusi is also a soup, made with ground melon seeds and a variety of leafy vegetables. I wouldn’t be surprised if every tribe in Nigeria eats Egusi and Eba, a fantastic meal, but not like home to me.
Amala is made from a white yam flour that magically turns brown when mixed with water. When I think of Amala, I see my mum sifting the flour for impurities and transforming white to brown as she pours the flour into the pot of boiling water—a representation of my mother’s divine abilities to make the most out of every situation. Then I see her violent but measured strides with the pestle, pounding and turning and pounding and turning until the mound is smooth, holding on to the handle of the flaming hot pot with her equally iron hand. I am yet to perfect these strides and I wonder if I ever will.
Ewedu is a soup made from jute leaves —I only learnt the English name of the leaf in my adult years as before then, I did not know Ewedu could exist in the White man’s language. When I think of Ewedu, I see myself plucking the leaves from the vegetable stalk into a bowl. Then I see my mum dropping a small stone of potash into the pot of boiling water and briefly waiting for it to dissolve. This will make the leaves draw more easily and enhance the characteristic green colour of the soup. She pounds the now added leaves with a special traditional broom called an ijabe—this broom is washed and kept with the plate rack, never to touch the floor—until the soup has a consistently slimy texture. I see her adding pungent locust beans, to introduce a peculiar flavour profile, and stock cubes and salt. Sometimes, she adds a scoop of melon (Egusi) paste to ‘brighten up the soup’.
Amala and Ewedu alone would make for a particularly insipid meal, but that’s where Obe Ata comes in, the tomato and pepper stew that ties everything together. An assortment of flavours that live in perfect harmony, a medley if you will.
I think my love for this medley was conceived at the same time as my love for Ibadan. I had not always loved Ibadan either. As a kid, my family visited Ibadan at least once a year. We would celebrate Eid with my grandparents—even though we were Christians—and maybe sometimes Christmas. Then, Ibadan seemed to me like a city where nothing of note happened. There was no cinema, there were more unpaved roads than paved roads and too many buildings with rusting brown-red roofs.
Ibadan was too slow, too simple, too ordinary. Even the city's single zoo in the University of Ibadan and nearby amusement park were not enough to redeem its reputation in my eyes. I often counted down my days in Ibadan, till I could go home to the city that I thought had more zest and lustre.
And so when I had to leave my junior secondary school in Abuja, I cleverly pointed my parents to options of secondary schools in Lagos alone. Lagos had a lot more zest than Abuja, but the few parts I had known of it were almost equally lustrous. My view of Lagos was incredibly sheltered and it wasn’t until my adult years that I saw the city in all its chaos, that I noticed its horrible smell and ear-splitting noise, and far-too-consuming rowdiness. This realisation made me appreciate Ibadan for what it was.
Ibadan moved at just the right pace, with the ease of people who were content and at peace because the clean air allowed them to be. The rusting brown-red roofs were a beauty mark that also told the city’s long, magnificent history. Ibadan was beautifully ordinary. And yes, it didn’t hurt that more commercial places of entertainment began to spring up. But what truly made me fall in love with the city of my birth was its tranquillity and warmth; these traits made my otherwise tumultuous gap year sane as I discovered myself and friendships and romantic love and the beauty of Amala and Ewedu.
When I travelled to Dubai for university, I did not miss Lagos or Abuja, but I wholly missed Ibadan, which I now proudly called ‘my city’ to anyone who cared to listen. I could make Eba and Egusi in Dubai, sometimes even buy it, but in my mind, Amala and Ewedu was something that only existed in my mother’s kitchen in Ibadan.
Today, I travelled from Lagos, where I have lived and worked in for the past two years, to Ibadan. The air of peace washed over me as the car, windows down to receive, landed on Ibadan soil. I soaked it in, readying my mind to enter the state of home, my nose already pre-registering the scent of my mother’s Amala and Ewedu. I saw the brown roofs and the free roads and the smiling, content people of Ibadan and my heart smiled at them before my lips could catch up.
Tonight, I sit at that all-too-familiar kitchen dining table with my Amala and Ewedu served in my favourite brown bowl. With every swallow, I learn anew what it means to digest a meal that has been made with the purest form of love. What it means to be home.
Oyindamola Depo Oyedokun is a Lagos-based writer, aerospace engineer and self-proclaimed polymath, who's passionate about telling authentic African stories and making complex concepts plain. Her writing portfolio spans everything from news and opinion articles for reputable publications such as The Republic, to prize-winning short stories, and two fiction books which have sold hundreds of copies combined.
Disclaimer: The opinions and views expressed in this blog post are those of the writer and do not reflect the opinions or views of Immigrantly.