Pounded Yam and Leopards

This is not a story about pounded yam and leopards, or maybe it is; just not quite the way you imagine. But it is definitely a story about a couple- a couple whose marriage is threatened by, not unfaithfulness or lack of love but by the monotony of stereotypes and old-fashioned beliefs.

Cupid is thought to be accurate, pairing hearts deserving of one another. But sometimes- and nobody knows why- probably for his own private amusement, he sets two seemingly contradictory characters together, settles back with whatever passes for popcorn in his world and watches. Just as he did with Romanus and Ezinne.

Romanus 42, an international textile merchant with an ego the size of Owerri’s own Grand Canyon (that deep gully erosion after Egbu, along Mbaise road) is great at what he does. An astute businessman with ties spanning across Singapore, Malaysia and greater China, Romanus controlled majority of market share for imported lace and similar woven fabrics in Eastern Nigeria and some parts of Lagos. With his amicable charm and tenacious attitude, there was no doubt he could sell fire to a dragon as he often boasted to his numerous Chinese dealers.

Evidently, he was rich and successful, but that was business. Unfortunately what Romanus gained in wealth, he lacked in domestic matters. For starters, he was an absentee husband and father. Not to be mistaken, he loved his children and was very affording, but his idea of family was merely providing all that they needed as long as money could afford it. However, raising them was not his responsibility…after all that was why he had a wife, right?

Ezinne, his young wife, a first-class graduate in Physical Ergonomics (not economics) and a former Miss Federal Poly Nekede was now a modern stay-at-home mum. Not by choice though, they had both agreed (well, Romanus mostly) that it would be far more suitable for their children to be brought up by their mum rather than unknown nannies with questionable backgrounds, as he put it. Not one to argue much, Ezinne gave up her promising 9 to 5 job to manage their home.

For many, it may seem that to Ezinne, life was good. And it should have been, they lived in a mansion on Nollywood side of Owerri, complete with a swimming pool, several white Grecian columns and enormous leopard-head sculptures carved into various parts of the impressive edifice. This included the entrance to the house which was shaped like the open jaws of a leopard. For some reason, Romanus was obsessed with leopards; and had even once considered having one as a pet but Ezinne had to put her foot down on that.

In spite of all the extravagance, she wasn’t contented at all…why?

You see, Romanus had many positive attributes about him but the one thing that threw a monkey-wrench into the whole fairy-tale life of Ezinne’s marriage was his archaic, out-dated, old-fashioned, antiquated, obsolete (I have run out of synonyms!) way of thinking. And it was such a shame because he was exposed to several foreign cultures from his many trips yet neither of them opened his mind to more contemporary ways of luxury living.

I have often believed that Romanus strict traditional upbringing by his village-wise father is responsible for most of his ancient values and I may be right but that is a long parallel story that shouldn’t be told with this one.

One such belief Romanus held was that the meat in any household MUST be bought by a man. African men were hunters in the past, and it was their sole responsibility to handle the meat. Today, even though men no longer hunted food per se, it was their duty to buy. 

Because of his frequent trips, Romanus never allowed meat to run out in his home so he put up a large cold room which he frequently stocked up with large hanging chunks of beef, goat-meat and grass-cutters, antelopes and whatnots whenever he was in town. If for some reason they ran out, his family would have to feed on fish until he returned. Ezinne had been warned.

Another quirk about Romanus was that he always expected his “nri ji” (pounded yam) to be actually pounded in the traditional way. He disliked factory processed ones like “Poundo yam” and abhorred using pounding-machines; to him they never tasted like the real thing. This would have been okay with Ezinne only if he didn’t insist that she did it herself.

According to him, he couldn’t bear some stranger’s sweat dripping into the mortar while they pounded it. So it wasn’t unusual to see Ezinne, former Miss Federal Poly Nekede, pounding away in the kitchen with her polished nails and all.

There are a few other peculiarities which I hesitate to include in this story- one of such that includes Romanus’ bedroom habits but let us keep this mainly PG13 for now. So Ezinne’s dilemma was quite understandable and while her peers envied her lifestyle from the outside, few knew what was really happening within. And, whenever she tried to voice her discomfort about any of these issues, Romanus would get into a fit and yell; “Do you want me to give up my omenala (tradition)?” Or 
"That is how women always did it in the past; my mother pounded yam and so should you!” Such statements usually ended the conversation immediately.

And so it was, one fateful night just before Romanus went to sleep, they had just had an argument about Ezinne’s plan to start a yoga class for other stay-at-home mums in the Nollywood estate (remember her first class in Physical Ergonomics?). But Romanus who couldn’t understand why women would want to wear skin-tight pants and stretch all day turned it down; saying if it were in the past, women would be too busy raising hunters and warriors to think of “yogurt” pants.

Ezinne cried herself to sleep.

I know many people do not believe in karma but let me quickly say here that there is always a consequence for anything you do whether good or bad. It just has different names used to describe it. That night, Ezinne’s tears reached Aleruchi, the goddess of divine feminism- if you believe in that sort of thing- and she decided to give Romanus a taste of his own medicine via the phantasm of a turbulent nightmare.

It began as all dreams do, suddenly finding yourself in the middle of something or somewhere with no recollection of how you got there. For Romanus, he was in the thickets of a dense forest very much like his hometown, he didn’t know what to make of it but he knew something was not right.

In the dream, it is dark and hazy; surreal in a Lynch-esque manner. Romanus can hardly see clearly in front of him and while trying to make his way through the bushes his hand brushes something sharp and bristly, like the muzzle of a cat. The feeling is unpleasant and he begins to run blindly towards the nearest source of light.

Before long, he runs into a group of men who ask him if he has seen it. He doesn’t know what it is but he suspects that they are hunting something dangerous, because they all have spears and knives. As one of the men leans forward to explain, a large cat swoops down on him and begins to rip his neck apart. The hunting party yells and thrust their spears at the creature.

Romanus tries to break away from the pandemonium but someone hands him a knife and pushes him inside the mob. By the faint light of the moon he can recognize the unmistakable patterns on the animal’s skin. It is a leopard.

Blackout.

Most dreams come in phases which we often can’t tell where they begin or end. In the next phase of Romanus’ dream, he finds himself inside what looks like small mud hut with a thatched roof. He is with a heavy-set woman in her 40s (who is not Ezinne but is Ezinne). There is something unusually off about her.

The Ezinne woman asks him if dinner is ready. Submissively, Romanus offers her a bowl of what appears to be pounded yam. As she eats, he sits by her feet on the earthy floor and begins to pound more yams. It is never enough because she keeps requesting for more and he tries to keep up by pounding faster. But why is Romanus the one pounding yam?

He looks closely at Ezinne and sees why she really isn’t Ezinne; she has a beard on her chin. A beard similar to the kind he grows. It dawns on him then that the Ezinne woman is actually he. Which makes him wonder, who is he?

Romanus stretches his forearms; they are uncharacteristically feminine and covered in henna dye designs. On his left wrist he observes a familiar birthmark belonging to his wife, puzzled he walks up to a mirror and sees that his lips are also dyed black. He is wearing hessian fabric as a skirt to cover his hips…and breasts. He is a woman! At this point Romanus begins to scream…

He woke up to see his wife Ezinne (the real one now) staring at him. She looked scared. There was a patch of sweat on his pillow. Romanus was relieved to find out it had only been a dream. 

"Sorry, I was having a bad dream", he explained. But she wasn’t worrying about that.

"I think somebody is in our house. I heard noise downstairs", she whispered.

Downstairs he found a flashlight by the stairs, for some reason he decided not to switch on the light bulbs; he went to the sitting room and into the kitchen. They were both empty. A kitchen window had been left open and the wind was blowing the utensils against each other like a wind chime. That was probably what Ezinne had heard.

Romanus often blamed the unwarranted paranoia of women for the stress many men suffered and this was one of them. He shut the window and started to ascend the stairs when he heard a sound. It was faint but repetitive like the idling engine of a car and it appeared to be coming from outside where his garage was.

None of his cars were on; he had gone outside to inspect them. But he saw a light on in the window of the cold room. Why didn’t Cook switch it off? As he approached the door, he discovered that that was where the sound was coming from. When Romanus entered the cold room, nothing in his 42 years on earth prepared him for what he saw.

All the frozen meat he stored was now alive; the hanging chunks of beef, headless suspended antelopes, pigs and even the birds- without their feathers- cried out as they swung from the racks on their iron hooks. A nearby pig with its hollowed-out belly and eyeless sockets clawed at Romanus as it cried for attention; they all appeared to be in pain. Everything was hazy and surreal…again.

By now you may have guessed that Romanus never really woke up from his first dream. In fact, he is in another phase of his nightmare; a dream within a dream…the worst of nightmares.

He is now on the floor crawling and shivering, more from fear than the cold. The horror before him can’t be tamed. Yet Romanus is aware of another presence. One that disturbed his assorted meats; an evil presence he doesn’t want to see but can feel. It lands noiselessly- on all fours- on the cutting table with precise feline agility and leaps at a suspended antelope, taking it down with its powerful jaws. The antelope’s cry is one of anguish and resignation.

Bloodcurdling.

Romanus watches quietly. He is trying not to draw attention to himself. At the moment it is backing him, feeding voraciously on the now silent antelope. The door is only a few feet away, if only he can crawl quietly to it… Unfortunately, the creature stops mid-meal and sniffs the air in typical cat-like fashion before turning quickly in his direction.

He has been seen. It approaches him unhurriedly with the grace of a patient animal; a deadly one that knows its prey can’t elude it, no matter how hard they try. It is huge, almost six feet high at upright length with a face unlike anything on earth. But the markings on its skin are unmistakable.

Oddly, the song that begins to play in his head at that moment is Bushmeat by Sound Sultan. Romanus had always liked the song but right now, not so much.

He is stiff in hypnotic shock as its bristly wet whiskers brush his neck. Then the only light in the room goes off and he is left in a staring match with a glowing pair of callous yellow eyes. A sharp pain surges through his neck as he feels its teeth cut through. The last thing he hears is the gushing sound of his jugular emptying its contents into the creature’s open jaws…

The first thing Romanus did when he woke up was not to pray for his Chi to bind the evil elements and principalities from his life. No, It was call his chief architect, Mr Wei Tin Chang. The Chinese engineer was to come and demolish all traces of ‘leopard’ from his house before the end of the week. From the building entrance to the leopard grotto he had set up by the pool, everything was to be removed.

Ezinne was surprised when a few days later she received a home delivery of a Yam Pounder from Konga. It had been signed by Romanus himself. He had also told Mr. Wei Tin Chang to include a studio in his new design, one where she can teach her “yogurt” classes. An elated Ezinne couldn’t understand her husband’s recent ‘strange’ behaviour but happily welcomed it.

As for Romanus, if anything, he now appreciates his wife more. The last time he attended the Ichies’ meeting in his hometown, the other chiefs noticed that his traditional Ishiagu shirt now had lion head patterns on it (which was the proper way) instead of his trademark leopard heads.

Maazi Romanus still feels somewhat uncomfortable about entering his cold room alone at night. Of course he wouldn’t admit this to anyone. He buys the meat in his house though, that’s the one part of his father’s nketa (legacy) that still remains. Maybe Aleruchi would have to come down herself and battle him on that.

-The End-

Click the audio file below to hear the song Bushmeat by Sound Sultan Ft Tuface