Caboose

The other night Suleiman came round to show me how to cook tuwon shinkafa. This is a popular staple food in northern Nigeria, one of the many different types of starchy blob. Shinkafa is the Hausa word for rice and tuwo is the generic term for starchy blobs.

It’s always eaten with some kind of soup (i.e. stew), in this case we made a sort of egusi soup, with ground pumpkin seeds. I’d been to the market and bought shinkafan tuwo (tuwo rice) and all the other ingredients the day before.

Here’s Suleiman cooking the soup and the finished product:

It came out well, although the rice could have probably done with a little more cooking to form into balls properly. I don’t often buy meat or fish, as I can’t rely on my fridge to keep food for very long, so the egusi soup had tinned tuna in instead.

The next day I realised Suleiman had probably added too much chili, I suffered from a distint burning sensation (as Marebec would put it).

I got a text from Aine last week with details of what to do on arrival in Minna. I texted back and asked if she’d meant to send it to someone else. It seems that she had asked me at the St Patrick’s celebrations the week before if I wanted to come through and I’d said yes, maybe too many Guinnesses had been consumed.

After the usual bouncy and dusty trip from Kaduna I arrived and met Aine, Thessa, Jenny and Pete at Mr Biggs for breakfast. Then we headed out to Gurara Falls to cool down in the waterfall. Julia was a bit delayed coming across from Jos, so met us at the falls.

We had a lovely time, although the rocks and sand were a bit too hot to spend any time lingering at the side of the water. As there hasn’t been any rain for quite a while now there wasn’t much water, so you couldn’t really swim but it was marvellous just floating and cooling off.

After a while a group of small boys appeared (they always do) and alternated between doing their own thing and watching us. Doing their own thing seemed to mostly be paddling and catching very small fish. The watching was especially intense when we were leaving and the girls were getting changed, there’s no link between staring and rudeness in Nigerian culture.

In the evening we had a few beers and some suya at the barracks, about the only place in Minna to get alcohol. The heat was terrible, even after the sun had gone down.

While my laptop is broken my options for entertainment here are limited. I’ve finished all my books, read my newspapers and got bored of playing solitaire.

So I was watching local TV and saw a Gilette advert, dubbed into Pidgin, with the slogan “Na be de best for all correct guys dem”.

I was sitting in the front seat of the minibus, so I had an excellent view as the motorbike veered across the road in front of us and we hit it. I saw the bike’s driver and passenger clearly in the headlights during their brief flights and felt the motorbike scraping under the front of the bus.

My immediate reaction was to jump out of the bus and check that the driver and passenger were OK but then remembered the VSO training and stories from expats: if you’re involved in any kind of road accident get out of there as soon as possible.
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ThisDay has an article (it will probably disappear soon) about the launch of the new Naira notes and coins.

On the whole this is a good idea, if the new notes are more robust then they should avoid ending up with the disgusting, shredded small Naira notes currently in circulation. I’m not sure that the central bank will manage to persuade people to stop ‘spraying’ money, throwing it at people at weddings and other festivities.

I’m not so sure about the coins. They’ve reintroduced the ₦1, ₦2 and 50 kobo coins, which in theory still existed but no-one ever used. Maybe the Central Bank of Nigeria could have spent a little while thinking about why nobody used the coins, perhaps because they’re worth too little to be useful?

What can you buy for ₦1? Not much, maybe a single boiled sweet. This is a coin that’s worth 1/250th of a pound or 1/130th of a dollar.

The governor of the CBN is reported in this day as advising:

commercial banks across the country to ensure that coins constitute 20 per cent of their currency transactions.

They seem to have some idea that the existence of Naira coins will immediately increase the value of the currency or decrease the cost of small transactions. In Kaduna the smallest bus fare is ₦10, even though ₦5 notes are in wide circulation, I don’t think the bus conductors will suddenly decide to accept ₦1 instead just because there are shiny new coins.

In fact quite often it’s not even possible to get change, businesses here don’t go to the bank to collect change to give to their customers so using the larger notes (₦1000 and ₦500) is very difficult. Even in large chains like Mr Biggs you’re likely to be told ‘change no dey’.

On a lighter note, I found this site (“Reporting FAKE NEWS Live From Nigeria”) with worryingly plausible spoof Nigeria news stories.

While I was shopping yesterday I spotted a woman selling cashew fruit. Here’s what they look like:

I saw them a lot in Abuja but the selection of fruit available in Kaduna isn’t usually so good. They’re a bit strange, sweet and fruity with so much juice it’s best to eat them outdoors but a sort of “dry” taste. The bit sticking out of the end contains the cashew nut, which is not edible raw and will cause nasty skin irritation.

Marion and I popped up to Zaria on Sunday to see some of the VSOs who are at the Theatre for Development workshop up there. A few of us then went into town for lunch and a stroll around the old city.

The traditional houses in Zaria often seem to be brightly painted, the Emir’s palace (on the left) was the first of these we saw. Strolling through the old city we came across several more in a similar style and also some traditional buildings with more modern uses.

There would have been more pictures but my camera has developed an intermittent fault. Sometimes it seems to be getting no signal from the image sensor, giving all-black pictures. I’m hoping it lasts for my remaining time in Nigeria.