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The Pilgrim, February 4, 2022*
I had intimated last week that I was
going to write about the African Banquet, which took place at my university on Sunday.
The column had set a clearly upbeat tone for Zambian nshima, since it was one
of the dishes that would be featuring on the menu. With bated breath, I wanted
to know what Americans would say after tasting it.
But before I rave or moan and groan
about the food, let me describe the event for you. The banquet had attracted a decently
diverse audience, which isn’t strange because this is America. I was leading
the event as President of the African Students Association and as the first
ever Zambian student to ever do so, but there were also three other people of
my ilk in the crowd.
We also had Kenyans, Nigerians,
Mongolians, Ghanaians, and the Congolese, including black and white Americans,
as part of the people that attended what I referred to in my keynote speech as
the most flamboyant and ebullient displays of African culture available at my
university.
We weren’t promoting a semblance of
African unity. It was something that we were practicing and living out last
Sunday night. We demonstrated this through a flag show—which included
exhibition of the Zambian flag—fashion show, African dance, poems, and solo
performances such as singing.
The subject for my keynote speech was
obviously African unity, which was the theme of the banquet itself. We
deliberately hold the event during Black History Month because it’s probably
the best time to articulate African and African American issues in a year.
In the case of the African Banquet, we
cannot talk of African unity without the United States of America. In my
address I drew attention to the fact that while colonialism persisted on the
African continent, some young Africans took long voyages to the United States
to obtain the knowledge that would be necessary to liberate the continent. So
America served as the crucible in which future African revolutionaries were
forged.
An African who exemplified this point
perfectly was Kwame Nkrumah, a highly driven Ghanian, who spent 10 years as a
penniless student in America. During that decade he morphed into the leading
theorist and activist of the African revolution, the father of African
nationalism.
Nkrumah couldn’t stand colonialism in
his country after he returned home from abroad. Accordingly, Ghana under his
leadership became the first African country to gain independence from colonial
rule.
The history is as interesting as it
sounds, but America is not a stranger to Africa. Its economy benefited a great
deal from the millions of Africans that were shipped out of their continent of
birth to work as slaves on plantations in USA and Latin America.
My speech thus pointed out the harmony
of hosting an African Banquet at a university in the United States, with a view
to celebrate African unity.
Besides, we could clearly see African
unity during the event as evidenced by an eclectic mix of Southern, East, and
West African music and fashion.
The only way that young Africans raised
in different countries could stage such performances together was if cultural
divides didn’t matter anymore, and this is what happened.
But the highlight of the event was the
food. Like I said, it had to be the moment of truth for nshima. However, my
worst fears came to pass. We had African food ranging from jollof rice to
mandazi, save for nshima. The only dish that made the menu, done the Zambian
way, was the chicken.
But it turned out that I was probably
right not to expect much from an American chef, who masqueraded as an authority
on African food.
Of course, I had visited the university’s
catering services to check on the dishes ahead of the banquet on Sunday. He
wouldn’t allow me.
“Can I help out with the cooking?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “Honestly, I don’t need
you guys because I’ve already done everything.”
I saw some shiny aluminum foils piled
together and at once I assumed they contained nshima. They didn’t.
The conclusion must be that it’s not easy
even for professional chefs to cook African foods, especially when trying to do
so in silos in a country as far afield as the USA. You need not only the right
cooking stick to pull it off, but for an event like a banquet you need to cook
lots of it with the right texture and with the right taste.
In this case, the American chef failed
and still we’ve to wait for another time in the future to share a typical
Zambian dish with the Americans.
*This column is published every Friday in Zambia's best-selling newspaper, the Zambia Daily Mail
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