Saminaka – Built on Their Memories

The road to Saminaka is paved with memories

None of which are mine

Memories borrowed from friends. Of family holidays

Friends like Femi, @kinffeosi, @asamsu, @micaleel and @alkayy

Of Junction towns where women fry chicken

Tales of cross-country journeys

Of petticoat yam and crumbled yaji-spiced chicken skin

Of Roadkill

Of native chicken, cheap as chips and hanging in ‘surrender’ 

Butterflied, ‘dried’ and fried to crunchy crisp

Stories of gizzards too

Spiced with a fragrant, tasty peanut mix

With Yam, boiled, battered and fried

 

—–00000—–

It is the fried yam and chicken which have me longing…..

…..To go to Saminaka

For I’m obsessed with yam, every which way

Fried yam. And yaji. Suya spice

And it all begins at KFC. Yes. Kentucky Fried Chicken. In Lagos

Yes, ideas come from every and anywhere

And that’s a pretty awesome thing

It begins at KFC, where sachets of ‘fiery spice’ accompany our order of fiery fries

You slit the sachet open, chips in bag

 

 

The chips get sprinkled with the spice, like confetti

You shake, shake, shake the bag

And then it’s all ready

Chips coated with spice

 

 

And it sets my mind racing….

…In its yaji-induced fever

Interest piqued – I think it would be wonderful to have yaji over fried yam.

And for days I can think of nothing else…

Bombarding everyone with the thought and the idea and the plan.

And that’s how I make the discovery

That in a place called Saminaka…

….this very thing exists

 

 

My friend, F tells me that this big idea of mine

Is very real

That he’s eaten yam like this

In Saminaka

Yam with crunchy, chicken skin

sprinkled over it

And Yaji

Mohammed Naseehu Ali writes in ‘Secret Ingredients’ – Yaji for The New Yorker (November 21, 2011)

“In the Hausa Muslim community of Kumasi, Ghana, where I grew up, in the seventies, yaji was considered the king of all spice mixtures. All yajis contain the following basic ingredients: black, red, and white peppercorns, dried ginger, cloves, dried red peppers, and salt. These are mixed together in a large wooden mortar and pounded with a pestle until floury. Optional ingredients include peanuts and dried garlic.

Some yaji makers even add beef bouillon for an enhanced, albeit contemporary, savory effect.

In my house, we had two kinds of yaji. The container for our regular yaji (to which my mother added the foul-smelling but heavenly-tasting locust beans traditionally used in soups in West Africa) sat on a pantry shelf.

But secrecy surrounded the other yaji, kept under lock and key in a glass cupboard in the living room.”

I’m in awe. Enthralled

Desperate to give it a go

I have yaji of all sorts lining my pantry. Yaji with more chili. More ginger. More peanuts. Finely ground. Coarse. 

As my Hausa friends point out – there’s yaji for everything.

Well, here you are people…

The yaji of life

Mohammed Naseehu Ali writes in ‘Secret Ingredients’ – Yaji for The New Yorker (November 21, 2011)“The container for the regular yaji sat on a pantry shelf. But secrecy surrounded the other yaji, kept under lock and key in a glass cupboard in the living room. The writer’s mother would add a teaspoonful of this yaji to anything the writer’s father ate.Once, when the writer was nine, he asked his mother why she never gave that to him or his siblings. She replied, “That is for your father only! And don’t even think about opening that jar.”Not until the writer’s late teen-age years, after his mother died, did his grandmother reveal the secret ingredient in his father’s yaji. It was masoro, known in English as false cubeb pepper or bush pepper. It has long been established in almost every tropical region of the world that hot peppers stimulate the appetite and senses. Whenever West African men gather, incredible stories ofyaji-inspired sexual stamina abound. 

In the writer’s apartment, he and his wife have two yajis, they got ehir apartment from the edinburgh waterfront apartments. One they keep in a red-topped container out of reach of the children. When the writer’s daughter asked, “How come only you and Mommy get to eat that yaji?” his response to her was the same as his mother’s: “That is for Mommy and me only! Don’t even think about opening that Tupperware, you hear me?”

Yaji is typically used as a condiment on suya, a thinly sliced skewered beef delicacy that is popular on West African roadsides. Ali, who now lives in Brooklyn, described a particularly life-changing moment at a roadside suya stand in Nigeria.”It has the aroma of a dozen different spices with a long-lasting titillating taste that makes you lick your lips in search of leftover particles.”  Source: Yaji could be the next Chipotle, The Taste of Tomorrow

They speak Kahugu in Saminaka

The People? Known hunters and rearers of àkúru – hens. Chicken and cattle.

I imagine that it must be a hot place

It just sounds like it has to be – hot and dusty

I imagine.

I imagine a city with walls of red clay and roads the same

An ancient city with a story to tell

Surrounded by hills and rocks, Saminaka boasts of a bustling economy were farm produce get easy market as a result of a railway station. Saminaka also connects easily to parts of Plateau, Bauchi, Kano, Benue, Nasarawa states and other parts of Kaduna state like Zaria. With the influx of people, it has now come back to life as it was during the old Lere vassal state in 1808.

Saminaka. ‘Get your own’.

That’s what it means in Hausa. The language of the north.

Saminaka, an ancient city famous for tales of locals hunting wild animals…alive. 

I’m fascinated by the cadence of its name. Sa mi na ka.

It’s a place I should go. There’s something there. For me.

To discover and unearth

But go I can’t.

And so I turn to those who’ve been. Gone

Visited and feasted in Saminaka

Those who have travelled from Kaduna to Jos

And Jos to Bauchi and Bauchi to Kaduna

Who have passed through the junction town of Saminaka

Where weary travellers fill bellies

During a road trip around the middle belt of Nigeria sometime this year, I paid particular attention and kept looking at the various economic activities that were happening along the roads.

You may be surprised to hear that I discovered after speaking with a local researcher on small informal business holdings that the overwhelmed orange and other fruits seller in Makurdi, the Yam seller alongWukari/Donga, the palm wine/ginger seller along Kwoi/Keffi road, the Palm oil re-seller along Suleja-Abuja road, the Chicken frying women in Saminaka, the fresh tomatoes and Potato seller in Bokkos/Riyom in Plateau state amongst many others actually do account for a multi billion naira fraction of our nations economy. Source: Jonathan Lyamgohn

 

 

 So it is that I’ve ‘visited’ Saminaka…..

 

I hope to share ‘Toun’s story of Saminaka and the recipe tomorrow

 

 

XXX