“Yam Pass Yam!”

IT is mid-day in my village. Only a few of us kids are at home, as everyone else has “gone to the farm.”

Man is hungry.
Indeed, one is waiting for a peculiar sound – a sound that can make the mouth water as soon as one hears it.

It is the sound of the voice of a woman. A woman who sells pusa [cooked yam.]

“Ogya wo mu o!” [It is breathing with fire!] she shouts.

“Pu-u-u-sa nie!” [Here is cooked yam!] she varies her cry.

“Po-o-o-na nie!” [Here is the special yam called pona!] better advertisement still.

“Daberekor nie!” [Here is another special yam called dabrekor!]

(Pona and daberekor are at the top end of the “taste scales” for yam. White yam is more common than Pona(sometimes spelt Puna) which, in turn, is more easily found than daberekor.

Taste is, of course, an entirely personal thing, and I must confess that I prefer daberekor to pona. One must be an expert of sorts to be able to distinguish daberekor, for instance, from other yams. Indeed, it is so rare in the markets that a woman who used to procure foodstuffs for me always miscalled it “dareborkor!”

But back to the village. Whenever we heard the yam seller’s voice, we ran outside to call her: “Bayere wura! Fa bra!”.[Owner of the yams, bring it!”]

And she would come into our yard, expertly take the load off her head and place it the ground. And open it.

Very hot steam could be seen coming out of her pot. How did she manage to carry such a hot load on her head? She had a special kahyire [head-cushion] made of material that absorbed the heat from the pot.

There were slices of cooked yam in her pot. If a slice was coloured white but slightly tinged with yellow, then it was going to be extremely good to eat. That would be pona.

The slices of yam came in two sizes – a small sized one that cost what was then one penny [maanan or kapre] and is represented by the supposed value of one pesewa . That the one pesewa coin has completely vanished from usage tells us what we have lost through inflation through the years since decimalisation.

Then came a larger, more appetising slice, that cost threepence [tro or sempoa].

( Whilst I am about it, let me reveal to the younger ones that the word “tro-tro” [threepence at a time] was coined from the fact that certain motor vehicles used to charge only threepence for a short journey, say from Adabraka to the General Post Office in Accra) when they first took to the roads in Ghana.

Now, if one was able to buy a slice of yam that cost threepence, then one was a champion. The meal would stay with one from mid-day till the evening’s main meal was provided – and even beyond then.

We usually ate the yam with a little bit of stew made from onion, pepper and tomato that the yam seller carried in a tin in her hand. If one was relatively “rich” on a particular day, one could add part of the contents of a tin of sardines, pilchards or – if one was exceedingly rich! – Exeter Corned Beef, to this stew. I swear, one would remember that mid-day meal for the rest of one’s life.

These things have been brought to my mind because I have heard that scientists at

the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) at Ibadan, in Nigeria, have succeeded in working out the genomes of different species of yams so that they can determine what constituents of the yams’ DNA governs resistance to disease and pests, and presumably, taste. They can then, through a process called Molecular Plant Breeding, develop “genomics tools to accelerate the development of superior varieties of cassava, yam, plantain and other crops.”

The general idea is to develop varieties of crops “with high nutritional quality that give high yield[s] under disease and pest pressure, or when there is [a[ shortage of rainfall caused by climate change.”

My natural instinct is to applaud scientific processes of this sort, which can help save mankind from starvation in the terrible years that will almost certainly dawn on Planet Earth if our current stupid practice of burning fossil fuels into the Earth’s fragile atmosphere continues.

But what shall we lose in the process of creating hardy varieties of crops? Will pona and dabrekor, for instance, begin to taste like ordinary white yam? How did esoteric varieties of yam – such as asobayere and ahabayere, retain their individuality over the millions of years of their evolution and what will be the outcome if they are cross-bred with say, pona?

I suppose the answer is that we shall soon face a stern choice: either you get what your taste buds really desire, for some time, but then expose those varieties of yam to disease or even possible extinction, or you adjust your taste buds to what science can provide. And if you don’t like the choice, you can lump it – so to speak!

END NOTE: Hmm! There’s a man who displays tubers of yam – five at a time – to those who drive along a certain busy road in Accra. Certainly, he wouldn’t be there day after day after day, if people were not buying his stuff – “unseen” – so to speak? Can one tell what sort of yam is being sold by merely looking at it from the window of a car?

Heck – supercilious me – I bought a tuber of yam from a supermarket in Accra the other day. Surprise, surprise – it turned out to be real pona!

We’ve come far oh!
– www.cameronduodu.com
From Cameron Duodu