|
THE AFRICAN INFLUENCE ON BARBADIAN CULTURE
by Trevor G. Marshall
PAGE 6
In terms of food, as I said, our tradition is African, even Joan cooks cou-cou (spelt "coo-coo" or "cou-cou"). This is known as "fou-fou" in Africa and it is our couscous and it is a solid porridge, in fact it was called "lob lolly" in the beginning by Englishmen who ate it. It is made of cornmeal, the guinea corn which we call Indian corn or maize and it was stirred to a consistency like that of hard porridge and it was the first fast food in Barbados because it could be whipped up in about 20 minutes and produced or served on banana leaves. Corn is in itself a protein element, the meat protein would be crab or fish brought in from Canada and from North America, or around Barbados a lot of fish abounded. There is the flying fish which is native to Tobago but around here we call ourselves "the land of flying fish". The strange thing is that the poor whites, whose story must be told next time, those persons who got lost in the in the struggle to build plantations, they had a long standing relationship with blacks in bondage and their culinary and other practices complemented each other. The poor whites fished, Africans farmed; the poor whites therefore traded fish for farines, for protein and for vegetables etc. We learn that black Barbadians were not allowed, by reason of being slaves, to go on the sea because perhaps some sailed away to St. Vincent and to freedom; that they depended on poor whites for their fish and we also learn that like the blacks in the United States and Canada, they utilised the cast-off elements in a slain animal - the head, the entrails, the hooves. They made food from the head and they made soup, ground the bones and made soup. The obeah men, the faith healers, ground the heads of animals to a fine powder and utilised it in their magical religious formulae, but fish head, cow head or sheep head etc. made a delicious soup. The entrails, the large intestines, the colon was stretched and ground potato, corn etc was put in it. It was cleaned and it became, not your Dutch sausage, but the equivalent of the Dutch and German sausage, called the 'black pudding' which is still a delicacy in Barbados, and tomorrow, Saturday, is the day when our African culinary heritage reasserts itself through the black pudding tradition. Saturday is the day because Saturday is the day of freedom from the hustle and bustle of the week in terms of culinary practices. During the week you have to more or less depend on the fast food, the rice from Italy, from the United States, whatever meat you could put together in a hurry. Two reasons, Saturday was the last day of work and a day of relaxed working; it was also the climax of the exercise of cleaning and preparing the entrails, because remember that the solid waste went through that and you had to clean it totally so that no gastro-enteritis occurred as a result of using it. So that exercise of cleaning and preparing the large intestine for a food took three to four days, utilising salt and lime and cleaning it and letting it soak and become pickled in that lime and totally cleaned and sterilised, so that took a few days. So by Saturday it was ready. I know that my sister is making more money out of selling black pudding than I am making as a lecturer, I have two degrees etc etc and she doesn't and she makes more money out of that. It is an African tradition which continues and is increasing in popularity.
The African traditions are replicated in Europe and they were transferred to America; America is after all a transfer civilization. I think it might be a fruitless exercise trying to establish the original provenance, whether it came from Africa or Europe. It could be a simultaneous development. What we do know is that in Barbados it was African-Barbadians who used head and belly of the slain animals otherwise they would have been thrown away by the Europeans who used the prime cuts. The culture of poverty meant that the slaves were materially poor, they depended on their masters and they also had to eke out a living by utilising the bushes for brewed beverages and by utilising head and belly and the entrails and the hooves of the animals which were slain. Wherever you have had a slave tradition or a slave population in the Americas where the necessity of having meat protein has driven them to killing rodents, lizards, iguana etc which the European literally did not use, and utilising European cattle, African sheep, goats, any and every animal and even chickens, the steppers, the feet of the chicken have been utilised by Africans as a source of meat; every part of the chicken including the head.
-- © Trevor G Marshall, 2000. This document is the property of the author. Quotation or reproduction without the permission of the author is expressly prohibited. |
