By: Ridhwan Adétutù Abdullahi
In our clime, yam is a god—so powerful a god. Funny, yam doesn’t pick up a gender affiliation—just any fine, powerful, neutral pronoun. Call yam a she, she’ll nod; a he, he’ll roar in excitement; it, they: everything goes. Yam has a mind of its own, and she uses that to move our world around.
A well over 652 years ago, Yam defeated the Aláàfin of Oyo. Kabiyesi poured libations at the mere sight of three tubers of yam and a cock, no more than sixteen months old. He poured libations for the successful transition of his only princess, Adedoja, to a faraway stranger who had traversed lands across the Ogbomosho River. Athens’ King Zeus, too, didn’t win Yam’s war—nineteen tubers were all it took the Greek god to let go of his beloved Helen. Yam has cost gods their precious princesses, and made emperors lose treasurable empires and kingdoms; Yam has moved queens and goddesses to where royalty was never a thing. Yam has bridged borders between the emperors and their serfs.
Without raising a sword, Yam has won many battles. And in history, the only time Yam was defeated was when it came in contact with Soyinka’s àbíkú. “Yams do not sprout in amulets/to earth Abiku’s limbs,” the crazy spirit of Abiku chewed off a father who had brought yams to appease the spirit child to stay. Yam is an enabler of fusion, confusion and frustration; it’s a melting pot of identity, class, culture and history. Yam takes many into slavery of the alien cultures, cultures that the forebears never knew about. It redefines traditions and makes many freeborn culturally fluid. Yam ties together the fabrics of two extreme worlds—from the northern hemisphere to the constantinoples of the southern hemisphere.
Fathers are helpless when yam knocks at their doors; when family heads come face-to-face with tubers of yam, they shiver and shrug away—even if it has journeyed from the horn of Africa, or from far away across the seas, or it’s an aboki, nyamiri, or ngbati-ngbati that holds the tubers—to hell with the tears in the eyes of any father’s daughter. When occasions call and yam is involved, fathers shun off their crying precious daughters—their once-upon-a-time apple of the eyes—and they sheepishly welcome a few tubers of yam to their mortar. Gbegiri, egusi and assorted will accompany the daughter’s dowry on the journey of no return.
All of the world’s problems are none of a father’s business when yam graces his mouth or car trunk. It doesn’t matter that Netanyahu is killing children and women in Gaza, that America is bombing the Middle East, that Trump dodged two assassination attempts over the November 4 elections, that the destruction of lives and legacies continues over the Russo-Ukrainian war, and that Tinubu’s policies are sapping life out of Nigerian commoners. To them, when yam sprouts, it marks a countdown to the erasure of a daughter, or rather, her transition to a stranger’s domain.
Like this Saturday now, just like last Saturday, and the Saturday before that, two beautiful friends of everyone, of mine also, would be exchanged for a few tubers of yam in their respective so-called family homes, houses they grew up to know as their comfort zones. Through telepathy, one once told me, ‘May it get stuck in their throats.’ She said this as she knelt to receive blessings from her father, her father’s uncle, her uncle’s uncle, who doubles as family head, her aunties and her community head with the beads. None of them cried to mark her departure. They have no cause to cry, Yam has paid them a visit, and they can’t wait to entertain their yummy guests back home. Clearly, there’s no end in sight to Yam’s onslaught on man. Every weekend, families lose their beautiful daughters, the stunning damsels in their lineages, to Yam’s onslaught.
Well, what can I say? My thoughts and prayers are with the latest victims of the weekly yam-human swap festivals.
Ridhwan Adetutu Abdullahi is the Media Innovation & Business Manager at WikkiTimes Media and Publishing Limited.
