My Daughter Interviewed me for a University Class Project:

 

1. How would you describe palm wine? 

 a. It is the natural sap of the oil palm and raffia palm or date and coconut palms. Mostly oil palm wine is preferred in Igboland. The flower of the palm fruit can be cut open and the sap will sip out to be collected in a calabash, ugbe, up on the tree. The palm wine tapper climbs with a rope, agbu, to drain the calabash and clean the cut on the flower daily for better flow. The collected sap is usually very sweet naturally and starts to ferment immediately in interaction with yeast in the atmosphere. The more it ferments, the more alcoholic it becomes. Some men prefer to keep it overnight to make it even more alcoholic and less sweet. It is usually mixed with water to make it less strong alcoholically. Some wine tappers, Diochi, add sweeteners to the more fermented wine and add more water to make more money but some buyers prefer to buy the fresh sap, akuru, which is more expensive, and then mix it with water to their taste but also to make sure that the water added was not from a polluted source that could cause diarrhea. 

 2. What is it like the first time you had palm wine? 

 a. I was just five or six years old when my parents decided to betroth me to a girl about my age with the expectation that when I grow up, we could get married or she could marry someone else and refund me all the yam and money paid for the bride wealth. They did not ask me to choose a girl or I would have fancied someone else and they did not even tell me the day of the betrothal. I had gone to the distant farms with mother and we worked all day weeding the farm. When we returned, there was a big feast in the compound with lots of palm wine in large basins for people to serve themselves. I joined in drinking and quickly got drunk. The ground started spinning and I went to lie down but I became sick and vomited the wine mixed with food. The next morning my head hurt and I was afraid that I was going to die but Papa laughed and told me to have another drink of wine to clear the hangover. I tried it and it cleared. 

 3. Have you ever made it/seen Simone make it? 

 a. I have never tapped wine. I guess that I never learned how to tie the climbing rope, agbu. I also knew that it was a dangerous job from which many men fall and break their bones or even die. I have seen tappers climb the tree or cut down the tree and carve a big hole in the center to fetch more sap for wine. I participated in fetching from a tree that was cut down once. That kind of wine, ogudu ali, is poor quality and results in headaches for the drinkers compared to nkwu enu or wine from the top of a standing tree. 

 4. Is palm wine consumed mundanely or is it used in any special occasions? 

 a. It is mostly ceremonial for things like family meetings, religious rituals, marriage, funeral, or child naming ceremonies. Friends can also go to a bar and share a drink or go to the market and buy a pot of wine to share right there in the open market. 

 5. Is the drink usually consumed by women or men or all? 

 a. Women may take a sip from a cup offered by men but it is rare to find a woman who is an alcoholic. This makes sense because the women do most of the domestic chores and most of the farm work and trading. Such tasks do not mix easily with drunkenness. The men are often habitual drunks. This was discovered by a British Anthropologist, C.K. Meek, who was asked by the colonizers to write an ‘intelligence report’ to explain why Igbo women declared war against colonialism in 1929 ‘The Women’s War’ against taxation without representation. He tried to find out if the women were drunk on something but concluded in his book, Law and Authority in a Nigerian Tribe, that they were sober and even the men did not drink much daily. 

 6. Are there any legends or stories about palm wine that you heard growing up? 

 a. Amos Tutuola wrote the Palm-wine Drinkard about a rich man who could afford his own personal wine tapper. He needed to consume hundreds of gallons everyday. Then his wine tapper died and he decided to follow the spirit to the land of the dead to make a deal that could bring him back to life. It was a metaphor for men who were power-drunk and who would do anything to bring their poor workers back to life rather than pay the living workers better wages to help them live longer. Wole Soyinka also wrote a poem known as Idanre in which the Yoruba god of war, Ogun, got drunk and massacred his own followers in the battlefield. This is probably a reference to the fact that Nigerian rulers committed genocide against the Igbo in Biafra as if they were drunk with absolute power and were playing god. Chinua Achebe critiqued drunkenness in Things Fall Apart by characterizing the poet and musician, Unoka, as someone not respectable and he died of malnutrition due to laziness, poverty, and drunkenness. That is still the image that Nigerians have of poor artists today though Afrobeat musicians are changing that poor image. University students have the palm wine drinkers club where they crown a chief, beat drums and sing and dance. I was not a member. I joined only the Press Klubb on campus. I just cannot stand monarchies, even if pretend ones. 

 7. When was the last time you had palm wine? 

 a. That was in December 2019 when Biko Jr. visited our hometown, Awgu, with me. One of my cousins who is a wine tapper, supplied us with one gallon every day for which we paid about $4.00 each and friends joined us to share the wine. 

 8. Do you think I would like it? 

a. You may like a sip of it but ladies do not usually drink much for obvious reasons given that men may attack and rape them if they are drunk. When you get married, one of the rituals is when you take a cup of palm wine and sip from it before giving it to your bridegroom to symbolize agreement. These days, people advise that the bride and the groom should pretend to drink from the cup because evil people may have poisoned the cup. 

 9. Do you prefer palm wine over other alcoholic drinks? 

a. I used to prefer palm wine to beer especially when I was an undergraduate student in Calabar. I reasoned that since the unadulterated wine from our village was hard to find, sticking to good palm wine when I could find it would help me to avoid getting drunk so as to concentrate on my studies. When our final results were released, I was with some friends at the bar where a man from Awgu sold only good palm wine in Calabar. A class mate joined us and said that our results had just been released and only one student got First Class Honors. He suspected that it was another class mate but when he told us the registration number of the student, I knew that it was me. I ran to the department to confirm it. I also have a friend who was training to be a catholic priest and he told me that when he became ordained, he would celebrate mass with palm wine rather than red wine. Unfortunately, he was found drunk one day in the seminary and was expelled before his ordination. I no longer enjoy drinking alcohol because it may be contributing to high blood sugar levels in my body. I now drink water and I say that that must be what Jesus was teaching when he turned water into wine – he wanted us to drink water and enjoy it like we enjoy wine because water is the best drink ever. I have a book chapter, ‘Why Did Jesus Turn Water Into Wine?’ in a book, Afrikan Wisdom. Thanks for asking, Ada m.