Making Vegetable Meat Stew With Traditional Bitter Leaf Plant Leaves
One of the Nigerian Yoruba people, traditional recipes for cooking with leaves is Ewuro or bitter leaf stew. The recipe calls for bitter leaves, the leaves from the Bitter Leaf Plant – Vernonia Amygdalina, and if you haven't cooked with them before, it's time to give it a try.
Bitter leaf stew is not bitter as suggested by the name but a delicious mix of beef, fish, chicken, pork, and seafood. The leaves are green with a robust odor and a sharp taste, every part of the plant is beneficial from the stem, leaves, and root.
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| Ewuro Bitter Leaf Stew |
Cooking Ewuro Bitter Leaf Stew
Ingredients:
5
ounces of cubed beef
5
ounces of pork or pork sausage
2
skinless chicken thighs
3
smoked fish, flaked
1/2
pound peeled and deveined shrimp
1/4
cup palm oil
1 small eggplant, peeled and diced
2
bunches scallions, finely chopped
2 tomatoes, diced
1
punch bitter leaf, chopped
Water
to cover
Directions
Note: If you cannot find bitter leaf, substitute 2 handfuls of spinach.
Add
all ingredients except shrimp to a large pot over medium heat cover ingredients
with water. Reduce heat to low and simmer 1 hour. Add shrimp and continue to
simmer another 15 minutes.
Now that you’ve tasted a traditional Yoruba recipe, let’s learn about the people, religion and transatlantic slave trade for a well-round view of the Yoruba people of Nigeria.
Who are the Yoruba?
The history of the
peoples that constitute the present country of Nigeria dates back more than
2,000 years. The earliest archaeological finds were of the Nok, who inhabited
the central Jos Plateau between the Niger and Benue rivers between 300 B.C. and
200 A.D. A number of states or kingdoms with which contemporary ethnic groups
can be identified existed before 1500.
Long before the 1500s,
much of present-day Nigeria was divided into states, which can be identified
with the modern ethnic groups that trace their history to the origins of these
states. These early states included the Yoruba kingdoms, the Edo kingdom of
Benin, the Hausa cities, and Nupe.
The most populous
country in Africa and the largest in area of the West African states, Nigeria
was an early twentieth century colony that became an independent nation in
1960. A country of great diversity because of the many ethnic, linguistic, and
religious groups that live within its borders, Nigeria is also a country with a
long past.
Of these, the three
dominant regional groups were the Hausa in the northern kingdoms of the savanna,
the Yoruba in the southwest, and the Igbo in the southeast all internally
subdivided along with the Kanuri, Ibibio, Tiv, and Ijaw.
The Yoruba were
organized in male-headed groups that occupied village communities, but from about the eleventh century A.D., village compounds began to merge into a number of territorial
city-states creating large well-connected independent states.
Yoruba Art and Artists
This transition
produced an urbanized political and social environment that was accompanied by
a high level of artistic achievement, particularly in wood, terra-cotta, and ivory
sculpture and in the sophisticated metal casting produced at Ife.
The brass and
bronze used by Yoruba artisans was a significant item of trade, made from
copper, tin, and zinc imported either from North Africa or from mines in the
Sahara and northern Nigeria.
Eastern Yorubaland
in Nigeria Africa bore the most important African sculptor of the 20th century,
Olowe of Ise. Born around 1875 Olowe of Ise made Yorubaland one of the most
important centers of Yoruba wood art carving.
Olowe of Ise
descendants claim he was self-taught, but it is likely that he learned the
Yoruba canon and perfected his carving skills during an apprenticeship. Eventually, he
became a master artist at the King's palace, and as his fame grew, other Yoruba
kings and wealthy families commissioned him to carve architectural sculptures,
masks, drums and other objects for their palaces.
Among the Yoruba such elaborately carved and
decorated bowls were prestige objects used to offer kola nuts to guests or to
deities during religious worship. Olowe was an innovative and virtuosic, even
daring, the artist as demonstrated in this sculpture. The image of four dancing
girls on the lid, for example, is the first such representation in Yoruba art.
Olowe's choice of
dancers raises questions about his inspiration. Olowe also depicted nude males,
one of whom is kneeling, on this bowl. Such renderings are exceptional and challenge
the Yoruba canon.
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| Yoruba African Sculptor Olówè of Isè |
Yoruba Religion
The Yoruba appeal to
a god, and includes lesser deities, some of them formerly mortal, who performed
a variety of cosmic and practical tasks. One of them, Oduduwa, was regarded as
the creator of the earth and the ancestor of the Yoruba kings. According to a
creation myth, Oduduwa founded the city of Ife and dispatched his sons to
establish other cities, where they reigned as priest-kings and presided over
rituals in Yorubaland.
Ife also lay at the
center of a trading network with the north. One of Ife's greatest legacies to
modern Nigeria is its beautiful sculpture associated with this tradition. Respect
for the priestly functions of the oni of Ife and recognition of the common
tradition of origin were crucial factors in the evolution of Yoruba ethnicity.
The oni of Ife was
recognized as the senior political official not only among the Yoruba but also
at Benin, and he invested Benin's rulers with the symbols of temporal power. Aladura
is a religious movement among the Yoruba peoples of western Nigeria, embracing
some of the independent prophet-healing churches of West Africa. Nevertheless, despite
this movement, Ife remains the religious center of Yoruba people.
Nationalists were
critical of colonialism for its failure to appreciate the antiquity of
indigenous cultures. They wanted self-government, charging that only colonial
rule prevented the unshackling of progressive forces in Africa. Out of
reverence for traditional kingship, for instance, the oni of Ife, whose office
was closely identified with Yoruba religion, was accepted as the sponsor of a
Yoruba political movement.
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| If the waters of the Atlantic Ocean could only speak |
Yoruba People and
the Slave Trade
Slightly more slaves
came from the Nigerian coast than from Angola in the eighteenth century,
whereas in the nineteenth century perhaps 30 percent of all slaves sent across
the Atlantic came from Nigeria. Over the period of the whole trade, more than
3.5 million slaves were shipped from Nigeria to the Americas.
Most of these slaves
were Igbo and Yoruba, with significant concentrations of Hausa, Ibibio, and
other ethnic groups. In the eighteenth century, two organizations, Oyo and the
Aro federation was responsible for most of the slaves exported from Nigeria.
The Aro federation continued to export slaves through the 1830s, but most
slaves in the nineteenth century were a product of the Yoruba civil wars that
followed the collapse of Oyo in the 1820s.
Although the transatlantic
slave trade did not end until the 1860s, other commodities, especially palm
oil, gradually replaced it; the shift in trade had serious economic and political
consequences in the interior, which led to increasing British intervention in
the affairs of Yorubaland.
The rise of the Sokoto Caliphate and the economic
and political adjustment in the south strongly shaped the course of the colonial
conquest at the end of the nineteenth century. The Sokoto Caliphate was a West
African Empire that became a part of northern Nigeria.
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