WHAT THE NANNY TOLD HER KIDS (CHAPTER 9) - B

He picked a book with a glossy cover on the table and showed it to the crowd and his colleagues picked a few copies and walked down the aisles to let the audience look closely at the well-produced books. Boldly on the large covers were assorted leaves surrounding a bee blown out of proportion.

‘The experts had carefully researched and put in this book the secrets of why our parents lived healthily for long and stayed strong throughout their years. They had lived long before the Europeans arrived and were not wiped out. But as soon as they arrived, the Europeans started falling sick because of mosquito bites. Our researchers were baffled by something they thought our forebears used in treating themselves which the Europeans ignored and brought in quinine to treat malaria. That missing remedy had been rediscovered and packaged in this book for our own good.

‘Another bad practice our parents ignored but we’re fond of doing today is this frying of food. Our parents boiled their yam, plantain and cocoyam.

‘But we are all frying these things for ourselves and our families. Instead of whole grains, what the eating houses and our homes feed us today are processed foods. We don’t have time to pluck our oranges, pawpaw, pineapples and other fruits, sit down, peel them and eat.

‘Chickens that used to run around our yards for like six months before our parents started planning to eat them are now doctored in poultries and in six weeks are served on our plates and we just eat them and enjoy crushing their brittle bones. So the style of our parents letting the fowls walk around till their bones became hard suddenly to us has become old school. But our diseases and death seem to suggest a whole lot is wrong with our new-school practices health-wise. These are the things the experts have done much to address in this fantastic book.

‘They tell us not to eat and then jump into our cars and drive off. You that is poor and walk to and from your farm don’t know the excellent things you’re doing to your muscles and bones. What you do and keep complaining about is what in the clinics the doctors and nurses are telling the rich people going there to check their conditions of health to copy and start practising so they can live well and long.

‘Before you get into money and become like them, we’re here to guide you on how properly you’d keep living and save yourself from the troubles they face.’

The first speaker spoke long both in English, Pidgin English and his mother tongue before leaving the podium for the second speaker who took time to explain the things in the book, the herbs and how they were called in the mother tongue familiar to him as the other two speakers would chip in the names in the mother tongues familiar to them.

At the end of the seminar, every attendee gladly parted with the stipulated sum of two thousand naira as they were quite determined to imbibe the tricks of staying alive and being in robust health so they could handsomely enjoy the largesse from the West, not minding Grace, if Japan and China had eventually relocated to join them.

When Mr Ransom returned home, he turned into an herbalist overnight. He read his book with seriousness and followed the instructions on preparing the concoctions religiously.

He had bought a big bottle of honey which he was guided by the book on how to separate the bona fide from sham.

A drop of sham honey would attract ants while the genuine did not (according to the anonymous author or authors of the book). A match could be dipped in the real honey and there was assurance it could still be struck to obtain light while with the sham it would not.

Mr Ransom’s children suffered peeling onions which made them sneeze and their eyes teary as their father guided them robustly on how to form a concoction which the benefits seemed to be a secret between him and his wife. But whatever was the result of the concoction, husband and wife just appeared to everyone else to be quite lovey-dovey though Grace believed whatever great traits they were exhibiting newly was basically as a result of what they and other villagers were anticipating.

The pawpaw tree from root to fruit became gold. The different parts to different diseases and organs of the bodies had beneficial impacts. Grace had a good laugh, secretly though, when Mr Ransom drank the bitter concoction made from the leaves and would be grinning, unfortunately, like a roast goat and would keep spitting around the compound long hours after.

To Grace, he was really killing himself to stay alive to grab the expected freebies from the West.