If I were to tell you that 2024 has already been a hugely significant year for West African food, then where would your mind immediately turn? Might it be Chishuru? The whirling firecracker of a West End restaurant where brilliant, Nigerian-born autodidact Adejoké Bakare (recently named Chef of the Year at the National Restaurant Awards) has already won a Michelin star for her expressive, palate-jolting adaptations of traditional recipes? Would you skip towards its near-neighbour, Akoko, which was also awarded a first star in February for its elegantly crafted yet uncompromising plates of smoked goat, pepper soup and jollof rice?
Well, to take my deliberately opaque phrasing at face value, what if I was to tell you that there was a hugely important, very different West African food story, one about scarcity and strife rather than abundance and acclaim, playing out in rural areas almost 4,000 miles away?
I will stop with the guessing games now. Five weeks ago, I flew to northern Nigeria to see the work that the charity Action Against Hunger is doing to combat food insecurity and malnutrition in an area where social and historical context has left people uniquely imperilled. Temporarily setting aside the privilege of my day job as a restaurant critic — all crumb-scraped tables, waiters pouring out low-intervention wines, and baskets of warm sourdough — I spent the best part of a week visiting various programmes in and around Sokoto; a city in the country’s semi-arid north-west that is an exemplar of converging humanitarian crises and geopolitical tensions. Not to mention, a place where 15 per cent of children under the age of five display signs of wasting, a particularly life-threatening and extreme form of malnutrition.
It is vitally important to connect these two West African food stories
There was, across those days, a visit to an outpatient therapeutic programme: a kind of open-air triage facility, where acutely malnourished children and their mothers collapsed in any available shade, beset by flies and pummelling, 42C heat; a memorable morning in the ward of a stabilisation centre, meeting staff, parents and acutely malnourished, defiantly sparky babies squalling and playing beneath the ceiling fans; a trip to a food distribution centre where hordes of local mothers waited for packages of ever-dwindling foodstuffs.
These are scenes that have become all the more commonplace in an era when the number of impoverished Nigerians is estimated to have risen by almost 15 million since the start of last year. Where increased acts of banditry and kidnappings on farms in the region (sidebar: going on a press trip that necessitated many security briefings about recent abductions and violent disputes in the region was quite the ride for my mother and wife) have displaced families and further squeezed an already strained food production pipeline. This is the other side of the West African culinary coin; a sobering counter-narrative to familiar tales of London’s contemporary Nigerian-inspired restaurants trying to prosper amid rising costs.
To experience this new world, particularly as a comparatively pampered British-Nigerian, was eye-opening to say the least. Transformative too. Because I now realise that it’s vitally important we not only connect these two, apparently disparate West African food stories, but support countries like Nigeria in this time of grave need.
The first reason for this is the simple fact of connectedness. Survey the reasons for the hunger epidemic currently gripping cities and towns like Sokoto — rising inflation and food costs, the aftershocks of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, a cratering currency (the naira) — and you’ll likely feel a shudder of recognition. We are all, in many ways, surfing the same global wave of polycrises. And so it is worth looking beyond our own issues, serious as they are, and the wearying churn of a general election campaign, to see the life-or-death ripple effects being felt elsewhere in the world.
Added to that, another way to view supporting charities like this is as an act of appreciation. And not just because northern Nigeria (the birthplace of suya, the fiery, peanut-laced barbecue dish that is steadily taking over the gastronomic world) is the cradle of a lot of the culinary ideas Michelin has finally anointed.
Food is something I have always associated with joy, succour and love; the fundamentals of a balanced diet were (the odd youthful Rustlers burger aside) something I innately understood. To sit in a restaurant like Chishuru, downing spiced okra martinis, is to be lucky in a number of different ways. It is only right we remember the hardships being felt by the culture that birthed this creativity. And that we pay our good fortune forward, however we can.
