At the Table: Food and Family around the World - Ken Albala (2016)

Mali

Stephen R. Wooten

COMMENSALITY WHERE THERE IS NO TABLE: THE IMPORTANCE OF EATING TOGETHER IN RURAL MALI

Over the course of 13 months in the early 1990s, Stephen ate almost all his daily meals with one family on the Mande Plateau in central Mali (West Africa). Nene Jara, the leader of Niamakoroni (a community of about 300 Bamana-speaking farmers) welcomed him, as the resident ethnographer, into his large household in a time-honored fashion: by integrating him into a group meal. Nene’s family consisted of 59 people, his dumògòw (house people). Like most rural Bamana families, his household was an extended family constituted through connections along male lines. Nene’s group included his wives and their children and his adult sons and their wives and children as well as his junior brothers and their wives and children. This large group had one central hearth, or gwa, and the nine married women living in the household took turns cooking for this family. Each day one tobilimuso (cooking woman) gathered grain from the central granary and prepared it for the group. Once the grain was cooked, she meted it out into a set of approximately 10 bowls, added leaf sauce, and then distributed it among the groups. Approximately five eating groups were thus constituted, each with age and gender profiles.

In the intervening years, Stephen has traveled back to Mali numerous times for additional field research with the people of Niamakoroni and in other communities across the country. In the process he has gained an intimate understanding of how commensality helps foster the spirit of family and community—what local people call badenya (mother-childness). As one woman explained it, “A united family eats together; they eat baden (mother-child) porridge.” When family members such as those in Nene’s household lower themselves to crouch around bowls of millet or rice and sauce placed on the ground before them by hardworking cooks, they eat and also forge bonds that all depend on for survival and community spirit.

The bond of commensality transcends the family setting as well. On so many occasions while traveling in Mali, people whom Stephen had never met before have called out “Come eat with us!” Such calls are clearly acts of hospitality, but they go further than that; a call to eat is a call to connect. “By inviting someone to join you, you are opening up the possibility for connection, for empathy. If your invitation is taken up, this shows that we are and can be one, which is badenya,” explained Sunje Jara, a quiet but insightful male elder. Badenya is something that people in the wider cultural world of Mande-language speakers prize more than anything else. It is the essence of community.

Albala

Come and eat. A woman presents a bowl of sorghum porridge with green leaf sauce while her counterparts eat their lunch in Niamakoroni, Mali, June 2015. (Courtesy of Stephen Wooten)

By accepting periodic invitations to come and eat and through sharing regular meals with Nene’s family, Stephen learned a lot about who eats together, how, and why—about commensality’s role in Bamana life. In addition to nourishing the individual physical body, consuming food with others constitutes and nourishes key social groups among the proud farmers he has come to know. Eating together is a sign of kinship connections, and these bonds are reinforced every day when contemporary residents partake of the food that nourishes them. Kinship ties put people in an eating space, but the act of dipping one’s hand into the bowl of grain and sauce that lies before you solidifies these relations.

Anthropologists have, of course, long recognized the significance that the consumption of a communal meal has in the dynamics of community life (e.g., Douglas 1971; Richards 1932, 1939; Weismantel 1989). Stephen argues that commensality is central to an understanding of the nature of social and economic improvisation in Bamana communities in rural Mali. Indeed, the centrality of the collective meal is readily apparent to and spoken widely of by the people of Niamakoroni. The phrases u bè to dun nyògòn fè (they eat meals together) and u tè to dun nyògòn fè (they don’t eat meals together) are important ways of expressing the character and quality of domestic relations within households. A vignette of a daily round of meals in the community will help illuminate the alimentary action that occurs in the process of creating the ties that bind.

PREPARING AND CONSUMING BOWLS OF FOOD: THE POWER OF THE DAILY MEAL

In the village, patterned activities and processes come together to create the badenya that characterizes community living. A sketch of the flow of life in Niamakoroni will allow us to appreciate the power of family meals and food-related actions.

Each new day begins with women’s early morning activities. Before the sun appears, a married woman in each one of the community’s compounds rises in order to prepare the morning meal (daraka) for the people of her compound, her fellow dumògòw. She will be the day’s tobilimuso. This responsibility rotates among all married women except elders and new wives.

Her activities begin with the drop of a rubber bucket into the village’s common well. She draws in the rope, hand over hand, lifting the water to the surface and emptying it into a metal washbasin. When it is full, she lifts it on top of her head, placing it carefully on a small piece of coiled cloth. Often, the cool water splashes onto the baby who likely rests on her back. She walks carefully to the cooking hut or gwabugu (hearth place), where she empties the water into the cooking pots. She repeats the process numerous times so that she will have sufficient water to cook the morning’s meal. Interestingly, the gwabugu where the meal, the substance of unity, is made is a quintessential women’s space among the Bamanas. Men do not typically enter these structures. The literal hearth of badenya is a female site.

Once she has the water boiling, she adds millet or sorghum flour. The day before she would have retrieved the whole grain from the group’s collective stores held in her household head’s meeting space. The grain was harvested the preceding fall from a distant bush family field, or foroba, worked in common by the household’s adult males during the rainy season (roughly June-September). To prepare the grain for cooking, she processes it using a mortar and pestle, removing the grain from the chaff. With the grain cleaned, she pulverizes it into flour. Through their deliberate individual actions, each tobilimuso helps to create the alimentary process that ties household members together in badenya.

The morning meal typically consists of a thin sorghum porridge, or seri, served to household members in large enamel or plastic bowls, most of which were produced in China. The thin gruel is consumed using a gourd spoon (galama). Small groups of family members, organized along lines of gender and age, crouch around and dip gourds into a common bowl. The gourd is then raised to the lips, and the contents are drawn off with a sipping action. This process continues until the bowl itself is emptied. The most junior member of the eating circle delivers the empty bowl to the tobilimuso for cleaning.

After the morning meal, all members of the du disperse to pursue their day’s activities; some head off alone, and others depart in groups. During the rainy season, the adult men typically depart en masse for work in the du’s main grain field, the foroba, where they stay from about 8:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Except for the tobilimuso, who is responsible for the day’s cooking, the du’s adult women typically head off in the company of their young children to work their own women’s fields, the musoforow.

After her early-morning activities, the tobilimuso turns her attention directly to the task of readying the midday meal (tilelafana). This meal is usually a thick sorghum paste called to, accompanied by a green leaf sauce called na.Each woman gathers the leaves for her sauce from plants in the bush or from crops such as okra growing in the musoforow. The midday meal is distributed first to those who typically remain in the village—the young children, the elders, and the sick or injured—and to the women who return to the compound from their nearby fields. Girls and young women usually bring bowls of to and na to the men working in the distant foroba. After the meal, people usually return to their activities.

In the middle of the afternoon, men finish up their day’s foroba activities and either return to the village or move on to other non-foroba production activities, which are often the source of personal income. A good many head off to the garden plots (nakòw) in the low-lying stream areas close to the village. Some head into the bush to gather resources for making rope, mats, or bamboo furniture.

Women often finish work in their musoforow at around the same time. Many of them also then turn to personal-income activities. They typically immerse themselves for several hours in the demanding task of charcoal (finfin) production. People generally spend several hours in these pursuits before returning to their compounds for the main collective meal of the day, suròfana.

At about 6:00 p.m., all du members reunite for suròfana, served in the du’s common area as with the morning meal. Usually the fare is identical to the midday meal: to and na. On some special occasions, rice (a purchased staple) is the grain of choice. Again, separate eating groups form within each du, divided first by gender and then within gender by age. However, the oldest man in the group, the cèkòròba and dutigi, typically eats with several young boys (between four and seven years old), and the oldest woman (musokòròba) typically eats with several young girls. Toddlers eat with their mothers.

The tobilimuso brings the cooked food out from the gwabugu and begins by placing a bowl on the ground in front of the dutigi, then placing one in front of the next group of men, and continuing through all the assembled men and women. With their right hands, people take a bit of the to and dip it into the na, which has been placed in a hollowed area in the center of the to. The process continues until each individual is satisfied or the food runs out. If the food in a particular bowl does run out before someone is full, he or she is free to move on to a neighboring group that is still eating.

When everyone has finished eating, the tobilimuso collects the bowls. Often she gives the remainders to the compound’s dogs, or if food is scarce, the remainders are kept for the following day. She then proceeds to wash the bowls and cooking pots so they will be ready for the next meal. When people are full they say “A barika” (Thanks be), to which the others assembled respond by passing the thanks to Allah with “A barika Allah ye”; even the many non-Muslims in the community use these phrases. They then pull back from the intimate eating circle, licking their hands before washing them off in the same bowl of water they used at the start of the meal.

Interestingly, while all tobilimusow produce basically the same meals of grain and sauce, they can do so with individual flair. Regular consumers of household meals can distinguish one woman’s sauce from another’s. It is not uncommon to hear someone, typically a man, praise a particular tobilimuso’s sauce publicly by saying “I ni gwa, I ni na” (You and your hearth, you and your sauce). This statement is a commentary on the woman’s distinctive culinary style. In a social world where women typically have few public opportunities to secure status, those who receive such praise find it very empowering.

After eating, the dumògòw usually linger in the eating area, talking and making plans for the next day’s activities. These discussion groups follow gender lines as well. After a period of conversation, people disperse back into the village, where they meet up with friends or spouses to chat or rest before retiring.

Having consumed the big meal of the day, older people typically are in their huts and asleep by 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. Stephen sometimes joined groups of young people for an hour or two in the early evening. Sometimes they would spend these hours processing produce from an individual’s garden—on several occasions, Stephen sat shelling beans until 10:30 p.m. These were very animated sessions, and a good deal of socializing took place. Indeed, young people amazed him by staying up talking and listening to the radio well into the early morning hours, even when they had to head off to a day of labor early the next morning.

As this portrait of the daily round of meals suggests, the people of each household are united by their consumption of food prepared from a common hearth. One of the most common phrases in discussions of food and family dynamics—du kelen, gwa kelen (one household, one hearth)—is typically rendered with conviction, as if it communicated a prized social value. The upshot is that the character of meal preparation and the nature of its consumption define households; if you have two hearths and two eating groups, you have two households. Each and every day, dumògòw come together to gather around bowls of food prepared in a common kitchen. Instead of a series of discrete eating groups, the households of the village are unified consumption units. Even if the people could eat alone, they choose not to. Instead, they choose to share their meals. Interestingly, on occasions when Stephen was sick or simply overwhelmed with the social intimacy of day-to-day life and chose to prepare meals alone in his house, people often came by to check on him to see if he had a problem—they meant a social problem, not a physical one.

However, there is complexity within this framework and within the “unity.” All people do not eat together within the community; and even within households, there are some dividing lines. As families grow over time, distinct groups tend to emerge, groups that over time constitute their own residential units, farming units, and, ultimately, eating units. Naturally, when issues of scale become significant, transformation needs to occur, new eating groups need to be constituted through the construction of new dwellings, and, most important, there need to be new hearths at which women can cook common meals to feed the house-people. This is a normal process, one that replicates rather than replaces the basic ideology.

Another distinction within the realm of eating together occurs between age groups and genders within the household. At all meals, men and women eat separately. The women eat on one side of the public space, and the men eat on the other. Within each gender group, people are further differentiated by age, with rough age mates eating together from a common bowl, the only exception being the aforementioned: when favored boys eat with their grandfather. So in a sense, the unified eating group is actually composed of a set of subgroups.

EXTENDING THE BADENYA OF THE SHARED MEAL

As mentioned above, communal eating is also a way of bringing nonkin or outsiders into the social fold. Many times when he traveled to neighboring villages near and far and arrived to find people gathered around bowls of to and sauce, Stephen was greeted with “Come, eat. Join us!” This happens day in and day out whenever travelers come by, and it also happens on a more profound level in the case of inviting new families to live in the community. A prominent male once recounted the village history. He pointed out that the original family of settlers invited another family to come live with them, and eating together at the outset was part of the process. Sharing meals until the newcomers could get on their feet was a way of creating new community ties and bonds. By sharing food, the hosts were forging new social relations, expressing and building badenya.

Another dimension of this dynamic is apparent in community-wide meat-sharing events. On occasions when one of the village men was successful in his hunt of wild animals in the bush around the village, a windfall of meat would become available. The meat would be cooked and then rather ceremoniously and publicly divided into equal parts, to be distributed to all households in the community and even on occasion to households in nearby villages.

The same dynamic would unfold on those occasions when Stephen procured freshly butchered meat from the market. The package of meat would arrive in the village, and the eldest man present at the time would open it in full view of all the inhabitants. He would then divide the mass into five clear piles, one for each household. A young man would then be dispatched to deliver packets to each family. Once it was received and cooked, the dutigi of each household would divide the meat into individual portions for his dumògòw.

On a smaller scale, even boys who kill a lizard with a slingshot typically grill it and share it with their playmates. Whenever Stephen passed the leftovers of his sweetened morning porridge along to the nearby children, the bowl fed a large number of young people who gathered around and shared it. The practice of sharing such a prized resource reveals the significance people place on exchanges that tie people together. The acts are reciprocal in nature—one man shares the fruit of his hunt with members of his community; a dutigi shares a windfall with his family members. The lines of sharing construct and trace the lines of community.

As noted above, no one, not even a visiting anthropologist, eats alone in the Bamana world. Recall that on Stephen’s first day in the community, Nene invited him to be a member of his eating group. Each day he spent in the village, Stephen joined Nene and his dumògòw for the evening—there is a local pattern of shared nourishment.

A BARIKA! THANKS BE!

As this brief tour of the alimentary landscape of a Bamana community suggests, groups who eat together are grateful. People united by residence, kinship, and marriage partake of common meals that the women cooked at their group’s common hearth with produce from household grain fields (forobaw) worked by male du members under the direction of their dutigi. In a very real sense, members of each of duw are linked in a shared economy of life, an economy of collective food. Its most basic aspects are apparent in the course of the most alimentary piece of daily life in the community, the consumption of the foroba to. The production and consumption of this shared meal is intimately connected to the organization of food production. Each time a woman cooks and lays a bowl of food on the ground before her family members, she transforms the products of different streams of household labor to present an opportunity to connect their efforts and to solidify their bonds. With each dip of the hand into the collective bowl of foroba to, a meal that embodies the fruit of everyone’s labors (men’s grain and women’s sauce), individual family members acknowledge each other’s work and signal their social unity. In this way, deep commensality is achieved day in and day out in a place where the Western-style dining table is completely absent.

LEARNING TO MAKE JABAJI WHERE THERE IS NO COOKBOOK

When Stephen asked women in Niamakoroni how to make one of his favorite dishes, jabaji (onion sauce), the responses were pretty short and direct: “Get some onions, vegetable oil, and salt and cook them all together. You can add some tomato paste or Maggi powder if you have money to buy it.” Their elementary guidance actually highlights an important aspect of culinary practice in the area. In the village and most other Bamana communities, cooking knowledge is shared orally and through interactive hands-on learning. From an early age, daughters help their mothers prepare and serve meals. In the process they learn how to process grains and create three or four sauces. They learn what ingredients are included in which dishes. By watching and assisting, they learn how much of what to add and when and how to produce the intended fare. There is no need for a cookbook or instruction manual in this setting. Such information is transmitted intergenerationally through an apprentice-type relationship. Mothers have the opportunity to share their particular takes on village standards with their daughters, and daughters have the chance to improvise a bit on the received wisdom of their mothers without radically changing the menu.

Albala

All hands in. A group of boys and men eat a lunch of corn couscous and sorghum porridge with green leaf sauce in Niamakoroni, Mali, June 2015. (Courtesy of Stephen Wooten)

Jabaji (Onion Sauce)

8-10 small-medium onions, diced

½ cup of vegetable oil

1 6-ounce can of tomato paste

1 chicken-flavored bouillon cube

Salt to taste

1.Add all ingredients to a large pot and simmer over medium heat until onions are soft.

2.Stir and break up onions until they form a sauce.

3.Serve on top of porridge, rice, or pasta.