Kombucha’s great, try bié! A probiotic I swear by.

When exactly my independent journey towards better health overall—began is not very distinct in my mind. Long before I cared enough to take the wheel, my mum did.

For context, I’m from Benue state, Nigeria—by which I mean when both parents' lineages are traced, the lines lead to a two-tailed, two-eared chunk, somewhere off-centre, in the north central region of Nigeria. Trace the lines too far, and it would lead you to the Democratic Republic of Congo, is what I hear.

I grew up in Jos, Nigeria however, about 240km, from the former. A bumpy, scenic six hour drive farther north.

Bié.

Made primarily from millets and ginger, it’s a staple breakfast in Tiv settings. It’s the sweet spot between brukutu and ogi/pap/akamu. Featuring in folk songs, love songs, tales, and modern mornings, breakfasts don’t get more indigenous than that.

A savory journey from home, Jos, to home, Gboko.

The landscape change is a profound thing to witness. On this journey, one goes from red-brick rectangular shacks behind cacti fences and impossible rock formations limiting one’s vision to a mere 50 meters to the left and right. An ear pop—amplitude change, as the highlands give way to plains. The view opens up to grasslands and orchards (oranges and mangos) that roll out as far as the eyes can see—lush green in May, and a dusty brown in December. Round thatched huts of brown soil host familial settlements in small clusters separated from each other by vast farmland. One can’t help but wonder if perhaps it would be as easy to infiltrate these communities if they lived closer together. The thought is immediately discarded as irrelevant. A community armed with hoes and cutlasses formed to harvest cassava cannot be expected to protect themselves from marauders wielding sophisticated artillery. One hopes regardless.

Over a hundred kilometers south of the Plateau, the road spans across the river Benue. A 50 second drive across the bridge leads you to the food basket roundabout.

Depending on the time of year, it’s adorned in some drapery, posters or other. When you see the one that reads “The Alia the Better”, it’s okay to roll your eyes, it’s not the best pun I ever heard.

Take a left into Wurukum market, and you're on Gboko road. To your right, Makurdi blurs past— a fuel station, a church, then a bank. After this bank, before the motor-park, sits my favourite bié place in the state’s capital.

Drive right by, don’t even stop for the oranges—I know a better place.

In sixty or ninety minutes, depending on the condition of the roads, we would arrive at our destination—a spot my mum put me on to. You’re welcome in advance.

Keep on the tarred road, I’d advise you focus on the bumps, and…depressions, there isn’t much else to see here but trees, more trees, farms, some orange pyramids, pumpkins, and yams. Some mangoes if you’re lucky enough to be there between March and July.

See that dilapidated juice factory by the right? I always wonder about that. Speaking of factories, you’re now half way there. When you see the Dangote Cement plant, you’d have only 25% of the way left to go. I get really sleepy around here, dreams of what a successful juice factory would’ve meant for this community.

Black smoke and lots of trucks.

Hey, did you know Dangote Cement was formerly Benue Cement Company?

You’re turning right, just up front.

My mum won a pageantry at that school to the left in 1986. They have a gigantic pig farm, not a gigantic farm, a farm with gigantic pigs.

Breathe in deeply. Do you smell the homeliness or is that just nostalgia playing tricks on me?

Go on, get lunch. I recommend pounded yam, pork, and whatever soup is available. For a warmer welcome, you could stop by my grandma’s. Cingé’s friends get a special treatment.

Get some rest, we have to do breakfast early tomorrow.

Seven o’clock finds us with a calabash in one hand, and akpukpa in the other. Put the cutlery away, let us break bread.

Bread.

As one who would often choose starvation over street food, boy, am I glad to wait in a roadside shack for my serving of bié!

Everyone wants one—kids on their way to school, their mothers, bike-men, taxis, families on their way to farms. Where two or three are gathered, god is.

Bié for breakfast is fellowship, it’s communion of hungry souls waiting together, their eyes fixed on the flame that feeds.

How are you finding it? Do you like it? No, don’t tell me. Savour. We don’t talk while eating.

Ayoosu shio.

Came all the way from the Jos Plateau to the Benue valley for this. I hope it was worth the miles?

For two decades, the Plateau has bled. For one, neighboring Benue has caught strays, then succinct, and relentless strikes that have carved out lives and the lands between them.

Growing up in the crosshairs has meant watching plans of finding solace in Benue turn into acceptance of the cornered position in which we’d found ourselves, with eyes watching God, jumping at the sound of fireworks.

Fireworks, not gunshots—I’m certain. A body knows the rhythm of its own undoing.

Can we use this? Shall we consider the possibility of cultural propagation being used as a weapon of solidarity in crisis?

Bié as a bridge, and millets—millets from Benue, resources from red zones as a tool for economic empowerment through times as dark as these.

For what good is a cry that goes unheard? As loud as a tree fallen alone in a forest, gone with no one to hear it, no one to save it. No one to even try.

What good is a day, when those who one began it with—kids on their way to school, their mothers, bike-men, taxis, families on their way to farms, the bié seller, together, can no longer be?

Ayoosu shio.