Growing up, my siblings and I didn't really have a fancy childhood. There were some things we rarely got, and snacks were one of those things. We loved snacks so much. Snacks were so special to us that whenever any of our moms or our dad came back with a nylon that crinkled in their hands, we got excited because new joy was coming.
Eating biscuits, Gala, cabin biscuits, cheese balls, chin chin—it felt like a special event for us.
And as kids, we somehow found a way to make anything silly. I don't really know who started it, but anytime we got snacks, we started saving them. The one I find the silliest when I look back was when we were given drinks, and we would add water to fill them up every time we drank a little. It would seem like we weren't even touching the drink, or it was magically refilling itself, until it almost lost all its color and taste.
We could all be seated watching a movie, and one of us would pull out two leftover sticks of biscuits that were shared like two or three days ago and start eating. And others would be taking sneak glances with what we Nigerians call longer throat—almost killing us.
(It doesn’t mean your actual throat is long—it’s just a playful way of describing someone who’s desiring what someone else is eating or enjoying.)
And sometimes, the one with the biscuit would be feeling special, not knowing two people still had some biscuits left hidden somewhere, just waiting to be the last person. It was like a competition of who could save their snacks the longest.
Every other person just saw it as nothing. My mom was always supporting us in saving, so she probably thought—it's good her children learnt the "waste not, want not" phenomenon. And maybe others thought—“Well, they are just kids. Kids do silly things."
But to us, it was totally different—it wasn’t about saving because of scarcity or any other excuse, it was to flex.
But it started getting out of hand. We started saving our regular food too. We would eat so slowly, trying to be the last to finish. One time, my brother even started saving meat. During that period, my mom bought a lot of cow meat and fried them. So, every time we were eating, she would share small pieces of fried meat among us. No one knew, and the day he just started chewing while we were in the parlour, all of us were curious. We found out it was meat, and after a long argument because he wouldn't tell us where he got it from, we reported to my mom that we suspected he knew where she hid the cooler of meat and stole from it. But he proved us all wrong by revealing a nylon of all the meat she had been giving him. And when my mom counted the pieces in the cooler, they were complete, meaning he wasn't lying.
My mom started complaining and warning us about keeping snacks for too long after she found biscuits that had spoiled after staying for God knows how long in one of our pockets. She said our intention to save made it even worse.
Then one day, my dad had enough.
We were all in the sitting room watching TV when my dad came out and joined us.
Then he randomly said, “If you bring out a biscuit when others don’t have, and if you waste time to finish your food, you’ll share it with everybody,” he said, eyes on the TV like he just said something small.
My sister was the first person he used to set an example. He shared a pack of juice with us, and we all drank it in his presence. But my sister pretended to finish her own and secretly kept the remaining in the fridge. She didn't know that my dad had been watching us closely.
When we thought we had all finished our juice and were about to continue our day, our dad called us back and told us to get a cup each for ourselves. We got the cups, and he went straight to the fridge and took out my sister's juice.
“Remember the rule," he said with a straight face. Then he started to share the little juice left in the box amongst us. He didn't care how little it was, he made sure it reached everyone—including my sister, the original owner of the juice.
We didn't laugh. We weren't happy or sad. We were just shocked. The only sad person was my sister as she sipped the little juice she got from what she saved, with a bitter face.
The next time was my brother eating his food really slowly, and he started pinching his meat. My dad called us and shared the meat with everyone. That's when we finally understood he wasn't joking with his rule.
The silly game changed to the opposite—from saving our food, to a fun game of eating fast and looking out for anyone who tried saving for the sake of a longer throat, so my dad could share it.