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Roselyne Sachiti

Features, Health & Society Editor

I love chillies and spicy food. I add chilli to every meal from my eggs to meat and veggies, that’s how I enjoy my food best.

In my drawer at work, handbag, and at home I keep some chillies just to spice up whichever flat meal I may come across.

At work, I am usually the go to person when anyone who knows I have them, is looking for chillies. 

I even grow some in my garden at home and for years bragged as the queen of chillies.

Yet, when I visited Edo State in Nigeria on a work assignment recently, I got a tough lesson that not all the strongest taste buds can tolerate their chilies. 

Making sure my itinerary without a doubt was to try out Nigerian food from day one till I returned home, each evening, I visited a local sports club in Edo State where they have a variety of meals served by different caterers.

Having dinner there four times, I no longer doubt the intensity of the chillies, or pepe, as locals call it.

The food was extremely hot. My taste buds were literary set on fire each time I had a meal giving me a burning sensation.

In Nigeria, peppers are staple ingredients in the preparation of most meals. Locals love pepe, add it to eggs, fish, jollof rice, goat meat, chicken, and in most dishes.

On many occasions we found lots of chillies in omelettes at breakfast.

Despite one of our hosts Uwi warning me of the intensity of Nigerian pepe, I took up the challenge. I wanted to see how far my taste buds would go. It was game on.

 He told me they have the Ata rodo (scotch bonnets), a regular pepper they use in that country.

It also consists of yellow pepper. 

“Most Scotch bonnets have a heat rating of 80,000–400,000 coville units. We also have dry pepper (Piri piri/chili). We use this to make the dry pepe that we grind. Most piri piri have a heat rating of 50,000–175,000 units,” Uwi said.

There was a variety of food on the menu.

I tried, efo riro, a mix of pumpkin green leaves and offal. Our hosts asked the waiter to add a bit of pepe.

As we were waiting for the efo riro, he asked us to try suya, a very popular delicacy in Nigeria. 

A snack usually eaten in the evenings, suya is made with fish or meat and doused with spices. It is then barbequed on a skewer. 

The spices comprise ginger, peanuts, pepper, dried onions and various stock flavours. 

The waiter served it with some brownish ground pepe on the side of the plate. As we ate we dipped our meat in the pepe. It was spicy enough for my liking. My colleagues Nyaradzo Makombe, Tariro Manamike and I ended up ordering it everyday, each bite did things to our taste buds.

We also tried Nigerian pepper soup, an intensely spicy flavour and the variety of meat, fish or chicken that can be used to cook it. The broth had some thickness to it, that even if too spicy, I kept digging in.

One of our hosts also slowly ate Okro soup. He seemed to joy it as he sipped on his glass of beer. Like hyena’s watching a lion feast, we sat there, hesitating to dig into his plate. Temptation beat us, we asked for a bit. It was awesome.

One of the local journalists ordered egusi soup. Having heard a lot about it while watching several Nigerian movies, I was quite curious. 

He said Egusi soup remains arguably the most universal of all Nigerian soups with each tribe having their own version.

 It comprises melon seed which is shelled and ground into a powder before use in the soup. I tried it and it tasted delicious.

We also had really spicy grilled catfish with sweet potato chips as a side dish.

We figured out that at many restaurants and bars, the spicy cat fish is called point-and-kill because of its combination of spices, pepper and herbs.

I got addicted to it. Each time I wanted to stop eating, I found my hand stretching out to my plate, even when I was full.

To this day I still crave for this extremely spicy fish. I love goat meat and tried the peppered goat meal. It was hot.

 My taste buds were on fire. 

I suffered silently, wearing a brave face of someone embarrassed to face the reality of being defeated by a meal they have fallen in love with.

I tried to control my running nose and teary eyes caused by the pepe, and the same time struggled to hide this from my host who I knew would have a good laugh.

I gave up and abandoned the meal as I tried to clear my throat. For a few minutes my voice became squeaky, as I tried to supress a cough which wanted to clear the hot pepe. Our host finally caught me.

He had a good laugh.

 That evening I was best friends with the toilet in my room. It heard all my confessions and how I would never eat such hot pepe again. The running tummy lasted till the next morning. The chillies had finally gotten the best out of me. 

 I admitted, the pepe in the goat meat was one of a kind, I still have no words to describe it, and I kept the running tummy a secret from our hosts.

It would not have been a trip to Nigeria without eating deep fried ripe plantains.

 We had the plantains with very spicy jollof rice. On another day we had the fried plantains with custard for breakfast. 

The plantains were caramel sweet and delicious, and sort of neutralised the hot jollof rice.

Leaving Nigeria, I made sure I bought a few bottles pepe, for some people back home to taste and learn more a bit about how to eat it.