[STORY] Why You Must NOT Eat Party Food Anyhow in Lagos

The Hand That Feeds You

Prologue: The Weight of a Boast

Lagos has a way of putting the truth right in front of your face and daring you to notice it. I learned that the hard way, watching a woman feed an entire street for four years before I understood what her generosity was actually costing us.

I had a canopy and chair rental shop on Randall Avenue in Surulere — the kind of business where every single party on that street eventually passed through my hands, because you cannot throw an owambe in Lagos without somewhere to seat your guests and something to shield them from the sun. From that shop, I watched Madame Bounty host her parties for nearly four years. Four years I watched her. And still, when the truth finally arrived on a humid Sunday evening, with half the street gathered under my own canopies, I nearly dropped the stack of plastic chairs in my arms.

To understand how we got there, you have to go back to the year she first arrived on Randall Avenue.

Chapter One: Madame Bounty

Her real name was Fadi Adisa, though almost nobody on Randall Avenue called her that. She earned the name Madame Bounty within her first year on our street, and she earned it honestly — or so we all believed at the time. She threw parties the way other people breathed — constantly, easily, without any visible strain on her pocket. A naming ceremony for a baby she was not even related to. A housewarming for a house she had just finished building. An anniversary for a marriage that we later learned existed mostly in the stories she told about it.

It did not matter what the occasion was. If Madame Bounty was hosting, the whole street knew there would be food enough for anyone who walked past the gate, invited or not, and she wanted it that way. She insisted on it.

Before she arrived, almost nobody knew where she had come from. Some said she’d once run a small provision stall in Ajegunle that folded under debt. Others said she’d been married to a man who left her with nothing but his surname and a stack of unpaid bills. Whatever the truth, the woman who arrived on our street four years before the truth came out bore no visible trace of struggle at all. She moved into a modest bungalow at first, though within eighteen months she had knocked it down and rebuilt it twice the size, and within three years had acquired the plot beside it as well, extending her compound until it swallowed nearly a quarter of the street.

I first met her when she came to rent forty chairs and two canopies for what she called “a small Thanksgiving,” though nothing about the eventual crowd outside her gate that Saturday could be described as small. She was a striking woman, tall, with the kind of skin that seemed to hold light rather than simply reflect it. Her gele changed color with every party, but her wrapper was always the same deep wine red — a color she told me once she chose because it reminded her of a version of herself she never wanted to forget.

“I like to feed people,” she told me that first day, counting out cash from a small velvet purse. “You will see. My parties are not like other people’s parties. Nobody leaves my gate with an empty stomach. Not while my hands still work.”

I did not think much of the phrase at the time. It sounded like the harmless boast of someone who enjoyed being thought of as warm. I know better now. I know she meant it far more literally than any of us understood.

Chapter Two: Come In, Come In

Madame Bounty’s parties became legendary within her first eight months. She hired live bands even for events that didn’t traditionally call for them. She ordered food in quantities that seemed designed less for the guest list and more for the entire neighborhood — coolers of jollof rice and stewed goat meat lined along her compound wall. She made a habit of standing near the gate herself, greeting every single person who walked in, known or unknown, with the same warm insistence.

“Come in, come in. There is more than enough,” she would say, guiding strangers off the road into her compound with a hand at their back. “A party is not a party if people leave hungry.”

She had a way of remembering names after hearing them only once — a talent the whole street admired — and she used those names constantly, calling out across her compound in a voice that made you feel, for the length of one greeting, like the most important guest in the room. She called the children small angels. She called the elderly women mothers of gold. She called the young men future chiefs, and they preened under the title even knowing it was flattery. Everyone had a name for Madame Bounty, and everyone, myself included, for a long time, felt genuinely fond of her because of it.

By her second year, people from neighboring streets began attending her parties simply because word had spread. She built a proper event space behind her house — a covered courtyard with tiled flooring and a small stage for her live bands — and filled it every few months with celebration. Weddings she was not related to. Chieftaincy title ceremonies. Birthday parties for children whose parents she barely knew. It did not matter. If there was an occasion, however small, however borrowed, Madame Bounty found a way to attach herself to it and turn it into something larger.

I rented chairs and canopies to her for nearly every one of those events. And I began to notice, though I didn’t think anything of it at the time, that she had a particular habit at every single party. No matter how many staff she hired, no matter how large the crowd, she always personally served certain guests herself, walking through the crowd with a plate in each hand, insisting, always insisting, that this particular person allow her — and only her — to fill their plate.

“Let me,” she would say, taking the plate directly from their hands before they could reach for the serving spoons themselves. “In my house, I feed my special guests myself.”

It seemed at the time like an extension of her generosity, a personal touch that made whoever she chose feel singled out, honored, remembered. I did not think to ask why it was always different people each time, or why those particular people so often seemed to be the ones with something enviable happening in their lives that season.

Chapter Three: No Plate

I want to tell you about Deaconess Rachel now, because her role in this story matters more than almost anyone else’s, and because the street’s treatment of her still troubles me whenever I think back on it.

Deaconess Rachel was a caterer, one of the most sought-after in our part of Surulere. Known for her jollof rice and her efficient, no-nonsense way of running a kitchen for two hundred guests without ever once raising her voice, she had worked events across Lagos for over twenty years. In all that time, she had built one very particular reputation alongside her cooking: she never ate at any party she worked. Not a single bite, no matter whose party it was or how insistently she was offered a plate.

“Deaconess, abeg small,” hosts would tease her, holding out a plate of the very food she herself had prepared. “You cook the food, you know say it fit — even taste your own work.”

She always declined the same way. Polite but immovable. “I eat before I come and I eat after I leave,” she would say. “What happens in another person’s kitchen, in another person’s compound, is not something I put in my body.”

The street found this endlessly amusing. They called her “No Plate” behind her back, and sometimes to her face, and she never once seemed bothered by it. Children joked that she was afraid of being poisoned, though nobody meant it seriously. Grown men laughed and said she had simply worked too many bad parties over the years and lost her taste for other people’s cooking. Nobody, myself included, considered for a moment that her caution might be earned rather than eccentric.

Deaconess Rachel worked several of Madame Bounty’s early parties, back before Madame Bounty grew wealthy enough to hire staff exclusively from outside our neighborhood. And I remember the first time I noticed something pass between the two women that unsettled me, though I could not have named why at the time. It was at a housewarming, the courtyard full of laughter and music, when Madame Bounty approached a young man near the drinks table with a plate in her hands, insisting he let her serve him personally. Deaconess Rachel, standing near the kitchen entrance with a serving tray, went very still and watched the exchange with an expression I had never seen on her before — something between recognition and dread.

Afterward, she found me near my stacked chairs. “You see the way she does that,” she said. It was not really a question. “I have seen that before. Not from her — from someone else, years ago. Another party, another part of Lagos. I do not like it.”

“She is only being generous,” I told her, the way we all told each other things we had not yet earned the right to doubt.

“There is a difference,” Deaconess Rachel said, “between generosity and selection. A generous person feeds whoever is hungry. A person who chooses, again and again, who receives food from their own hand is not being generous. She is doing something else, and I do not yet know what it is. But I intend to watch.”

I laughed it off that evening, the way the whole street learned to laugh things off around Deaconess Rachel’s warnings. Though I want to be honest and say her words settled into me differently than I let on. I did not want to ask further questions, because Madame Bounty had become, by then, someone I genuinely liked.

Chapter Four: Mama Uche’s Fortune

Now let me tell you about the people whose lives began changing in ways none of us thought to connect to a woman known across the neighborhood for her generosity.

Mama Uche ran the largest fabric store in the Randall Avenue market, a business she had built over almost twenty years from a single table of wrappers into a proper shop with three employees and a reputation that drew customers from across Lagos. Sharp with numbers, sharper with negotiation, entirely self-made.

She attended Madame Bounty’s housewarming that first year — one of the guests Madame Bounty insisted on personally serving, holding her plate with both hands and saying loud enough for several nearby to hear, “A woman like you deserves to be fed by another woman’s hands, not by staff who do not know your worth.”

Mama Uche was flattered, as anyone would be. Within four months, her fabric supplier in Kano, a relationship maintained without incident for over a decade, suddenly and inexplicably stopped honoring their agreed prices, then stopped responding to her calls altogether. She scrambled to find new suppliers, but the replacements were unreliable, delivering damaged goods or nothing at all. Within a year, she had lost two of her three employees and closed her shop two days a week just to save on overhead. The woman who once negotiated prices down through sheer force of reputation now found herself accepting terms she would have refused outright a year earlier.

“I do not understand it, Bisola,” she told me one evening, sitting heavily on one of my rental chairs after helping me stack the others. “Twenty years, and nothing like this has ever happened. It is as though something decided all at once that my luck had run out, and I cannot find the reason why.”

Chapter Five: Kelechi’s Two Years

Kelechi was a young man who lived two houses down from my shop — the kind of serious, disciplined young person parents on the street held up as an example to their own children. He had spent nearly two years preparing for a visa interview to join a graduate program abroad, studying every evening after work, memorizing every question he might be asked, saving carefully for the trip.

He attended Madame Bounty’s son’s birthday party that same year, one of several young men she called “future chief,” and she served him personally, telling the gathered guests that a young man with such a bright future deserved to be honored before it even arrived.

Three weeks before his interview, Kelechi’s passport, along with the folder containing every document he had painstakingly prepared, went missing from his own room — a room he shared with no one, in a house that had not been broken into. He never found it. By the time he managed to reconstruct the paperwork and reschedule, the interview slot had been reassigned, and he was told to reapply the following cycle. That cycle, the university changed its funding structure entirely, and the opportunity he had built two years toward simply ceased to exist in the form he had prepared for.

“It feels like the ground shifted right when I needed it to hold still,” he told me once, standing outside my shop with the particular stillness of someone who has stopped expecting things to make sense. “Two years, Bisola. I did everything right. I do not understand how everything right can still add up to nothing.”

Chapter Six: A Marriage Twelve Years Strong

Dr. Adaeze and his wife Funmi were for years the marriage everyone on Randall Avenue pointed to when they wanted to describe what a good match looked like. He ran a small clinic near the market. She taught at the primary school. They had been married twelve years and still walked to church together every Sunday, still held hands the way people do when the holding has not yet become habit.

They attended Madame Bounty’s anniversary celebration, an event that struck several of us as strange even then, given how rarely her husband was ever seen in public. Madame Bounty served the couple herself that evening, standing between them with a plate in each hand, telling anyone nearby that a marriage like theirs was rare enough to deserve celebrating in someone else’s house, since her own had grown so quiet.

Within six months, small disagreements began appearing in a marriage that had weathered twelve years without visible strain. Dr. Adaeze started staying later at his clinic than his caseload required. Funmi began finding reasons to visit her sister on weekends they used to spend together. Neither could point to a single incident that had changed things — only a slow, creeping distance that neither seemed able to name or reverse. The kind of quiet unraveling that looks from the outside exactly like two good people simply growing tired of each other, the way Lagos sometimes wears a marriage down without any dramatic cause at all.

Chapter Seven: Toby’s Promotion

Toby worked at a local government office — a serious young civil servant everyone expected to be promoted to a senior position that year, a promotion he had been quietly working toward for three years. He attended one of Madame Bounty’s smaller gatherings, a simple Sunday lunch she threw for no occasion at all beyond wanting company, and she served him personally, calling him a future chief in front of the other guests and telling him she could already see the greatness waiting for him.

The promotion went to someone else that year, through an administrative reshuffling nobody could fully explain — one that seemed to catch even Toby’s own supervisors by surprise. He tried again the following cycle and was passed over a second time. Then a third. Each time for reasons that sounded reasonable individually, but formed together a pattern that left him quieter each year, less certain of his own competence — a man slowly convincing himself he had simply overestimated what he was capable of.

Chapter Eight: The Wedding That Never Happened

Chiamaka was engaged to be married that same year — a match her whole family had been overjoyed about, the kind of union people on Randall Avenue still stopped her in the street to congratulate her on, months after the engagement was announced. Madame Bounty hosted her bridal shower herself, insisting on it as a gift to a young woman she called radiant, serving her a plate with her own hands in front of the gathered aunties and calling her the most beautiful bride the street had seen in years.

Within two months, small cracks began appearing in wedding plans that had until then moved forward without friction. The hall they’d booked suddenly canceled the date over a clerical error nobody could locate. Chiamaka’s fiancé grew distant in ways neither of them could explain — small arguments erupting over nothing, silences stretching longer between them. By the time the wedding date arrived, it did not happen at all. Called off quietly, painfully, by two people who still, as far as I know, cannot fully explain to themselves what went wrong between them.

“Everyone keeps asking me what happened,” she told me once, sitting outside my shop long after the engagement had ended, “and I do not have an answer that makes sense to anyone, including myself. One day we were fine, then we simply were not. And I cannot point to the day it started.”

Chapter Nine: The Pattern

Five people. Five capable, respected members of our community, each with something enviable happening in their lives before that particular party, and each watching that same thing quietly dissolve in the months that followed. Nobody connected these five unraveling lives to a woman known across the street for her generosity. Nobody except Deaconess Rachel, who continued watching from the edges of every party she worked, saying less each time, because she had learned by then that saying more only cost her the respect of people who preferred to believe in kindness rather than suspect anything darker beneath it.

I want to tell you about the evening my own doubt hardened into something I could no longer explain away as coincidence.

Mama Uche came to my shop after closing hours, ostensibly to discuss chair rentals for a small gathering she was no longer sure she could afford, though I could tell within minutes that the chairs were not why she had come.

“Bola,” she said, sitting across from me, her voice lower than I had ever heard it. “I need to ask you something, and I need you to take it seriously, even though I know how it will sound.”

“Ask me.”

“Everyone who attended that housewarming with me — the ones she served herself that evening — I have been asking around quietly. Kelechi lost his visa opportunity. The doctor and his wife are struggling in ways nobody expected. Toby has been passed over for that promotion three times now. Even young Chiamaka, whose engagement fell apart not long after her bridal shower. I did not think anything of it until I started actually asking, one by one, and realized we all have this in common. She served us with her own hands, and every one of us has watched something we worked for simply come apart since.”

I sat with that for a long moment. “It could be coincidence,” I said, though even as I said it, I did not fully believe my own words.

“I have run a business for twenty years,” Mama Uche said. “I know the difference between bad luck and a pattern. This is a pattern, Bisola. I do not know what it means yet, but I know it is not coincidence.”

That night, after she left, I sat alone in my shop for a long time, thinking about Deaconess Rachel’s words from years earlier, about how easily we had all dismissed her caution as eccentricity — about how a woman who had built a career watching other people’s kitchens closely had seen something the rest of us, dazzled by warmth and free food, had simply chosen not to look at directly.

Chapter Ten: What I Began to See

I began paying closer attention after that — the way you pay attention once you can no longer pretend not to notice. I watched Madame Bounty at the next several events I supplied chairs for. Watched how she moved through her own parties with plates in her hands. Watched who she chose, and why. And I began to see something I had somehow overlooked for nearly three years.

She never chose randomly. She chose people who had something happening in their lives worth having — something she herself seemed to be missing — and she watched them, in the weeks that followed each party, with a kind of quiet, satisfied attention that had nothing generous in it at all.

Chapter Eleven: Comfort’s Discovery

Now I must tell you about Comfort, because without her, none of what happened next would have come to light. Comfort was a young woman, perhaps nineteen, who had come to live and work in Madame Bounty’s house two years earlier, helping with cooking, cleaning, and the endless preparation her parties required. She was quiet, careful, the kind of young person who noticed everything and said very little, and she had access, by the nature of her work, to parts of that house the rest of us never saw.

It was only much later that I learned what she had been carrying quietly for almost a year before she finally brought it forward.

She found the box, she told us afterward, while cleaning a locked cabinet in Madame Bounty’s private sitting room — a cabinet she had been specifically instructed never to touch, though on that particular afternoon the lock had been left open by mistake. Inside was a small wooden box, and inside the box, a notebook filled with names, dates, and small items tucked into folded paper. A button that matched a shirt Kelechi had worn that year. A scrap of fabric that looked identical to the wrapper Mama Uche had worn to the housewarming. A photograph she did not recognize but later realized showed Toby, standing at that quiet Sunday lunch.

Comfort closed the box immediately and told no one for months, terrified of what it might mean, and more terrified of what might happen to her if Madame Bounty discovered she had seen it. She carried that knowledge alone, watching the same pattern the rest of us had only begun to suspect, watching new names added to the notebook after new parties — until the evening she overheard Madame Bounty discussing plans for an upcoming celebration, a housewarming for her newly finished second property, and heard her mention, almost casually, that she intended to personally serve my niece, Adaeze, who had just been offered a position at a bank downtown after months of interviews. A position the whole family was still celebrating.

Chapter Twelve: The Plan

It was Comfort who came to my shop that evening, nervous and out of breath, and told me everything — the box, the notebook, the items, and what she had overheard about Adaeze. I do not think I have ever felt fear quite like that, hearing my own niece’s name spoken in the same breath as everything Mama Uche had described to me months earlier.

I went to Deaconess Rachel that same night, and for the first time since I had known her, I watched her listen to something without a trace of surprise on her face. Only a grim, tired confirmation, as though a suspicion she had carried for years had finally found its proof.

“We cannot simply accuse her,” Deaconess Rachel said. “A woman like that, beloved the way she is, will turn any accusation back onto us if we do not have something undeniable to show. We need the notebook itself, in front of witnesses, at the moment she tries this again.”

We agreed on a plan. Comfort, terrified but resolved, would find a way to bring the notebook out of the house on the day of the new housewarming, hidden until the right moment. I would make sure Adaeze attended, but coached her gently to decline any plate offered directly by Madame Bounty’s hand, no matter how insistent she became, and to alert us the moment it happened.

Chapter Thirteen: The Humid Sunday

The housewarming took place on a humid Sunday evening in the new dry season. My canopies once again stretched across Madame Bounty’s expanded compound, chairs arranged in careful rows, the courtyard filled with music and the smell of stewed meat and fried plantain. I remember the particular heaviness in the air that evening — not rain, but something close to it. A stillness that made the laughter around me feel slightly too loud, slightly too bright.

Madame Bounty moved through the crowd as she always did, radiant, warm, calling out names. I watched her make her way toward Adaeze with two plates in her hands, exactly as Comfort had warned us she would.

“Let me,” Madame Bounty said, reaching for Adaeze’s plate before she could protest, that same warm insistence in her voice that had charmed all of us for years. “A young woman starting a new chapter deserves to be fed by someone who understands what it costs to build something from nothing.”

Adaeze, coached and steady, stepped back gently. “Please, Auntie, allow me serve myself today. I insist.”

Something flickered across Madame Bounty’s face — quick and controlled, gone almost before I could name it. But I had been watching her long enough by then to recognize it for what it was.

Chapter Fourteen: Open It

Comfort chose that exact moment to step forward from the edge of the courtyard, the small wooden box held tightly in both hands, and placed it, without a word, on the table directly in front of Madame Bounty, in full view of everyone gathered nearby.

The music did not stop immediately, but the conversation around us did, spreading outward in a widening circle of silence as people noticed the box, noticed Comfort’s trembling hands, noticed the sudden stillness on our hostess’s face.

Deaconess Rachel stepped forward next, calm, unhurried, the same steadiness she had carried through every party she had ever worked. “Open it,” she said. “Let everyone see what is inside. Or I will.”

Madame Bounty did not move for a long moment, and in that silence I watched the warmth drain slowly from her expression, replaced by something colder — something that had perhaps always been underneath the warmth, waiting.

“You have no right to go through my things,” she said finally, her voice tight but controlled.

“And you have no right to what you have been taking from this street for four years,” Deaconess Rachel answered. “But here we both are.”

It was Mama Uche who stepped forward and opened the box herself, hands steady despite everything she had lost, and lifted out the notebook, flipping it open to show the gathered crowd the careful list of names inside — her own among them, dated the exact evening of that first housewarming years earlier.

Chapter Fifteen: I Am Not Sorry That I Stopped Losing

What followed was not loud. I had expected shouting, accusations thrown back and forth, but instead there was only a heavy, stunned quiet as people examined names they recognized, dates that matched parties they remembered attending, small items that meant nothing to strangers but everything to the people standing in that courtyard.

Madame Bounty did not deny it. I want you to understand that clearly, because it is the detail that has stayed with me longest. She did not cry. She did not beg forgiveness. She simply stood very still, watching her own notebook pass from hand to hand. And when she finally spoke, her voice carried no apology in it at all — only a flat, matter-of-fact honesty that was somehow more chilling than any denial could have been.

“You all think generosity comes free,” she said, looking around at the crowd rather than at any one person. “I watched people build things for years while I had nothing. I watched women like you,” she said, looking directly at Mama Uche, “build businesses while my own husband left me with debts I am still paying. I found a way to stop losing. That is all. I am not sorry that I stopped losing.”

“You knew,” I said, finding my voice for the first time that evening. “This whole time, you knew exactly what you were doing to us.”

“Of course I knew,” she said, and there was no shame in the way she said it — only a tired, worn-down honesty, as though the effort of pretending otherwise had simply become too heavy to maintain any longer. “You do not stumble into something like this by accident. I went looking for it. I asked for it. And when it was offered to me, I understood exactly what it would cost the people around me. And I decided their cost mattered less to me than my own hunger.”

Nobody moved to touch her. Nobody called for police, though someone in the crowd murmured about it. In the end, what would it have accomplished? There was no law written for what she had done. Nothing a court could easily hold. We simply stood there, the whole street together in that courtyard, absorbing the fact that the woman who had fed us for four years had been, the entire time, quietly taking something from each of us that we had not agreed to give.

Chapter Sixteen: What Was Left Behind

Madame Bounty left Randall Avenue within the month. Her house sat empty for a long while afterward, the events courtyard behind it growing quiet, then overgrown, the tiled floor where she once served her special guests slowly disappearing beneath weeds. Nobody saw her go. She simply was not there one day, and none of us, strangely, felt the need to ask where.

What came after was slow, the way real recovery usually is.

Mama Uche’s business did not return to what it once was overnight. But within a year, her old supplier in Kano reached out unprompted, apologetic and confused about why their communication had broken down so completely, and she rebuilt the relationship carefully, cautiously, the way you rebuild anything you nearly lost. “I do not know if it will ever be exactly what it was,” she told me, “but I recognize my own hands in the business again. That is enough for now.”

Kelechi reapplied the following year under the restructured program, and though the opportunity looked different from what he had originally prepared for, he was accepted. He told me before he left that he still did not fully understand everything that had happened to him — only that something had shifted back into place once Madame Bounty was gone, the way a held breath finally releases.

Dr. Adaeze and Funmi did not immediately return to who they had been. Marriages, I have learned, do not heal simply because the cause of the strain is removed. But they began speaking again, slowly, honestly, choosing to rebuild the trust that had eroded rather than assuming it would simply return on its own. The last I heard, they had started walking to church together again on Sundays, the way they used to.

Toby received his promotion the following cycle, delayed but not lost. And though he told me once that he still sometimes doubted his own competence in ways he never had before, he was at least moving forward again.

Chiamaka did not immediately find her way back to who she had been before her engagement ended, but almost a year later she began seeing someone new, slowly, cautiously. She told me she no longer let herself panic at the first sign of an ordinary disagreement, because she finally understood that not every difficulty in a relationship was a warning of something worse to come. “I spent months thinking love itself had failed me,” she said. “It took time to understand that something else had simply reached into a season of my life that should have been mine alone.”

Epilogue: The Hand That Feeds You

As for Comfort, she left Madame Bounty’s house that same night, and I made sure she had somewhere safe to stay while she found her footing. She works in my shop now, helping manage the chairs and canopies I still rent out for every party on this street. And she has never once, in the years since, hesitated to tell a client exactly what she thinks of anyone who insists too eagerly on serving a particular guest with their own hands.

Deaconess Rachel continued cooking for parties across Surulere, though I noticed she took on fewer of them each year, and eventually stopped working the largest, most lavish events altogether, saying only that she preferred kitchens where the food asked nothing of anyone beyond the price on the invoice. She never spoke of that Sunday evening again — not with pride, not with vindication, only the same quiet steadiness she had always carried, as though being right about something terrible was never something worth celebrating.

I still rent chairs and canopies for parties on Randall Avenue, and I still watch, more carefully now than I ever used to, how a host moves through her own crowd. I think often about how easily an entire street can be fed generosity for years without once asking what that generosity is actually made of, and how the people among us who refuse to eat without knowing exactly whose hand prepared the meal are so rarely given credit for the discipline that caution requires.

There is an old saying my grandmother used to tell me, long before Lagos ever taught me anything about hunger or its costs. The hand that feeds you can also be counting what it is owed. I understand it differently now than I did the first time she said it. I used to think it was a warning against ingratitude — against forgetting the people who help you. Now I understand it as something closer to a warning against forgetting to ask, at the exact moment someone insists on filling your plate themselves, what that insistence might actually be measuring.

So the next time you find yourself at a party in this city, invited or otherwise, and a host you do not know well insists a little too warmly, a little too specifically, on serving your plate with her own two hands — pause before you accept it. Ask yourself what she might be watching for. Ask yourself what you have, right now, in this season of your life, that someone else might be hungry enough to want.

Because in Lagos, the sweetest hospitality sometimes comes with its own quiet arithmetic. And it is only the unquestioning who eat without ever wondering what exactly is being counted on the other side of that plate.

Do not be among them.

— END —