Atimbo: Calabar’s hot spot for bushmeat, plantain, palmwine

The story is not very different from Atimbo, in Calabar, Cross River State. It is the city’s hot spot for plantain pottage served with bush-meat and `up-wine’, the fond name customers and traders have given to palmwine. For anyone who expects to be given a treat by hosts in Calabar, the likely destination is Atimbo, […]

The story is not very different from Atimbo, in Calabar, Cross River State. It is the city’s hot spot for plantain pottage served with bush-meat and `up-wine’, the fond name customers and traders have given to palmwine. For anyone who expects to be given a treat by hosts in Calabar, the likely destination is Atimbo, an area on the outskirts of the Calabar Metropolis leading to Akpabuyo town.

Jude Odinika who came to Calabar in 1983, served as an apprentice in an area known as Diamond before regaining “his freedom” a few years later, is a major business owner at Atimbo. His journey began in 1997 in a very swampy and bushy Atimbo settlement. “Luckily for me I was able to acquire a portion which I cleared out and sand-filled with about nine tipper loads. At the time, this place was already bustling with people selling palmwine and bush-meat. Later on, plantain pottage was included to the menu to make the customers stay longer and consume more.”

A typical day for Odinika involves an early morning rise to go into the bush for at least three hours, until about 9.30am if he is tapping palmwine from an already tapped tree. Otherwise, “I can be there until midday if it is fresh tapping before I come to the shop with no less than forty litres of palmwine. On a bad day, we get twenty or twenty five litres. I also go in the evening again between 3.30 and 4.00 and return with about ten litres.”

Mother of four, Mrs. Love Odnika sells along with her husband and explains that it is tasking preparing her children for school and preparing for trade at the same time. “It is not an easy task to prepare four children for school, five days a week whilst preparing for business at the same time. I wake up at six every morning to prepare my children and send them off to school.

“After this I start preparing my ingredients to cook. I prepare a decent portion of the food I will sell during the day at home so that I am ready if on arrival my customers are already waiting for me.

We go to buy directly from the hunters when they just return. As our identity denotes, we stick to using only bush-meat, unlike some others who use cow leg or tail or other kinds of meat to do their cooking. We are known for bush-meat.

Towards late afternoon to early evening, I prepare a second round which is usually smaller than the first. It takes me about two to three hours to prepare because I take time to wash the ingredients. I don’t want anybody to say it was when they ate in my place they developed runny stomach belly-ache or one thing or the other. Sometimes I make plantain porridge at other times I make the plantain separately from the source. But at weekends, I make the plantain both ways, because of the number of people who come and the fact that many of them like the variety.

“Weekends are usually a lot busier for all of us here than the weekdays; particularly Saturdays and Sundays.

Most clients like Armstrong Otu prefer the freshly tapped palmwine, because it is sweeter. “From drinking upwine over time, you can clearly distinguish freshly tapped wine from old one. Even the wine tapped in the morning tastes different from the one tapped in the evening.”

Savouring a variety of bush-meat from porcupine, antelope, reindeer and grasscutter, first-timer, Aba resident, Elsie Nwobi said Atimbo has lived up to expectation. “I had heard so much about this place and decided that my first visit to Calabar will also mark my first entrance into the register here. I don’t really care about the plantain but bush-meat is my specialty and I have just ‘confirmed’ myself here again.”

No matter how bad a business day is, about thirty six jugs of up-wine are sold along with about forty to fifty plates of unripe plantain and bush-meat bringing the day’s business earnings to an approximate sum of N30, 000 to N40, 000 at N350 per plate and N400 per jug.