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Chief-Boima

Eat Rio meets Chief Boima!

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Chief-Boima

Chief Boima.

 

It’s been a while since we’ve had a musically-themed post on Eat Rio so I’m delighted to return to the subject today. Recently life has been a big whirl of food tours, writing gigs and a few other bits and pieces thrown in – that hasn’t left me much time for music. Luckily, not so long ago, the music came to me!

Boima Tucker booked an Eat Rio Food Tour with us back in February as his parents were visiting. Despite taking bookings from people from all over the world I don’t  think I’d ever seen the name Boima before and my curiosity got the better of me. After a little Googling I found that Boima is also known as Chief Boima and (amongst other things) is a Sierra Leonean-American music producer, DJ and writer who is currently living in Rio.

Although his food tour was guided by my fellow guide Angela, I managed to grab a few words with Boima at the end of the tour and then followed up later with an interview (completed on 30th March – yes, I’ve been busy!).

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Zombies of Brazil

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If I said ‘Zombie Nation’ you might think I’m talking about a crappy video game from 1990, a horrible techno song that (apparently) US college kids like to sing when their team does something good, or a movie so bad that one reviewer described it as “a monstrously absurd turd of a film”.

If, on the other hand, I mentioned Nação Zumbi, at least some of my readers would think of a Brazilian band who are most definitely not crappy! I was lucky enough to be taken to one of their performances a couple of days after I arrived in Rio and I have to say they were awesome. Their style is a fusion of rock, hip-hop and traditional Brazilian music with some serious drumming thrown in. If you get the chance, go see them, they’re a great band. When I went to see them, I misheard the translation of the band name and assumed it meant Zombie Nation. In fact it means Zumbi Nation – this is Zumbi: 

Zumbi also known as Zumbi dos Palmares. His story is fascinating, inspiring and tragic.

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Acarajé

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Last weekend we had a friend from London to stay. This was fun, not just because our guest was nice and not only because she brought us all kinds of yummy goodies from home, but also because her presence pushed us into doing a whole bunch of sight-seeing things that we probably wouldn’t have bothered with otherwise. We wandered around a favela, we went to see some samba and spent a fair bit of time eating and drinking in Santa Teresa. 


One of the places we ended up was Armazém São Thiago, a really nice old bar that dates back to 1919. The bar itself does pretty yummy food, but even better than that, on Sundays there is a lady just outside the bar cooking Acarajé. 

A delicious bundle of spicy goodness. I am designating acarajé as an essential food – see the others in the list by clicking the ‘essential food’ label on the right (Photo: Leonardo Martins).

 

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Sprouting Fence Posts

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Long (long) before I was born, back in the days when Britain had such things as colonies (nowadays they’re called British Overseas Territories), my grandparents lived in modern day Malawi (then known as Nyasaland), East Africa. Many (many) years later, after my grandparents had long since moved back to England and I had been born, my grandparents would tell me stories about their days in Africa – places like Zomba and Blantyre still have a slightly magical ring to me, even though I’ve never been to either.

One day my grandmother said something to me that has always stuck in my mind – she told me that in Nyasaland (as it would always be known to her) the earth had been so fertile that the fence posts would actually sprout leaves and branches. For me, as a wide-eyed seven year old, it was an amazing image and although I’ve since heard it used to simply signify ‘very fertile’, it will always conjure up images of a part of East Africa I’ve never seen.

Farofa – Tasty Sawdust

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When I was young I used to look at the map of the world and want to grab South America in my left hand, Africa in my right,  and push them back together. It would be satisfying wouldn’t it? One of the legacies of the slave trade is that the people who now live so far apart – in the hollow of West Africa and the pointy nose of Brazil – have many cultural similarities: religion, music and, you guessed it, food.

 

Pangea – continental snuggling

 

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