The wisdom of Palm Wine Sunday: Zukiswa Wanner

One of the problems with art is that, for all its entertainment value, it can create (or entrench) stereotypes about people and nations.

When I first came to Kenya, all I wanted to see was a mugumo tree, thanks to Ngugi wa Thiong'o's novels. South African writer Niq Mhlongo horrified his middle-class Nairobi hosts - who had planned to take him to Naivasha for a week - by insisting that all he wanted to do in Kenya was see the pedestrian River Road. All because Meja Mwangi's novel Going Down River Road was a favourite of his.

Similarly, my Kenyan friends read Peter Abrahams' 1946 novel Mine Boy as a school setwork. As a result, they are petrified of a big, bad Joburg crawling with cut-throats, never mind the fact that well-marketed, idyllic Cape Town boasts the highest murder rate in South Africa.

Fiction makes us romanticise and exoticise the oddest things - and seek them out when we travel. That's why a Zimbabwean friend and I found ourselves in Abeokuta, a town two hours outside Lagos, asking an okada (motorbike taxi) rider to lead us to a palm-wine seller.

For what have we learnt from books and Nollywood if not that Nigeria is a land of harmattan winds, egusi soup, pepper soup, jollof rice and palm wine?

We had already consumed the egusi, the pepper, and mountains of jollof rice. The harmattan hadn't shown up - but we were not going to miss the palm wine. No ma'am. So we set forth at midday.

The okada rider led us to a home on the main highway. That's where we met him.

Name of Sunday. The palm-wine tapper and trader. As we waited for our 10 litres of wine to be poured into containers, he gave us a calabash to taste.

Google should hire this guy: the sheer mass of random facts he had at his fingertips was astounding. In a discussion with Bwenga, Doreen's driver, about the Power Holding Company of Nigeria, Sunday cited precisely how many megawatts Nigeria uses in relation to other African nations and explained how more could be produced. Eskom should get this guy in as a consultant - then they wouldn't require the services of Ndumiso Ngcobo as a load-shedding PR guru. Sunday could put our lights on.

Then he engaged Doreen, a returning diasporan, on both US foreign policy and the failure of Uncle Bob's land policies. A lightbulb went off in my head, as I thought of another of the dangers of stereotyping. I had assumed, you see, that the palm-wine tapper would be some illiterate village boy. In my defence, that was what Nollywood had taught me to expect.

It was Doreen who asked the question that was also on my mind: how far did our guy go academically? Or was he just one of those brilliant self-taught chaps?

Sunday has a degree in mass communications. After graduation and a year of searching for a job without luck, he moved from his home town to Abeokuta. There he wakes up before 5am and heads for the palm plantation nearby, where, for a fee, he is permitted to tap wine by the plantation owner. It ferments within two hours of tapping, yielding a 4% alcohol content. He supplies the palm wine to local businesses and drunkards.

Sunday embodies one of the more beautiful but tragic stories of our continent. Here is a young man who has decided that his inability to find work in his field of education will not stop him from eating. And yet too, here is one of many young Africans who have hard-earned knowledge that is being wasted.

Palm wine is lovely stuff, but Sunday and his ilk have better things to do.