In a busy Lagos food market, a customer points at an enamel bowl filled with rice. “How much for a derica?” she asks.Salesman Christopher Onyekwere scoops grains into a tin can and holds it up, listing the prices for local and imported rice.Heavy use has worn the text off the tin can that once contained 400 grammes of tomato paste. The branding on most of the tin cans used to measure rice, melon seeds and black-eyed beans at Lagos’s Idi Alba market is equally illegible.Derica is a unit of measurement found in markets all over Lagos, as well as in some cities in the south, like Port Harcourt, and the east, like Enugu. But where does the name come from? Twenty-one-year-old Onyekwere shrugs. “I have no idea.”An older trader on the next street responds to the question with a smile.“How old was the salesman you spoke to? You must have asked the wrong person. Too young to remember how popular De Rica tomato paste was,” says 49-year-old Henry Njoku. The derica-size tin is on the left at a Lagos market [Femke van Zeijl/Al Jazeera]Ubiquitous tin canWhen Njoku moved west from Imo State to Lagos as a teenager in the 1980s to set up his food shop, vendors were already using derica as a measurement.But the De Rica brand was once so widespread in southern Nigeria, he says, that it was used simply to mean tomato paste, whatever the brand.Nigerian food writer Yemisi …
