The Cassava Agreement is a story about losing your shoe in the mud and finding your feet. It is about what happens when a woman who has spent her life negotiating everything, boardroom deals, family expectations, her own carefully guarded heart, runs into something that cannot be negotiated. It is a love story, but not just between two people. It is a love story between a woman and a place, between a community and its land, between a grandmother and a legacy, between a little girl and a goat that will not stop eating things it is not supposed to eat.
Set in Lagos and Abeokuta, Nigeria, this is fiction that tastes like jollof rice and smells like rain on red earth. It is funny in the way that real life is funny, awkward, warm, full of people who are trying their best and occasionally falling flat. It asks what it costs to belong to a place, and what it costs to leave one. And it reminds us that some of the most important agreements we make are not written on paper.
