How Nigerians reinvented an Italian tinned tomato brand | Features

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…