Ghanaians have African names, like Kwame or Kofi, that are vaguely familiar to most Americans, or they may have European — usually biblical — names. Often, they have both and use one or the other depending on the situation. There are seven common male names and seven common female names, one for each day of the week. And yes, this name is determined by the weekday of your birth. So, the first President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, was born on a Saturday. My driver, Kwame, was also born on Saturday, as was I. Had I been born here instead of Mississippi, I would also be Kwame. I have not yet watched enough television in Ghana to know whether the local writers have yet recognized the comic potential of this tradition. I personally know a man named Kofi (Friday) who has four brothers who were all born on Friday and are therefore all, also named Kofi. There is a tradition to deal with this confusing circumstance also. Everyone with sameday siblings gets a number to go with their name as an added identifier. The five Friday brothers I mentioned have one sister. To me, this sounds like a pilot for a weekly 30-minute TV program, “My Five Kofis.” Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” meets “The Brady Bunch” meets “Roots.” Mistaken and switched identities, misunderstandings abounding – “Oh, when you said ‘give the yams to Kofi,’ I thought you meant Kofi 2. But I gave them to Kofi 4, and he ate them! What a silly mistake I have made!” The episodes would write themselves.
And sometimes, as generations pass, the numerical suffixes may also become names. Sometimes they are eventually used as the equivalent of a family name. I personally know a man who introduces himself as “en-syen” (six), and I also know an “an-wah-tchree” (eight). And the number four, which is pronounced “eh-nine” in the Akan languages (including Twi) is spelled Annan. So our former UN Secretary General was born on Friday and was himself a number four, or else one of his ancestors was.
Lest I leave the impression that I have the naming protocols all worked out, let me hasten to add that all Ghanaian names are not numbers or days of the week. The cultures here are much more complicated than that. There are a lot of common family names in Ghana the significance of which remain a mystery to me. One of them, however, I learned in the kitchen, while Agatha was preparing an okra stew to be eaten with Banku (corn and cassava stiff porridge). An okra pod, or okra in general, is “oh-kru”. But more than one okra pod are “nkrumah.” And so I am back again to the First President of Ghana, another political figure whose family name conjures up food. Move over Claude Pepper, Felix Frankfurter, and Bob Dole!
I have eaten the standard Ghanaian foods served in several chop bars and restaurants in both Kumasi and Accra, and I have concluded that either Agatha is an exceptionally good cook, or you cannot get the equivalent of home cooking, or better, in a restaurant. Recently she offered to prepare her Ghanaian repertoire for Suzy and me. How could we possibly decline such an offer? It is a win-win situation; we get great food, and she makes enough to feed Joseph and Kwame and some to take home also. On days when Agatha cooks, she and Suzy walk to the neighborhood marketplace in Kotei together or drive to the Kejetia Open Market in downtown Kumasi to purchase the needed ingredients. Then they return to the kitchen where Suzy and I get to observe the magic happening. It is essential, Agatha believes, to get down on the floor to have the proper leverage to crush the peppers in a mortar and pestle. Okra must be grated into fine pieces before it is added to the stew. And banku must be stirred over a charcoal fire outside (not a gas stove) using a 4-foot long spatula, until it is sturdy enough to wrap in plastic bags for individual servings or to be refrigerated.
Meals for ordinary working Africans are not recreational events as they are for us. Traditionally, when one sits down to eat, the object is not necessarily to savor the subtlety of the sauces or to appreciate the virtuosity of the chef. Instead, the primary goal is to turn an empty stomach into a full one with ingredients that will endure through the day and the night. This was true in Chad and Cameroun when Suzy and I lived there 30 years ago, and it is true to some extent in Ghana today. Africans eat to power their bodies when they are hungry, not as we do, to satisfy a craving. As a result, Kwame and Joseph, who are both in their 40s, are as buff as any Santa Monica lifeguard. And I cannot imagine that either has any idea what it means to be on a diet. This is part of the reason why Ghanaians are such attractive people. They are, with few exceptions, lean.
Thirty years ago in Central Africa, most people were eating the same food every day. In each location, there was a preferred starch, which was pounded into flour and then boiled as a porridge until it assumed a semisolid state. It was then shaped into a large lump from which smaller lumps could be teased away with the fingers, dipped into a lubricant sauce (usually well-peppered) and swallowed. When the preferred starch was unavailable or unobtainable, then one switched to the next acceptable foodstuff. But the meal is the starch. You eat “millet,” or you eat “manioc,” or “yam,” or “corn.” If there is a chunk of goatmeat in the sauce, that is a bonus, but it is basically part of the lubricant.
I find that Ghanaian food is more varied and creative than what I have just described. Whether it is a consequence of the passage of time or a product of a more wordly culture, I do not know. The basic meal is similar to those that I have already described. The starch occupies the main plate with a sauce on the side (as with banku), or it is placed in the center of a bowl of “soup” (as with fufu). And the porridges are mixtures of foods – corn mixed with cassava, or boiled cassava and boiled plantain pounded together after cooking (i.e., fufu). And although eating this food is a quick path to alimentary completeness, one also experiences a certain intimacy with the dish when you get to shape the starchy pudding with the fingers, dip and scoop up the peppery sauce, and swallow the bolus with a minimum of mastication. You can taste and smell it for certain, but you can also touch it and handle it — an experience that you cannot even begin to approximate with a meatloaf and gravy (at least in the better American homes). I cannot even imagine what it would be like to eat fufu without using the hand. It is designed to go from the hand to the stomach in one continuous sweep, and it would be anathema taken in any other way — as inappropriate as using a knife and fork to eat an ice cream cone.
Agatha pays more attention to the flavor of the food than I would have expected. She uses Maggi shrimp cubes for certain purposes and Royco shrimp cubes for others. She seasons dishes with unexpected spices, like freshly grated nutmeg, tumeric, and curry. And she buys only a certain genre of red palm oil. Perhaps there is an culinary evolution in progress. People in Ghana do not have to eat just anything, and their preferences and tastes are cultivated. There are several Ghanaian dishes that do not necessarily involve the hands – Red-red (spicy red beans with plantains fried in red palm oil on the side) and Joloff rice (cooked in a sauce with tomatoes, onions, peppers, and various mysterious flavorings). Both are usually accompanied by some protein source – chicken, fish, etc. Tonight, Agatha is serving up Joloff rice, and I am expecting another revelation. And I am imaging Agatha, who speaks maybe a half-dozen words of English and has never left Ghana, as a successful restauranteur in Ann Arbor. I know people there who would line up to eat at her establishment. “Sorry, it a Saturday night, and we don’t have anything available until 10:45, but you are welcome to sit at the bar and drink some fresh cocoanut water.”
Although there is more appreciation of the sensory aspects of eating than I have seen elsewhere in Africa, there is also something else of a more insidious nature happening here as well. It comes with the growth of the middle class, flattening of the population (to use Thomas Friedman’s term), and globalization of the economy. Chinese food, pizza, burgers, and the usual dreck that we eat in the Civilized North are now here to stay. And what a surprise! Ghanaians are now expressing concern about obesity, and every year, the hospital has more diabetic patients to cope with. Fortunately, for reasons that I do not understand, tobacco has not established a beachhead here. No one smokes. In fact, the thought of puffing away on a Romeo & Juliet Churchill, a past-time that I found exceedingly pleasant in the privacy of my hot-tub at home, seems nauseating here when I consider that for the price of one fine cigar, a family of six could eat for a week.
I do not wish to leave the impression that either the Julia Child or the Ronald McDonald philosophy is taking hold here. While there is no starvation, many people are living hand-to-mouth in the figurative, rather than the literal, sense. They are living on a diet of their preferred starch staple made at home or bought from the market, and it is not sophisticated, but it is cheap. And thankfully, the World Financial Crisis is unlikely to impact the availability or price of these comestibles produced from backyard gardens or subsistence farms. I see cassava and plantains growing like weeds everywhere, and thankfully, they will be here even after Wall Street collapses.
