However, hers is a tough love that has been tested during some dark days in Ghana. She defiantly closed her successful Accra restaurant, The Calabash, after military personnel began “bullying their way through, thinking they could come in and eat free.” She escaped by seconds being caught in the crossfire of a 1966 coup when she was the last person to leave the Ghana Broadcasting Company after cleaning up from filming a cooking show. She has weathered food, water, and power shortages, political and economic instability, and social upheaval with persistence and an unshakable confidence in the goodness of God. In short, Barbara epitomizes the “can do” attitude (what I call “betumi”) now recognized as a key ingredient for successful development anywhere.
Barbara decided early on to keep her company small enough that she could know and supervise her employees personally (several dozen now), and be close to the fifty or so students who attend her catering school each year. This was a conscious decision not to expand into a huge business, but to remain a small efficient one.
Long before “culinary tourism” became an official term, Barbara was regularly traveling to England, France, and North America with her staff and students, exposing them to international standards in the tourism industry while promoting Ghana’s cuisine and fashion with her signature “From Ghana with Love” extravaganzas. She could raise many thousands of dollars in a single night while showcasing Ghanaian fashion designers, floral arrangements, and foods. An advocate and role model for women’s rights, she has long been an active member of the professional women’s group Zonta International.
Now in her seventies, Barbara shows few signs of slowing down. She recently single-handedly began a campaign to upgrade food safety and sanitation skills in Ghana’s informal and semi-formal hospitality industry. She has begun by organizing courses that are being expanded to include more sites, and is hopeful that it will soon be possible to establish a nationwide certification program. In characteristic giving fashion she welcomes this opportunity to share her culinary expertise and stories with a larger audience. She has also recently broken ground on a new site and embarked on fulfilling a life-long dream: to expand her current catering school into an African Culinary Institute, capable of educating students to prepare not only Ghana’s regional specialties and Asian and Western dishes, but eventually highlighting regional food from across sub-Saharan Africa, from west to east to south.
2 Crane, Louise. Ms. Africa: Profiles of Modern African Women, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1973, p. 16.
INTRODUCING GHANA
Ghana is vibrant and intensely alive. Its essence is difficult to capture, for it is a collage of innumerable constantly shifting sights and sounds and smells:
• Fishermen straining and singing in tune with the rhythm of the waves as they stand on the sand along coconut tree-lined coasts and pull in nets
• Wooden pestles rhythmically thumping in wooden mortars, pounding boiled cassava and plantain or African yams into fufu while skillful hands turn the dough
• Flutes, drums, keyboards, electric guitars moving bodies and feet and voices in fields, churches, and nightclubs, day and night
• Vendors streaming along streets gracefully balancing heavy loads on their heads or calling out and waving phone cards, plastic bags of plantain chips, peanuts, tiger nuts, whole pineapples, dish towels, sunglasses, dog chains, CDs, chewing gum, green South African apples, chocolate bars, newspapers and magazines, soccer balls, etc., etc. … a constantly moving roadside market passing by car windows
• Neatly stacked peeled oranges and coconuts ready to quench thirst
• Smiling children eating sweet mangos with juice dripping down their arms
• Fashionable young women in bright, dramatic outfits and high heels with elaborate hairstyles smartly moving between offices and shops
• Musical laughter and loud voices everywhere
• Constant construction, with cement and glass skyscrapers and malls and restaurants and overpasses and freeways popping up everywhere (sometimes clogging roads and drains and straining water and electrical systems)
• Gorgeous textiles, classic and new
• A hopeful, youthful energy in the air, fueled by investors, oil, and the “African maker” movement
• New technology everywhere—cars, computers, notebooks, i-pads, and ubiquitous cell phones
• The faithful kneeling on prayer mats or chanting
• Opulent gold jewelry and huge, dramatic umbrellas and pomp displayed at durbars with kings and attendants sitting in glory
• In the north, cattle grazing, vegetables and yam slices drying in the sun, skilled leatherwork and woven fabrics, mosques, distinctive round mud-walled architecture, colorful woven Bolga baskets
• Rivers and lakes, tropical rainforest, elephants and crocodiles, red dusty lateritic soil, Guinea fowl along roads and fields, roosters crowing
• A swirling mix of peoples, national and international: Ga, Akan, Dagbani Ewe, Fanti, American, Nigerian, Indian, European, Syrian, Chinese …
In 1957, at the time of independence, the “Gold Coast” renamed itself after the ancient wealthy West African medieval kingdom of Ghana famous for its gold. The Republic of Ghana is over 92,000 square miles, making it slightly smaller than Oregon, my home state. In the center of West Africa’s coast, Ghana’s southern coast borders the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean. Its other borders include Côte d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast) on the east, Togo on the west, and Burkina Faso to the north. Coastal Accra is the capital city.
Tropical Ghana lies just a few degrees above the equator, and about 4 percent of the land remains tropical rainforest, about 20 percent is semi-deciduous forest, and there are savannah lands along the coast and in the north, plus transitional zones. The Eastern Region is home to the Akwapim-Togo hills.
Ghana’s youthful and rapidly growing population numbers over 26 million people (compared to about 4 million in Oregon). Up to two-thirds of the people are involved in agriculture and animal husbandry in the formal or informal sector. Crops vary with the climate and geography among the ten administrative regions in the country, which are historically loosely affiliated with ethnic groups (i.e., Ewe speakers in the Volta Region, Fanti speakers in the Western Region, Twi speakers in the Ashanti Region, etc.).
The land is crisscrossed with rivers, especially dominated by the Volta River (the Black Volta and White Volta and their convergence), its tributaries, and Volta Lake, one of the largest man-made lakes in the world. Fresh and salt-water fish and shellfish from the coast and inland are an important part of the diet, often smoked, salted, and/or dried to preserve them.
Crops include maize (corn), cassava, pepper, plantain, okra, yam, tomato, cocoyam, peanut, leafy vegetables, oil palm, beans and pulses, millet, sorghum, cocoa, rice, banana, papaya, eggplant (garden egg), oranges, pineapple, avocado, mango, sheanut, onion, coconut, cashew, cotton, colanut, sugarcane, lime/lemon, ginger, along with other fruits, vegetables, and staples.
Cattle are raised in the hotter, drier north away from the tsetse flies that transmit animal trypanosomiasis and prevent cattle from thriving elsewhere. Guinea fowl also run wild there. While goat, mutton, pork, and poultry are more prevalent in northern Ghana, in the more central Eastern and Brong Ahafo forested regions cocoa, red palm, and plantain trees thrive, and bush meat like grasscutter (aka, “greater cane rat”) has long been a delicacy, along with seasonal mushrooms and giant land snails. Palm trees line coastal areas.
The many languages spoken in Ghana pose a research challenge when writing about foods and ingredients. For example, people may say they use kakadro (Twi), kakatsofa (Ga), gometakui or nkraosa