With oral histories and a DNA test as his guides, food historian koshersoul traveled to Ghana for a taste of the home he's never known.
The six of us have given our undivided attention to Auntie Mabel, owner of the eponymous Mabel’s Chop Bar in Ho, Ghana. Here the kitchen is an outdoor building, a complex of covered shelters where peeling, washing, and butchering happen. Large cast-iron pots sit atop fires built on three stones.
I am an African American, gay, Jewish culinary historian whose life has been shaped by a search for my roots and an exploration of the ways food shapes identity. Food has played a deep and active role in empowering my people to overcome oppression, and how we do so is our greatest form of cultural capital. For most African Americans, slavery forcibly cut our immediate ties to the motherland. Needing to know more about our roots has become one of the central issues in our identity.
We retire to the back of the chop bar and take turns pounding fufu, a soft, gluey loaf of boiled yam. Immediately Harold and I think of possum cooked with yams, a treat mentioned often in collected oral histories from folks who were enslaved in the American South. Three women dipping pestles into water knock away at the yam in an ancient beat, making it look easier than it actually is. We stumble at the process, trying not to knock ourselves out and to keep the yam off the ground.
In my mind I had been preparing for this trip for decades, nibbling at facts and words and recipes. Ghana, it seems, was calling me.In Ghana, it’s clear I have inherited a remarkably rich culinary tradition, largely expressed through the chop bar. Yet everywhere we look are reminders of home. The white clay that people still eat as a sort of folk medicine in the American South is sold in the market in Kumasi.
Coming back is reparative. We make our pilgrimage to Elmina, Anomabu, and Cape Coast Castle. “You are fulfilling your ancestors’ dream to come back home,” Ada tells us plainly. “They never thought they would come back. You are giving them peace.” We step five feet into the pitch darkness of the men’s dungeon at Cape Coast Castle, conspicuously placed under the chapel where the same men who violated women and children and subjugated formerly proud warriors prayed for their own souls’ salvation.
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