Make Fufu, Not War Part I

When I discovered I was headed to Ghana this summer for my Fulbright international field experience, I have to admit that I was jealous of the others in my cohort going to Morocco, Uruguay, and India. I wanted to go to Africa more than anything, but I am also a lover of all foods, and nothing was more exciting to me than having the chance to eat some amazing local cuisine. I have been lucky enough to travel to some fantastic destinations, but I have found that anything connected to the United Kingdom colonially was often still suffering from the flavorless (don't @ me, it's true) foods that part of the world is famous for providing. Watching shows like High on the Hog (Netflix) made me excited to potentially visit Benin or Senegal to savor all of their West African spices mixed with French technique. So, when I read that it was Ghana, and after I processed the exhilaration about finally having the chance to journey to sub-Saharan Africa, that food FOMO set in. I expressed this feeling to my high school students, the majority of whom share connections with West Africa and the Geechee-Gullah community here in the Savannah area, and they empathized. They too had heard about all the amazing foodways in the formerly French African colonies. One student, however, disagreed.

This particular student is obsessed with fufu. She sees it on her TikTok and Instagram scrolls, and told me she was "dying" to try it, but we do not have any Ghanaian restaurants in the greater Savannah area. Fufu? I know I had heard of it at some point, but I was clearly not as familiar with the delicacy as my student, who could not only tell me how it was made, but the ways it is served with specific soups, how to eat it, and why it's culturally significant to Ghana. Needless to say, my interest was peaked. I read some articles about the up-and-coming food scene in Accra, and I devoured as many articles and videos as I could find about fufu, banku, jollof rice, kelewele, red red, and waakye. I felt like the luckiest cohort now because Ghanaian food is NOT something readily available in every city in the US like Indian and Moroccan (to an extent), so our journey to Ghana was going to be especially singular and adventurous. Happily, we all converged in DC for the Fulbright Symposium and decided collectively to visit one of the Ghanaian restaurants while we were there.

And so, on a random Thursday evening in February, 20 teachers (and our administrators) from all over the United States descended on a small basement eatery near Howard University to devour as much Ghanaian food as we could manage. All I knew, was that I wanted it to be spicy and rich, and not at all British...

Read my next post to find out how it went...