Asase Ba Podcast - S3E2: The Storytellers are the Farmers (Ancestral Ghanaian Foods) ft. Abena
Transcript
Michelle
Hello and welcome to Asase Ba, a podcast that honours oral tradition and shines light on Ghanaian stories that are often on told or silenced. I'm your host Michelle, and my pronouns are she and her.
Hi, everyone. I hope everyone is doing well, enjoying the summer. We're in summer season right now. I know that's what I'm trying to do. You know, do my nature thing. This summer, I've just been trying to do my nature thing because we were in quarantine. Most things are open now but trying to like do my nature walks, got a bike, hiking, that kind of thing. Also, a lot of gardening, so you know, trying to be on my nature thing, on my nature wave.
So I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. I also want to thank everyone who's been supporting Asase Ba whether it's via donations, or by sharing a podcast. I see you and appreciate your support. Special shoutout to Black Thorn Boutique for their support. And this is black with a Q at the end.
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Thank you so much for your support. I appreciate it. Alright, so I also wanted to mention again, this episode that the transcripts for season one are now available. You can check the show notes of this episode to access them. It's really important for this podcast to be more accessible. I'm working on season two transcripts as well. So I will announce when that is available, but for now, you can check out the transcripts for season one.
Alrighty, so now let's get into today's episode: episode two of Asase Ba. In today's episode, I talked to Abena Offeh Gymah. Abena's pronouns are she and her and Abena is a writer, a researcher, a food consultant, and an advocate for an indigenous food sovereignty system. Abena's passionate about preserving indigenous plants, seeds and seeks to work in collaboration with small-scale African farmers to grow and preserve ancestral foods.
In this episode, Abena talks about documenting the narratives of our ancestral foods, highlighting the knowledge of farmers in Bolgatanga in the Upper East region, prioritizing the voices of farmers in Ghana and not replicating colonial behaviours, women farmers, seed savers, how we can support small scale farmers and much much more.
You know, this episode was so enlightening for me and a lot of is because I don't know much about farming, all that stuff. I just started gardening recently, y'all. So I'm kind of in the beginner stages. I know some stuff, thanks to YouTube, Google. But just in terms of, small-scale farming and Ghanaian farmers and preserving our ancestral foods, this episode was so enlightening. Abena is so passionate.
And you can hear this through the way that she talks about things, the way that she talks about our indigenous food systems in Ghana. It comes through so vividly and I couldn't help but just really absorb everything and take everything in. And I learned so much when it came to food and the ancestral aspect of it. Often, we talk about culture and our cultures and food as part of our culture. You know what I mean?
And it's important to document that as well and that's what Abena is doing. And I'm so happy to speak with another cultural worker. Shoutout to cultural workers doing the damn thing. You know, I have a special place in my heart for the storytellers, the griots, the cultural workers. So shout out to us. All right, now let's get into this episode.
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Abena, welcome to Asase Ba podcast Can you introduce yourself?
Abena
Thank you for having me. I am Abena Offeh Gymah. My interest is in food farming, agriculture. I do research on food, ancestral food, indigenous food, preserving native African food. But I'm also a community worker, a community coordinator. So I also work with the Jane and Finch community research partnership.
And we really look at how researchers come into the community to do research on the community, but also on residents. So it's really looking at ethical and respectful practices, to working with communities. But yeah, I guess I'm interested in community development, farming, food, and everything that has to do with food and farming.
Living the Ancestral Way
Michelle
Awesome. I'm so excited to talk to you today. Something that I've noticed that you write a lot about on your personal blog and your social media is living the ancestral way. What does that mean to you, to live the ancestral way?
Abena
I think for me, living the ancestral way is about connecting to a way of life that we're losing. It's about connecting to a way of life that is holistic, that is intrinsic to not just the food we eat, not just our culture, our traditions, but also who we are as a people. When I think of living the ancestral way, for me, I think of my grandparents. I think of my great grandparents, I think of being born in Bolga. Growing up part in Bolgatanga, and growing up in Toronto.
So for me, living the ancestral way is really about connecting back to a way of life that we are losing in contemporary society, a way of life that we sort of think is backward. But really, the old ways of life have wisdom, they have the knowledge, they have strength, and they have a lot of the secrets and a lot of the answers to a lot of the questions that we struggle to answer now.
When we talk about climate change, for instance, and we're trying to figure out how to solve climate change, our ancestors, indigenous communities, their way of living, how they live intrinsically, holistically, really comprised of including all aspects of nature and all aspect of plant life and animals and trees, etc.
But in modern society, we value our human-ness above all other things. So I think for me, living the ancestral way is how can we honour a way of living that is old, that is ancient that is still valuable, that has a lot of wisdom? It has a lot of knowledge and it also has a lot of the answers to many of the questions that we seek in today's society, whether it's mental health and wellbeing, farming, food and nutrition. All these things are woven into how our ancestors lived.
Michelle
Yeah, and that's something that I think about quite often. I really loved your answer because a lot of the time, I think a lot of people are actually interested in learning our indigenous ways of living, our traditional ways of living. But it seems like the information a lot of the time is just not accessible to a lot of people. Do you think that? Do you agree with that? Or do you think we're just not approaching accessing this information in the way that we should?
Abena
I think it's honestly very accessible to people. For me, it's speaking to your grandmother or your grandfather. It's speaking to your grand aunt and your grand uncle. I think in contemporary society, elders and seniors are very disposable. We see the world through capital, we see people as commodities. Like, "if I'm not getting any value from our friendship and our relationship, then why am I with you in the first place?"
This type of messaging even on social media, for me, is very problematic messaging. Because people's relationships to us, be it friends or families, doesn't always have to have a monetary value on it. But I think that's sort of the society we've shifted to, and so you can connect with your grand aunt, and you can connect with your grand uncle, your grandparent, even a senior in the community and ask them about their life.
There's so much that you can take from their life stories. So I think it's very accessible. It's not so much that you have to necessarily fly back home, or you have to go to a far-off country. If you're able to get that experience, then that's great. But I think that as long as there's a senior and or an elder in your household, in your community, they have lived, they are connected to a wealth of wisdom in so many different ways. But I think we see so many of these ancestral ways as old and as disposable, as opposed to as valuable.
Michelle
That's a really good point that you made about talking to the seniors in our life, our elders, grandparents, if you have grandparents or grand aunts, whoever. Because I guess, when I posed that question about accessibility, I was thinking about “ancestral ways” in terms of pre-colonial times. And I guess we don't necessarily have to go all the way back to learn from our indigenous ways of living. We can just go to our elders and grandparents and all of that. So that's a good point.
Abena
Yeah, they have so much knowledge, right. And I think there are stories that people will tell us, for instance, talking to an elder here in Bolgatanga, who was telling me that when he grew up in his village, there used to be a particular fruit tree. There used to be a fruit tree that monkeys used to come to, and they used to love it. And he used to eat a lot.
This is before monkeys discovered bananas and shifted from it. But now and then, the monkeys used to chase them because they used to eat from the fruit. And then they used to chase the monkeys. And now all those trees have been cut down. Because all those trees have been cut down, the monkeys don't come anymore.
For me when I hear those stories, I hear biodiversity. I hear natural ecosystems. I don't think "oh, silly monkeys or silly kids." That story tells me something about a shift in our ecosystem, and also a shift in the diet of a certain animal species. So I think it's also what are we hearing for when we're with elders or when we're with seniors and they're telling us stories about their lives or their experiences?
Documenting Ghanaian Ancestral Foods
Michelle
Yeah, that's a great point. And right now you're in Ghana and you are talking to small-scale farmers, learning about our indigenous ways of life in terms of food and farming. What led you to this journey of advocacy and documenting and amplifying the stories of our ancestral foods?
Abena
Wow, this thing is an entire book on its own, but just very briefly, it wasn't a straight path. When you follow a calling, or a purpose or whatever folks want to term it as, one door opens after another.
In fact, you come to one self-realization after another. So I struggled actually with allergies for a very long time and I wanted to learn how to grow my own food. So I became a youth farmer at Black Creek Community Farm at Jane and Steeles. So when I got there (to an organic community farm), that was my first time learning about just growing food organically and putting food in the earth and the soil.
And that blew me away. There's a magical power about you putting the seed in the soil, watering it, adding compost, and then seeing life. Seeing something that you can eat, that can nourish you. It's a whole completely different experience. So for me, that experience really just moved me and I thought, "what is happening on the African continent, particularly Ghana, in terms of indigenous and ancestral food, what are we doing?"
So in 2017, I actually fundraised and came with a friend. And we came to Bolgatanga, we came to the Upper East Region. And Upper East region—the north—because within the context of Ghana, the Northern Region is always ignored. Like folks come, they know Accra, they know Kumasi. Even politically.
Economically, a lot of the wealth is sustained sort of in the south, but when it comes to the north, it’s typically ignored. And so I thought, not only am I born in Bolgatanga, but I thought it's important to incorporate the narratives of the Upper East Region, of the three regions in the north in this work.
So in 2017, I came and I connected with an organization called Tracks. We went to chat with small-scale farmers and then I was really interested in what is happening around organic agriculture in the north. And when I came, I was shocked or shooked just seeing that there was a lot of agrochemicals that were used on the land. Heavy chemicals.
And the chemicals were washing away to the rivers and were washing away to the streams. And these are rivers and streams that people will get water to cook from or kids will be playing in. I saw people cutting Baobab trees and shea trees. And for me, it was like, "whoa, you know, these are trees that have taken how many years to grow?" Like none of us actually planted these trees. So why are we cutting them down?
But I mean, people are cutting them down because they needed firewood, how else are they gonna cook? They're not able to afford gas or electrical, just the economic conditions. So when I came up to Toronto, for me, it was about "how can we save our indigenous foods? How can we have more farmers planting them?"
And so for me, I thought, “let me start this business called Adda Blooms.” If we have more people eat indigenous foods, then we'll have more people grow them. But of course, that's a whole complete story on its own. But within the process of doing Adda Blooms and learning a lot about the food business in Canada, how food systems operate, capitalism, capitalism and food, globalization and food, and just seeing that food was becoming more corporatized.
So corporations were owning food as opposed to farmers, seeing how farmers were pushed and forced to give up their indigenous seeds. Just seeing how African stories are always told from a very negative light. The African continent is painted as if it's black and white. Meanwhile, there's colour. We live in colour, we don't live in black and white. There's actually an abundance of food here.
The challenge on the African continent is not people being able to grow food, it's food distribution, food being able to leave the farms, post-harvest, equipment to make sure that tomatoes are stored properly, onions are stored properly, people actually having access to buying more rice. A lot of food actually spoil on the farm.
So for me, I thought, "who's doing this work in terms of our ancestral food, who's documenting our ancestral food?” We're losing seeds at an exponential rate because farmers are being forced to now use hybrid seeds or genetically modified seeds. And so I thought that it was important not just to sell indigenous foods, but to also collect the narratives and the stories of “how were these foods grown?”
How did we grow them? Who literally started the process of making Dawadawa or fermenting Dawadawa, or of making the shea butter process? Who was the first person to say "let's do this" and then it spread throughout the community? So for me, documenting the knowledge was important because it's who we are as a people.
These are not knowledge, they are just a part of us. It's who we are. It's how we've lived. It's how we've survived. Our ancestral stories of food are stories about how we have survived. They're stories around our resilience, around our taste, around texture, our culture, our skin, our hair, all these things are infused in the food that we eat.
Very often in the North American narrative, the individual is seen above the food systems. The individual is put above farming systems. And there's an abundance of food in North America, but people are really undernourished. People are eating a lot. You can open your fridge and get a burger and a fry. But there's zero nutrition in the food you're consuming.
So for me, it was "no one is going to do it for us because we live in a capitalistic world, white supremacy" and that is the reality. So if we don't document our food, who is? And I feel like a lot of us are conditioned to wait for permission to be able to do the things we want to do.
The story is long, and the issues are very deep. But those were the moments for me. Every time I came back home to meet the women, to baobab, to come see where my fonio was coming from, or where Bambara beans and millet. Who's the farmer growing this that I'm getting it from? What are their conditions? What are the values, and who's the money going to?
Even for this documentary that we're filming, we compensate the people that we meet. I obviously don't have enough money to be able to change their socioeconomic condition but [I] compensate the time for them to be able to tell us this narrative of food processing or this narrative of how a tree or how something came to be.
So I think for me, it was really valuing African tradition as equal. It's because we're raised to think that being African and African tradition is inferior to European. And we often as Black African people, look at the African continent and we often look at our food from a very white European context.
And that's why development doesn't happen because you can't copy and paste. We have our own systems and our own systems work within the time and space and place within this context. And until we get that, we can’t solve any issue because the indigenous secrets already know.
So for instance, we're bringing in Australian eucalyptus trees and Indian teak trees for forest restoration. Those things don't grow here because our indigenous foods are also foods. The trees are also food. Dawadawa is edible. Rice is from a tree. Baobab is edible. You know, you can eat the fruit. Shea you can eat. Tamarin you can eat. You can't eat a teak tree, you can't even eat the leaves. You can't eat a eucalyptus tree. So why are we planting foreign trees that don't even address food security?
So for me, it was knowing that the African way is the way, period. And it’s the only way that we can really solve our issues, but also realizing that I value that up there and that is the lens through which I see the world.
Michelle
Period. Yes.
You touched on several ancestral foods or indigenous foods with your recent answer. And I'm just wondering, just to talk about different foods and all of that. What is one of your favourite ancestral food? And what is a cool fact that you've learned about it so far on your journey?
Abena
Man, there are just so many incredible foods, but I always go back to the baobab. Because if you ever see it, it's so grand. It's just the stature. It's like a queen, you know, it's like the queen among all living trees. It's just so grand, so present. And I think for me, it just reminds me of how diverse the ecosystem is. Just what a gift we have on the African continent, to be the only continent that has a tree like this.
It is the only fruit that dries on the tree. The fruit is high on antioxidants. You can add the fruit, not just to beverages here. They add the actual white baobab to T-Zed/Tuo Zaafi to make it more nutrient-dense. I recently learned that the seeds in the baobab, which has been recently processed as oil, traditionally the women used to collect the baobab seeds.
They would pound it in a mortar and a pestle. And then they would take out the white stuff in the seed and they would cook with that. And it was nutrient-dense, and that is something that people are not doing anymore. You know, the baobab leaf actually, when you come around the season, people are climbing the tree, and they're harvesting the leaves and making soups with it.
And it's naturally slimy actually, like okra, like literally the leaves. And it's really, really high in iron and the tree grows back. It's one of those trees that lightning can strike it and then next thing you know, the branches are growing back. The bark peels off and it grows back. And as the tree gets older and older, the middle part becomes very, very, very hollow. It's just seeing that for me, it's like "who created this? And why is it so grand and just so incredible?"
Small-scale Farming in Bolgatanga, Ghana
Michelle
That's so cool. I can't wait to travel back to Ghana and just really explore. I'll definitely be on the lookout for that.
You highlighted previously that your hometown is Bolgatanga, and that you really wanted to amplify small-scale farmers there and what is going on there. Can you tell us about your hometown and your heritage and food lineage in that location?
Abena
Yes, yes. So my dad is from Asante Bekwai, so I'm not erasing him. And my mom is from Navrongo, Upper East, but I was born in Bolgatanga. So I was born and raised, well not raised, (because then I was raised in Toronto) but part of my early childhood to age six, or age seven was in Bolgatanga.
I grew up eating T-Zed. I grew up eating Tuo Zaafi. Millet was a big part of the culture, eating Koko, Koose. I grew up eating Bambara beans that would be cooked. Shea oil would be fried or sauteed and then put on the Bambara beans. I grew up eating Tobaani. These are foods that you eat as a kid. I grew up eating tree fruits, like tree grapes. They literally look like grapes hanging on trees.
When I left Ghana for Toronto, my mom used to make these foods. My mom doesn't cook with Maggi, my mom cooked with Dawadawa. We lived in an apartment so our hallway would literally smell like Dawadawa.
It's like going to the house of an Akan person in Toronto and you smell Kobi in the hallway.
Michelle
Yeah, I know.
Abena
Like do you ever go into a building and you’re like “a Ghanaian person lives here” cause this is too strong.
Michelle
I love it.
Abena
And it literally sticks to the wall. It even reminds me of some days in Toronto where you'd be going to church or any event and have to leave home before your parents cook because you end up at the event with the smell.
For me, I was still very much connected to eating our cultural foods in Toronto. My dad loved the T-Zed a lot so my mom would make it. My dad still ate a lot of cultural foods too, like my dad was very much plant-based. And so we were very much a plant-based household.
My dad got a juicer 21 years ago when I was in middle school. People come to our home and we were juicing dandelion, kale, like juicing wasn't even a big thing. And so the blend between eating plant-based and eating healthy, and eating cultural foods was really instilled in me. Even in Toronto, my parents did unknowingly.
So the older I got, I started getting a lot of allergies. I would eat something and just have an allergic reaction. And I knew that I had to disconnect or had to let go of a lot of foods. I was lactose intolerant, like most people of colour, so I stopped drinking milk as a teenager. I stopped eating fish for a while. I stopped cinnamon, sugar, so many things I had to cut down.
I had to become completely vegan at one point in my life. I'm now vegetarian. So it was just connecting back to my ancestral foods. And then when I got the allergies and I started farming, I became more interested in terms of what foods do I need to eat more of?
And so [I was] already sort of living the lifestyle of eating cultural foods and being plant-based, and now farming and understanding sort of the growing food component of preserving indigenous food, all that sort of came together to bring me back.
In Bolgatanga, I will say it's a really small town. It's still very much rural, still very much connected more so to indigenous ways than you find maybe in Accra, Kumasi. If you were to walk through the market, you would see someone selling Bambara beans, millet, sorghum, cowpea, groundnut, Dawadawa. These are still very much the ingredients that people use in their foods. If you were to visit people's homes, people are more likely using Dawadawa to cook.
People are more likely using shea butter to cook and groundnut oil to cook, as opposed to all the other vegetable oils that you might typically find in other parts of the country. So folks are still very much connected. A lot of people here are farmers. Most of them are our sustenance farmers so they grow their own food to eat, to feed their family, and then if there's some left, they will sell it.
And so they're able to feed their family. People are able to grow the early millet and the late millet. The late millet takes six months, so by December when they harvest the late millet, they're sustaining their family with that from the beginning of the year to June, the next raining season.
Folks here are still very much connected to growing their own food, growing their own vegetables. Not everyone, but a majority of folks. And really consuming a lot more of their traditional foods. So for instance, even with this research that I'm doing, when you ask people "what do you eat for breakfast" they'll say, "T-Zed." "What do you eat for lunch?" They'll say “Tobani or Bambara beans.” "What do you eat for dinner?" "T-Zed." You're like, "wow, that's a lot of millet."
But they will tell you that if I eat T-Zed or if I have this drink—it's called Zoncome. Zoncome is millet powder, mixed with shea butter with water in it. So you mix shea butter with millet, you add water to it, you mix it and you drink it. They will tell you if they have a cup or two of that, they can work all day. They can farm all day and be full.
And that also tells you the power of millet—the nutritional value, the nutritional power of millet and shea butter combined. So folks are still very much connected to traditional ways of eating and traditional ways of being. It's shifting but not at the rate or of the pace that you might see in the southern part of Ghana.
Prioritizing the Voices of Local Ghanaian Farmers
Michelle
Yeah, that's awesome. I love how you mentioned shea butter in Bolgatanga and how people use it indigenously. So that's really cool to know. Right now, you are in Ghana, as you mentioned and you're documenting the work of small-scale farmers and all of that. So how are you prioritizing and amplifying their voices and making sure that they’re the ones that are narrating their stories?
Because something I've noticed is that sometimes people in the West who, in terms of power structures, we often end up sometimes taking over the conversation over people who are living and experiencing whatever is going on. So just in terms of your work, how are you making sure that you're prioritizing the voices of the locals?
Abena
Wow. There are many ways to respond. I think for a lot of us who want to come back home, whether you're Ghanaian and you were born in Ghana, you schooled in North America but you're coming back or you're born outside and you’re Ghanaian coming back. Or even if you're not Ghanaian, and you are coming back to Ghana or the African continent…I think it starts with a lot of us doing our own personal decolonization.
I think we assume that because we're Black, because we're African and because we've also had experiences abroad, that we ourselves may not carry anti-Black racism, right? Because there's a way that we consume what the world tells us about who we are, that we replicate it without us realizing.
So for instance, I have seen people who sell indigenous food and I'll go in stores and see women farmers' pictures right on the products. And I'm like, "that is so inappropriate" because I'm sure this woman did not understand that when you took her picture, that she would be sitting on the shelf of Whole Foods or Nofrills. It's even wrong just to sell the face and the picture of a farm.
And when I first started, people told me to do that and I said no. That is wrong on so many levels. How often do you go and see a product of a white person's face on the package and they're selling? It's not commodified. They don't commodify whiteness in that way but they commodify Blackness.
So for me, I do this work with the realization that as much as I'm Ghanaian, as much as I'm African, the fact that I have a Canadian passport, the fact that I've spent over 20 years in Canada, I carry some sort of privilege, period. I'm aware of that. And there are ways that I will move into these spaces with farmers who will see me speak and assume that I have knowledge, and they assume I have knowledge because they have been raised to think knowledge aligns with English.
A person's ability to speak English has nothing to do with knowledge or smartness. But that's how we've been raised. And so when I go there, I have to re-emphasize that "no, you have the knowledge, I don't, because if I had it, I wouldn't come to you." So one, for me, it's recognizing that I carry a privilege because I can leave Ghana at any point. I have a Canadian passport, anything happens, bam, I'm out.
But if anything happens, the farmers can't leave, they have to stay here and deal with their socio-economic conditions and political conditions. So recognizing that unequal power relations in my work means that be attentive, one, to language, how I'm speaking with them, being attentive to the kind of storytelling that I'm saying.
How am I positioning them? Am I positioning them in terms of "poor African farmer, by one, help them?" Or am I enabling them to tell the story that, for instance, women are seed savers? These people have knowledge and this is what I am learning from them. I position the farmers as the knower. I know they are the knower.
And so I'm constantly asking myself, "how can they come through the narrative, the pictures and the storytelling, as the knower?" But I think first to do any of this work, for us to come home, to document stories, we're not separate. And I think a lot of people forget that. You can have good intentions, but good intentions are not enough. People have done a lot of harm in the world with good intentions. To make sure that I'm not replicating stereotypical stories, for me it's checking myself of the privilege and the power that I bring.
But also my part-time job is really around protecting communities from harmful and respectful research. And there are sets of principles that we work with, like respect for residents, respect for the community, concern for all beings, social justice. Because I've been doing this work for a long time, these are principles that also guide me. I have respect for the residents, the residents of Bolgatanga. I have respect for the farmers. I have respect for this entire place that I'm in.
I think honestly, it's doing the individual work. If the individual work is not done, we will come back to do this work and replicate the same harm that colonialism has done or that white supremacy continues to do. It's doing the internal work, and constantly checking in with myself, like, "why am I doing this in the first place? And who am I doing this for?"
I think it's always imperative to ask "who is it for," because once you can clearly define that it is to preserve the stories, then you're not the centre. I'm not the centre. Because if I'm preserving indigenous foods, I'm not the centre. The storytellers are the farmers. The storytellers are the seed savers. The storytellers are the food processors.
So how can we bring them to the forefront? Two, for them to be able to tell their story the best way that they know how, in the African way, in their way, their cultural way, their traditional way. So I think there's just a lot of self-work, to be honest. And be responsible, honestly be accountable. There isn't accountability in a lot of this kind of work, in terms of taking and documenting narratives and stories. I think accountability is a big part of this.
I'm accountable to farmers first, period. I'm accountable to my ancestors first, and I'm accountable to this place that I'm able to come up to. Hence since 2017, I've been able to come back in 2021 and work with the same organization and the same people.
Michelle
I definitely love that. And I love how you stress the importance of self-reflection, the importance of defining your goals and your mission and why you're there. That's really beautiful to hear, that's really good. I do a lot of self-reflection, and all of that and that's something that I'm definitely going to always keep in mind. To just define the goal and the mission so that I always have my eye on what I have to do and how I can just be more communal, in what I'm doing. So I think that's such a great point that you made.
Abena
Yeah, exactly. And I think, honestly, it's also realizing that you may be wrong. There may be ways that a person approaching their work is wrong. Because within the North American context, we're not raised to be critical of ourselves, to be reflective. Because whiteness moves as if it's the knower, that's it and all other cultures are inferior.
And so many people of colour, Black, Indigenous, people colour, when you live in a North American environment, you too also carry a lens where you become the knower. You think you're the knower, or that your perspective of the world is the right one. Also, we've been conditioned to see the African continent in a particular way, to see indigenous people in a particular way, to think they're backward and behind time.
That's also a part of the dangerous narrative of whiteness. Very often when people meet women farmers or indigenous folks, or people planting indigenous seeds, very often [people] automatically they think that person is backward. And that “I need to save that person.” And if you're coming with the mindset of saving, fixing, it's not going to work. I believe in what I do.
People already know the answers. People who live in the socio-environmental conditions know the answers. They may not have the resources, they may not have the capacity, but they already know. And just because they're not able to communicate with you in English, it does not mean they do not know. It means that you need to learn and come to where they are because they already know.
Very often when folks are not able to communicate to us in English, we assume they do not know because we come with English as the only tool to communicate with 1000s of languages in the world. Even in our businesses, nonprofit, anything that has to do with working with other people, just realizing that you may not know, and it's okay not to know.
Ghanaian Women’s Impact on Indigenous Foods
Michelle
Definitely. Even learning is such a continuous journey. There's not going to be a point where we know everything. We are constantly changing and evolving and we have to embrace that. So yeah, definitely beautifully said. You touched on women farmers quite a bit. I wanted to know, just in terms of women farmers, why is it important for you to highlight women and their impact on our indigenous foods?
Abena
This response is also a book. It's like a book with many chapters, or actually, many volumes. Because of patriarchy, many women farmers are typically not seen or are not acknowledged. We know that 70% of small-scale farmers feed the world. We know that it's not corporations that are feeding the world with GMO corn and GMO wheat because people's plates are more diverse than corn, wheat and soy. So we know that it's small-scale farmers that are feeding the world.
Among small-scale farmers, about 60 to 70% of them are women. They're sustenance farming and this is feeding their household. You're growing food, then you're feeding your kids, you're feeding yourself, you're feeding your spouse, and whatever is leftover they sell. But the narratives and the stories are often hidden, they're often not told. Women are the seed savers in many different cultures and traditions. Women are the ones receiving the seeds. Because many of them are feeding their families, they save the best seeds to be planted for the next season.
So even in Upper East, I was told it's the women who do the groundnuts. They do the groundnuts, the Bambara beans, they harvest the rice, and they do a lot of the crops that are nutrient-dense, a lot of crops that are drought resistant, whereas the men are seen to do more of the cash crops. So the soy, the corn, sorghum. But their narratives are often not told, and their narratives are often missing.
So in communities like the Upper East, if you marry and you're farming with your spouse, when he passes away, his family can come back for the land, which means it's a loss on all the years of work you've put in. All these sort of pieces need to change, but their narratives are lost. And they're not highlighting, they're not documenting, but women are playing a huge role. They are the movers and shakers in our food systems.
When we even look at examples of how some African indigenous crops made its way to North America during the slave trade, most women were putting it in their hair and braids. Yes, slave owners were also buying. They also bought seeds, so they can cook food, and feed enslaved people their cultural foods. But women also hid some so it tells a lot.
When they came, it was women that were planting it in their gardens to cultivate the traditional foods in the so-called "New World" in North America and parts of South America. It's important to be able to highlight and not erase that because erasing that means when we talk about food security, and we talk about food justice, and we're making big plans to grow genetically modified seeds with zero yields, but we lie and say it gives more yield to feed the world, we erase women. We erase the work, the narratives and the role in the place of women that have fed people 1000s of years prior to this intense commercial agriculture we have.
Michelle
That's great, to know that and to outline and highlight women's role in preserving our indigenous foods. That's so important.
Abena
Yeah, there's so much. Even now when I'm looking to document food processing, it's the women that are teaching me. How do you ferment Dawadawa? It's such a tedious process. How do you make shea butter? How do you make all these things? Groundnut oil? They have that knowledge. And if you ask them, their mothers taught them and their mother's mothers taught them. And they're passing it down from one generation to the other. And what they’re making, they're feeding people. People are consuming, cooking with groundnut oil, or cooking with shea oil or cooking with Dawadawa. The hands of women are feeding people, not just in terms of cooking, but literally in terms of farming and preserving the traditional processes.
Critiquing Ghanaian Ancestral Ways
Michelle
Yes, love that. And so I noticed that sometimes when we're on a quest to validate our identities and affirm cultures, a lot of the time we reach to our ancestral ways. I know that's something that I do. And that's something that a lot of people that are cultural workers do. So do you think there's room to question or critique our ancestral ways? And are there times when our ancestral ways don't work for us in our current context?
Abena
I think when you say ancestral ways, each person has to define it within what context. So I use ancestral ways within the context of food and within the context of farming, within the context of seed saving, because it captures not just food, nutrition, livelihood, but it also captures biodiversity.
But if you're using ancestral ways, in terms of traditions and marriage and culture, then those could look different. For instance, if an ancestral way was polygamy, and now you're just not someone who subscribes to that, then it can be seen as wrong depending on what a person's personal commitment or perspective is. So, I think it just depends on what ancestral way and what context someone is utilizing it.
But I think there's room to be critical in what is an ancestral way. I think when we're criticizing, it's to what context in our current lifestyle. So I use it mainly around food and culture because it has worked for us for 10,000 years. If we take seeds, for instance, and I'm actually working on a blog article on that...ancestral seeds, you could save it year after year.
So you grow, you save seed, you grow, you save seed, you could feed. With genetically modified seed, you can't save seed. If you plant it, that's it. The farmer has to go back and buy seeds from the seed company. And with the seed companies come the chemicals. That has to go with it.
So within that context, there's so much insight that we get around food, nutrition, health, biodiversity, and so forth. But I think in different contexts, we can definitely critique. We could definitely question because the ancestral way is not one way. The same way that our culture and traditions are not stagnant. They shift, they change.
For me the ancestral way is not one thing, it's a way of seeing life. It's not just one activity. It's a particular lens to which I view life and it's a particular lens to which I see life, which is really honouring the earth and honouring what the Earth has to offer us. And knowing that I don't own anything, none of us own anything, that we came here.
We didn't come of Earth, we came to meet Earth. So I think it's a lens to which I do my work and it's the lens through which I see the world but there's definitely room for criticism. There's room for negotiations, and there's room for conversations on what people mean when they say the ancestral way for them. And in what context you're using it.
Supporting Small-Scale Farmers in Ghana
Michelle
Definitely. What do you think those of us that are consumers of foods produced by small-scale farmers can do to better support small-scale farmers, whether we're local Ghanaians or whether we're Ghanaians in the diaspora? What can we do to support small-scale farmers?
Abena
I think very often people don't realize that they can vote with their dollars. You can start by buying from a local Ghanaian store in your community. You can start by asking questions around where this comes from and who grew this food. I think for me, the bigger response will be that people think food should be cheap and people are willing to buy cheap food and buy other things more expensive, whereas food is nutrition, it's your health.
You're literally putting something in your body that could nourish you or harm you. So for me, I think it's it's shifting perspectives on food as cheap food and looking at food as an investment in your well-being. Because if you look at food as an investment in your well-being, then you will make sure that you're purchasing food from a farmer who is growing it according to the principles of nature. So they're growing it well, growing it organic and all that stuff.
My thing is to start from where you are with what you know. So if you can get a Baobab, great. Start there. If you can get an indigenous rice, start there. If you can buy shea butter, start there. Even if you can amplify. Sometimes you may not have the funds to purchase. If you can amplify the voice of another farmer, if you can promote the market, why not? So there are many ways.
If you can support with resources, why not? So it can go beyond purchasing, to capacity building, amplifying, providing resources, providing support, and this can happen on social media, or it can also happen at your next Ghanaian store. But I think people can start with what they know and where they are and inquire.
Just so that doesn't feel stressful so folks don't feel like "oh, now I got to go to Ghana and buy a bag of millet, and ship that to Toronto?" Oh my god. That's just too much. No, it's a lot of work. People can just start honestly, with supporting a small-scale farmer in whatever way in whatever capacity that you can.
Conclusion
Michelle
I love that you highlighted starting locally. And also, a lot of us have access to social media and that's definitely a tool that we can use as well. And just learning and educating ourselves about what's going on, visiting your blog. I feel like that's a great way for people to learn. So I know that you have to go soon. So just before you go, is there anything that you'd like to add that wasn't covered? Any final words?
Abena
Man, you asked such great, great questions. I feel like almost every question was a book on its own. So it was really, really good. Um, I think for me, maybe it's just the space that I'm in…we're all accountable to our own narratives and we're all accountable to our own storytelling. Telling our narratives or our stories doesn't all have to look the same way. It could all look different.
It could be like, what you're doing—a podcast, or what I'm doing—video or pictures, whatever capacity. But regardless of what the capacity is, I think that we all have a responsibility to preserving our culture, preserving our traditions. It doesn't mean that culture is stagnant, that if something doesn't make sense or something is harmful, that we have to keep it, not in that sense. But keeping the things that worked, keeping the things that are valuable, and documenting the things that are meaningful in that way. But yeah, I could always say a lot so I try to catch myself, it's just being connected. There's just so much back home. There's just so much to see, and to connect with and to be connected to.
Michelle
Yes, I love that connection. Thank you so much for coming on Asase Ba. I've been watching your content on social media and reading your blog and it's just so nice to read the content and absorb the content of someone who is producing such great work and doing the cultural work. So I'm definitely grateful that I had the chance to chat with you for Asase Ba. And before you go, how can listeners find you and support your work?
Abena
You can find me on social media platforms. So on Instagram, I'm there @livingtheancestralway or @AddaBlooms. You can visit my website, you can read more about the work that I do on my personal blog or you can read more on ancestral foods on the Adda Blooms website. And yeah, you could connect in that way.
Michelle
Love it. Thank you so much, Abena.
Abena
Thank you so much for having me.
Michelle
Thank you everyone for listening to this episode. Wasn't it really dope’ like bringing the ancestral food knowledge! Thank you so much, Abena. Abena's information is in the Episode Notes. Let me know your feedback, your reactions, your comments. Use the hashtag #AsaseBaPod so I can see it and so that everyone can see it. Alright, so don't forget to follow Asase Ba on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok @AsaseBaPod. Asase Ba will return in two weeks so see you in two weeks for episode three. Bye!
Episode Notes
Researcher, writer and food consultant Abena joins Michelle to discuss ancestral Ghanaian foods. Abena talks about collecting the narratives of our ancestral foods, documenting the knowledge of farmers in Bolgatanga Upper East Region, valuing African traditions as equal, prioritizing the voices of residents, women farmers, how to NOT replicate colonial behaviours, how we can support small scale farmers and much more!
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GUEST
Abena Offeh-Gyimah is a writer, a researcher, a food consultant, and an advocate for an indigenous food sovereignty system. Abena’s passionate about preserving indigenous plants, seeds, and seeks to work in collaboration with small scale African farmers to grow and preserve ancestral foods.
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HOST
This podcast is produced, edited and hosted by Ghanaian Canadian Michelle (pronouns: she/her). She is also the creator of the theme music.
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