Original Story Published by: Vanessa Bolosier, www.theguardian.com
Photo Source: Vanessa Bolosier
(Above) Vanessa’s peanut stew.
My definition of home has often boiled down to a place where I feel I don’t stand out. When I first landed in Ghana, the jovial warmth with which I was greeted emphasised my failure at passing for local, but I felt I belonged.
I had the privilege of being guided around the most vibrant corners of Accra by a close friend, Deborah, who had been on the same course as me at university in London and had recently returned to Ghana, where she was starting a new journey as an artist. Until then my experience of Ghana had been limited to the food from a small shop in Brixton market, where I tried waakye – rice and beans – and shito – a hot pepper sauce made with dried fish, prawns, onions, chilli, garlic, and spices. Deborah showed me her native city as a local.
We drove around listening to Ghanaian-Romanian musician Wanlov the Kubolor singing about humanity in pidgin. Stuck in traffic for hours, we ate roadside kelewele. I loved this unpretentious snack of plantains, cut into chunks, covered with spices and fried to a caramelised brown before being sold with grilled peanuts by the hawkers.
But the dish I most wanted to experience was nkate nkwan, or peanut stew. My mother learned to make it in the 1970s from her Ghanaian best friend and often cooked it for us when we were growing up in Guadeloupe. So as I settled on to a wooden bench in BB’s Chill Bar in the West Legon neighbourhood, I was excited at the prospect of eating this dish in its homeland.
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