• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 424 0

rituals surrounding service. Food has remained an integral part of ritual on the continent, from the milk that is poured into the sea at Gorée, Senegal, to placate Mame Coumba Castel, the spirit of that island, to the mashed yam that is symbolically “fed” to the sacred stools of the Ashanti. In general, traditional holidays on the continent can be divided into two basic types: those that offer thanksgiving and sacrifice to the ancestors and the gods and those that celebrate the new harvest. “Hooting at hunger,” or Homowo, among the Ga people of the Accra plains of Ghana, is a thanksgiving festival where the community gathers annually to ridicule hunger and celebrate triumphing over it and vanquishing famine. In Ghana and Nigeria and other countries within the belt where yams are the major starch, traditional yam festivals like Homowo remain common. New yams are propagated from old ones, and so the tuber has come to symbolize the continuity of life. Yam celebrations range from new yam shoots being paraded through the street of the community to ensure prosperity and a fruitful harvest to the elder or communal leader reading yam peelings as an oracle to foretell what the next crop will yield. Many of these celebratory occasions end in a communal meal of pounded yam. Over the centuries, these ceremonies and others like them were transformed by time and place, religion and culture, and they form the basis for many culinary rituals that remain integral parts of African American life: holiday celebrations, church suppers, traditional New Year’s meals, and even Kwanzaa.

In Western Africa, the recipes and indeed the festivities changed as the continent increasingly became invaded by the cultures of the outside world. The Dya’ogo dynasty that ruled the kingdom of Tekur in what is today Mali adopted Islam around 850 C.E. From this foothold, the religion began to make further incursions into sub-Saharan Africa. It spread through trade, jihad, and conversion deeper into the Sahel and fanned out toward the coastal regions. It was integrated in the cultures of Mali, Senegal, Niger, Mauretania, Upper Volta, and Guinea by the time of Ibn Battuta’s travels and those of the early explorers. Islam brought with it dietary prohibitions, rules about meal service, and a cycle of feasting and fasting, complete with holidays and rituals that melded with those of traditional religions and became a potent cultural force in the western part of the continent by the time of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The Christianizing of the continent from the fifteenth century onward resulted in Roman Catholic dietary rules and regulations being adopted by its followers. Those who lived in the coastal areas were more rapidly influenced by the Europeans who made increasing incursions into the continent. Coastal dwellers eventually developed a creolized society that mixed African mores with those of the prevailing European colonial powers. Over the centuries, travelers were followed by explorers who became colonizers, and the Portuguese, French, Dutch, British, Belgians, and Germans all brought their dietary habits, religious restrictions, and everyday rituals to the continent, where they became a part of the culinary kaleidoscope that is the western segment of the African continent.

Recipes, religious celebrations, meals, menus, and more from the African continent were a part of the cultural baggage that was brought across the Atlantic by those who would be enslaved. No matter where the individual’s origins, direct ties to the mother continent were ruptured and scattered in the upheaval of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The general notions of ceremony and the tastes of the food of ritual and of daily life, however, remained in memory, atavisms that influenced the taste, cooking techniques, marketing styles, ritual behaviors, and hospitality of their descendants and of the country that would become theirs. The matrix was fixed on the African continent; the transformation from African to African American involved one of the most brutal passages that humans have had