As I walked through customs, I was excited. Not only was this my first trip to Africa—as a Black woman food writer who focuses on African diasporic cooking, no less—it was also the work trip of my dreams. I had come to Ghana to work as a cowriter with chef Eric Adjepong on his debut cookbook, Ghana to the World, a collection of recipes and essays exploring his Ghanaian American identity and how both the United States and West Africa inform his cooking. “You have to come with me to Ghana,” was a common refrain during our early planning calls, when we’d walk through the flow of chapters, the potential recipe list, and photography.

I also came hungry. Over two weeks, my main goal was to taste the many dishes Eric and I had been discussing the two years prior: okra stew, starchy swallows such as fufu and omo tuo (rice ball), and grilled meats sold on street corners, to name a few. I knew them in theory and via the African restaurants I’d visited in the U.S., but Eric wanted me to see them firsthand. He was a guide holding one hand, while my mother, who was joining me on the trip, held the other. A seasoned and avid traveler, my mother said Ghana was one of her favorite places in the world, and that it reminded her of growing up in St. Thomas, where we still have family. She was flying in separately later in the week.

 In the days that followed, I settled into Ghana, eating skewers of grilled beef chichinga at the Aburi Botanical Gardens, fried fish with fufu at a beachfront restaurant in Elmina, and late-night wings after dancing at Bloom Bar. But it was waakye, the tomato-based stew served over rice (and sometimes spaghetti)—with boiled eggs, crispy fried shallots, and a healthy dose of funk from dried fish—that sped up my heart (in the best way), causing me to look down at my fork with wonder, contemplating what I had just eaten. My mother’s favorite stall was outside Makola Market in Accra, and waakye there was at once familiar and surprising, like hearing a song you love played by a different artist; as I ate the heap of maroon-tinged starches, I found myself trying to name the spices. “Is there anise in here? Maybe ginger?” I asked my mom. Curious but also hungry, she rattled off a few likely ingredients before shrugging and getting back to eating.

The feeling of familiarity pulsed in my mind during my trip. As a Black American, visiting the continent of Africa can be bizarre: You are at once a foreigner and also potentially connected to the very place you are seeing as an outsider. It’s an experience that food historian Michael Twitty wrote about in an essay about visiting Ghana as a Black, gay, Jewish man who has traced his ancestry there. “For most African Americans, slavery forcibly cut our immediate ties to the motherland,” Twitty writes. “Needing to know more about our roots has become one of the central issues in our identity.” 

For me, those edible ties to the motherland were immediately electric, but the interpersonal ones left me with a dull ache I’m still confronting today. There were many moments when a taxi driver, fellow diner, or hotel worker would ask if I was from Ghana or if my family was. “I don’t know,” was always my response, eliciting a discomfort that would hang in the air between us. The truth of that history (or the lack thereof) is hard to broach in everyday conversation. 

I haven’t done DNA testing; I’ve relied solely on the history and cooking practices of Virginia and the Virgin Islands (where my father and mother are from, respectively) to piece together where my ancestors may have originated. My father’s side is likely from Senegal because enslaved West Africans were brought to the Carolinas due to their expertise in growing rice. Because of the transatlantic slave trade, many in the Virgin Islands trace their roots to Ghana, where my mother’s side is likely from.

In the months after visiting Ghana, as I worked on the book with chef Eric, I reflected on my trip not in terms of experiences, but feelings. Although Ghana profoundly moored my Blackness to Africa, it also accentuated my Americanness, reminding me that my home is Maryland; the Virgin Islands; Chesapeake, Virginia; and New Jersey, where I live with my husband. That sensation—of roots unearthed yet untethered—was, to be frank, deeply uncomfortable. 

Yet the flavors of Ghana stayed with me like campfire smoke that permeates your clothes. Back home, I sought out heat in shito (a Ghanaian pepper sauce) and habaneros; the dusty, tart taste of the country’s brownish limes; and in the fragrant earthiness of groundnuts. I found proximate flavors at the African and Latin supermarket near my apartment in Jersey City, and at Teranga, chef Pierre Thiam’s fast casual spot in Harlem.    

Recently, I was testing one of the final dishes for the book, a seemingly simple turkey wing stew with bell peppers, tomato paste, and aromatics—the components of a typical Ghanaian stew—when it hit me. The connection to the waakye I had with my mother in Accra was obvious, but I was also transported to my great-aunt Vashti’s kitchen in St. Thomas, where she taught me to make our family’s “gravy,” a tomato sauce that we serve with fried fish. It was thick with sliced onions, fragrant with garlic, punched up with apple cider vinegar, and my aunt always added a dash of ground clove. I remember asking why, since the flavor struck me as out of place. She shrugged and said, “That’s how Mom [my great-grandmother Alice] taught me to make it.” Here I was tasting a version of it in my own kitchen while working on a cookbook for a chef with roots an ocean away.

I texted Eric. “Did you know there’s a sauce like waakye that my family makes in St. Thomas!?” Then I shot off a message to my mom to tell her I finally figured out what spice made the waakye taste so familiar: cloves. “That’s funny!” she replied. “Probably explains why I love it so much.”

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