My first fu fu

On Saturday, Helen arranged for her regular cabbie to drive George and me into Accra for a day of sight seeing. This involved a peek at the ocean, and a stop at the Kwame Nkrumah memorial and museum. He is the father of Ghanaian independence.

We then stopped at a tourist market, a vast, warren of dark kiosks, filled with kente cloth, batik, carvings, paintings, and musical instruments. There is lots of room for bartering, and I will return once I know what my finances look like. Much of the goods is made for the tourists and not impressive, but a few shops had quite interesting finds.

No photos as I really was not buying. Knowledge of this, plus my two helpful companions warding off the more aggressive vendors, made the whole experience fun. People called me “papa” (I’m assured a term of respect, though these sorts of things just make me feel old) until my nationality got around, and then it was “hey Canada”. My beard, though, was a huge success.

Much has been made since I announced my travel plans of how friendly Ghanaians are. Even the most aggressive and disappointed vendors were jovial and genuinely friendly, even helpful, as when we had to negotiate our car out from between a truck off-loading bottles of Guinness Malta to a van, both parked across our tail.

Malta is a local drink made by Guinness, and as best as I can describe it, tasting like a sweetened wort, the pre-fermented stage of beer, as it is made from hops, barley malt, and lots of sugar. While George and I drank a bottle each of this, mid-morning, our driver quickly polished off a vodka cooler. When I pointed out he was the one doing the driving, he pointed out the cooler only had 5.5% alcohol. Nonetheless, it didn’t seem to alter his ability to navigate the craziness of Accra streets.

We ended our tour at the Bush Kanteen, in East Legon, where they serve up huge portions of Ghanaian food: kenkey, red red, waakye, forowe, and kelewele. I specified we should go somewhere for local food, as long as it didn’t kill me. The day before, George had introduced me to some local dishes at the guest house restaurant. Yesteday was red red, tilapia fish and bean stew with fried plantain. Today, I opted for the forowe, a spicy tomato based stew, with a whole fish in it. I’m not sure the kind of fish, but I know it wasn’t tilapia, because the stew with it only came with the head. So instead I got the body of some other fish.

Regardless, the stew was fabulous. My companions, taking advantage of a free meal (the department was paying) ordered the stew with goat and a side of fish. In fairness, this cost pennies more than what I ordered. The stews come with fu fu, to be fashioned into a utensil for grabbing morsels out of the bowl with the right hand.

This picture shows all the fu fu I could eat.

Fu fu is cassava, yams and sometimes other ingredients like plantain and maize, pounded until, as one source says, “the desired consistency in reached”. On the one hand, it’s quite innocuous, a reasonably flavourless, gelatinous lump about as unflavourful as non-Canadians might find cream of wheat. On the other hand, I found its consistency quite undesirable, its gelatinous quality becoming increasingly hard to swallow. In its defense, the portions where huge, I am not used to eating fish (and think I just ate a month's supply), and could not have eaten all I was served no matter how delicious I found it. We finished lunch about 2:30 and I skipped dinner altogether. My friends, who had more to begin with, cleaned their bowls and probably had dinner later.