Making shea butter, part 1

The reason for our stop in Tamale, aside from breaking up the long journey to our northernmost destination of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, is to see the shea butter production process. Global Mamas has recently decided to offer the sought-after lotion and soap made from the shea nut, and the area around Tamale is one of only a few in the world where it is grown.

Georgina Adalibe of the Christian Mothers Association (CMA) meets us at the guesthouse and leads us a few miles out of town to the village of Vittim. We eventually leave the asphalt for a dirt road. After a few hundred yards, in a modest compound comprised of a few mud huts, a group of more than 20 women suspend their work to greet us with a song and a prayer.

It is an incredibly warm welcome, with much smiling and laughter. We shake their hands, which thanks to a lifetime working with shea butter are as smooth and soft as warm milk chocolate. Their faces manage in their manifold creases and wrinkles to resemble the nuts themselves. I am amazed yet again by how transformative a smile can be.

A spot in the shade is prepared for us and we are brought water, which passes for a cocktail in these parts. Georgina explains that the shea nut has been grown and harvested in this area for longer than she can remember. Virtually every family in the region knows its way around the small, dark nut.

For the next two hours we are given an up-close look at the laborious, time-consuming, hardly-seems-worth-it process. We count 12 discrete steps, from cracking open the nuts, to roasting and grinding them, to milling them and cooking down the result for the oil. The air fills with a smell that so resembles chocolate it’s hard not to toss a handful of the bitter nuts into your mouth.

When things are really moving, we are told they can product a ton a day. But I’m more staggered by the discovery of the process in the first place. Who first conceived that the nut was good for anything? And who was the consummately bored person who happened upon the Byzantine process for squeezing oil out of it?

(Picture: Alice, Shawn and Jeanne testing the shea nuts just out of the roaster)