Ngondo Period COrigin theory CVerified

Ngondo (Ngondo nya Mukon) is a steamed dish of the Duala and Sawa peoples of coastal Cameroon. It appears at year-end festivals and has long been cherished as a dish of honor served to important guests.

The stars are egusi and fish. Egusi is a cucurbit seed long present across West and Central Africa, a crop rooted in the land. The white egusi (Cucumeropsis mannii) in particular is known as the "real egusi," widely cultivated in Cameroon and Congo, a material that has been at hand from early on. It is ground, combined with dried shrimp (dibanga) and fish, wrapped in banana leaves and steamed through. Egusi, fish and banana leaf alike are all materials found in the land.

The richness of ground egusi and the savor of fish come together as they steam inside the leaf. Wrapping and steaming turns the leaf itself into a vessel and lends its aroma to the food. Native materials and the craft of the land join to make this festive taste of the coast.

There are two views on how far the reach of ngondo extends.

One takes it as a dish particular to the Duala and Sawa peoples of coastal Cameroon. At year-end festivals, ground egusi, dried shrimp (dibanga) and fish are wrapped in banana leaves and steamed, handed down as a dish of honor served to important guests (from a description of Duala cooking by awayfromafrica). The Sawa water-oracle worship of "Ngondo," with which the dish's name is bound up, was inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage in 2024. The Sawa are a coastal community from before the colonial period, who settled at the mouth of the Wouri around the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries in the course of the Bantu migration.

The other view holds that leaf-steamed egusi dishes are not limited to the coastal Duala but form part of a food culture spread across a wide swath of Cameroon—the Northwest, Littoral, West and Central Regions—a tradition shared across a broad land that cannot be ascribed to a particular people or a founding year (from a description of egusi pudding by African Vibes).

The main ingredient, egusi, deserves a note. The name may bring to mind the New World squash seed, but egusi is a cucurbit seed rooted in West and Central Africa, of a separate line from the New World squash. Its seeds were used in Libya six thousand years ago and in Sudan some three and a half thousand years ago, as ancient-genome and archaeological work has shown, and that use reaches back far before any contact with the New World (a study by Renner and colleagues on the origins of edible cucurbits; PROTA on the crop's distribution).

The earliest written record of the dish dates to 1966. A survey of plant foods in Cameroon, compiled by the Nutrition Section of the Yaoundé centre of the French overseas research institute ORSTOM, describes a cake of cucurbit seeds: the kernels pounded into a paste, combined with meat, dried fish or egg, wrapped in banana leaves and cooked in boiling water (Zamengon in Ewondo; Pelé & Le Berre, 1966, p. 55). This is the year the dish first appears in writing, not the year it was born. The surveyors were setting down something already part of the food of the land, and by this year at the latest ngondo was being made in kitchens in Cameroon. The making of it passed from kitchen to kitchen by word of mouth rather than through cookbooks, and no record telling when it began has yet surfaced.