Kenkey Period BOrigin theory CVerified

To make kenkey, maize dough is left to ferment, part of it is cooked until it thickens, and the dough is then wrapped in maize husks or banana leaves and steamed. The Ga (Ga-Adangbe) call it komi and the Fante call it dokono, and it comes to the everyday table as a dumpling that keeps the sourness of its fermentation. It is said to have begun among the Ga, with the Fante dokono branching off later as a variant.

Its main ingredient, maize, is a New World crop and was not originally grown in West Africa. By the sixteenth century it was widely cultivated along the coast from the Gambia River to São Tomé. Pieter de Marees, whose account of the Gold Coast was published in 1602, recorded what he had been told: that maize was carried from the West Indies to São Tomé, and that the Portuguese, after building their fort on this coast, brought it over from São Tomé and sowed it. The inhabitants, he wrote, had not known the grain before the Portuguese came. Until maize crossed the sea, the fermented maize dough at the heart of kenkey had no way of coming into being. By the later seventeenth century, maize is said to have displaced the older millet and sorghum along the coast.

On the Gold Coast of de Marees's day, the everyday bread was millet mixed with a little maize, ground into a dough, salted, shaped into balls and baked on a heated hearth. The people living around Elmina Castle baked their bread from maize alone. Those who had no means of making bread themselves bought it at the market, where it was called Kangues. Grain dumplings bought ready-made at market were, in other words, already part of coastal life at that time. But this was a baked bread, not the leaf-wrapped, steamed dough of today.

One view of kenkey holds that it is an ancient grain dumpling of the land, older than the arrival of maize. The Ga and Fante ate millet and sorghum as staples before maize came, and on this view kenkey is that millet dumpling carried down to the present with only the grain changed.

De Marees's 1602 account gives this view some footing. He writes that millet was a grain the inhabitants had held since before the time of the Portuguese, and the bread sold at market as Kangues was made mostly of that millet. A plate of a market in the same book shows women from Elmina sitting with this bread, and the editor of its 1912 edition annotated the bread as "balls of millet bread". A millet dumpling with a name close to kenkey's was, then, on sale in a coastal market in 1602.

Much, though, is missing from that record. The dumplings were baked; nothing is said of fermenting the dough or of wrapping and steaming it. Nor is it known whether millet dumplings went by the same name before maize arrived. That a fermented, steamed millet dumpling was the older form of kenkey can, for now, be neither affirmed nor ruled out.

How maize reached this coast is not settled either. The story that the Portuguese brought it survives as something de Marees was told in 1602. According to Miracle's 1965 study of the introduction of maize into Africa, maize was widely grown along the coast in the sixteenth century, but the oft-repeated claim that the Portuguese carried it from the New World could not, at that point, be documented. Maize took root on the sixteenth-century coast, and by 1602 a bread with maize in it was being sold at market as Kangues. The path from there to today's kenkey of fermented, steamed maize dough has yet to be traced in the record.