NOTE: This essay has been excerpted with permission from Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue by Adrian Miller. This highly readable book is well-researched and the author has a funny bone. The essay here is but a small slice of a much bigger history of American barbecue laid out in the book. To read more, buy the book here. To learn more about Adrian Miller, check out his bio here.
For while much in this history remains unquantifiable, it is certainly true that Black southerners were a good deal more than just smiling waiters, appointed only to ferry [barbecue] from its Native source out to the tables of white America. Both before and after Emancipation, on the plantation and beyond its disciplinary orbit, such known and unknown figures were instead the innovators, rejuvenators, and reinventors of the food. —Andrew Warnes, Savage Barbecue, 2008
They had barbecues. That’s where the barbecues started from, I reckon, from the barbecues among the slaves. —Charles Graham, a formerly enslaved man, Clarksville, Tennessee, 1939
I’ll recycle a question raised in the last chapter: “Black people invented barbecue, right?” This is not a cool, dispassionate, objective thing to write, but I would love to prove that barbecue has an African origin while simultaneously forming an “X” with my arms across my chest and shouting, “Wakanda Forever!” Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Many West African societies have oral traditions, making it a challenge to find out what exactly happened with food several centuries ago. On top of that, people outside the region who wrote things down when they encountered West African people weren’t always accurate and thorough in their writings. When it comes to West African history around the time of European contact, we’ve got a lot of folklore and “fakelore” to sift through. Yet the prospect of finding African antecedents or influences on American barbecue is too tantalizing to ignore.
Most African-heritage people in the United States trace their roots to western Africa because that was the “Old World” focal point for the Atlantic Slave Trade. West Africa is a vast region (roughly five million square miles) that more than four hundred million people call home. The diverse and vibrant mix of cultures there makes the region one of the most fascinating places on Earth. From the rich mix, we’ll ultimately focus our attention on two groups: the Senegambians of present-day Senegal and Gambia and the Igbo peoples of southeastern Nigeria. Why? Because, as slavery scholar Ira Berlin notes, “During the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, captives from Senegambia and the Bight of Benin (present-day Nigeria) constituted about three-quarters of the slaves entering the Chesapeake. . . . Over the course of the eighteenth century, Igbo peoples constituted the majority of African slaves in Virginia and Maryland, so much so that some historians renamed colonial Virginia ‘Igbo Land.’ ” There were certainly enslaved people from other parts of West Africa, but these two groups had the numerical superiority to apply their culinary signatures to Virginia barbecue just as it took shape.
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To investigate barbecue’s possible African origin, I digested the work of leading writers on African American foodways and its connections to West Africa, namely James Beard Foundation Cookbook Hall of Fame recipient Jessica B. Harris, Frederick Douglass Opie, an author of several books on the subject, and James Beard Awardee and culinary historian Michael Twitty. To discern the presence of a West African culinary signature, it helps to understand what the region’s meat-cooking and preservation techniques and culinary traditions were prior to European contact.
What might the respective culinary signatures of Senegambians and Igbo peoples be? From a regional perspective, a typical West African meal consists of a “filling starchy carbohydrate such as rice, or a stiff porridge-like substance from corn or a grain such as millet or sorghum, or boiled and pounded root vegetables such as yam or cocoyam, accompanied by a thick soup, stew, or sauce.” Such meals tend to be mostly vegetarian, but when meat is added to a dish, it is usually as an ingredient in the soup, stew, or sauce rather than as an entrée.
Specifically, Senegambians have historically cultivated an indigenous rice, so we know what their standard starch would be. The Igbo have relied more on root crops such as yams. People living on the coast and in low-lying areas made fish, small domesticated animals, and bush meat their primary sources of protein. What about larger animals? The appropriate environmental conditions for cattle raising are found at higher elevations, for two reasons: it’s easier there to cultivate grain to feed the cattle, and the dreaded tsetse fly is nowhere to be seen. The tsetse fly’s blood-sucking, disease-transmitting capability would have devastated any attempt at animal husbandry in lower elevations. In modern times, humans have done much to manage the tsetse populations, but raising cattle remains a challenge.
Harris pioneered examining the culinary influences that West Africa had on foodways in the Americas. Her work shows that, in the realm of barbecue, West African cooks in Africa and the Americas shared the practices of “toasting” meat by a fire and the use of seasoning pastes to impart flavor and color to raw meat. Opie has argued for an African provenance by examining how African women have cooked, seasoned, and sauced meat in a process akin to barbecue. Opie has also explored Zora Neale Hurston’s writings on barbecue’s African diasporic connections in Florida, Haiti, and maroon communities in the Caribbean. Howard Conyers, a NASA rocket science engineer and South Carolina whole hog barbecue expert, is also exploring the maroon connection to barbecue. Also of note is the post on Twitty’s Afroculinaria blog in which he admonishes, “We must cease and desist those efforts that would divorce barbecue from its African roots, connections and narratives rooted in slavery and the African Diaspora.” With that context, let’s explore some possibilities and sort out fact and fiction by breaking down barbecue into its key elements: the meat used, the cooking process, the seasoning, and the sauce.
West Africans were already familiar with the domesticated animals (chickens, cows, goats, sheep, and sometimes pigs) that Europeans brought to the Americas. Either some species were native to their region or they were introduced during the colonial period. Today, beef, chicken, and seafood are popular with West Africans. As one travels away from the coast and farther inland, domesticated animals and bush meat, a generic term for wild animals, are eaten more often.
West Africans, past and present, preserve food through fermentation, frying, salting, sun drying, and smoking. As we’ll see in a moment, meat takes a more central and starring role for snacking and special occasion feasting. So, what in the ways did West Africans preserve or cook food that could lead to barbecue?
Last chapter, we saw that cooking at ground level over a shallow pit was the method that became synonymous with barbecue. At first blush, the argument for barbecue’s West African provenance suffers for a lack of earth ovens in the region’s archaeological record. Did West Africans cook meat before European contact in the mid-1400s? Fortunately, we have substantial glimpses from the scholarship of Tadeusz Lewicki, an Africanist scholar. Lewicki compiled the references to West African food practices recorded by Arabs who encountered West Africans during the Middle Ages. Islam appeared in Africa south of the Sahara with Arab traders and scholars from about 1000 AD. It spread through the region with the growth of the trans-Saharan trade, with caravan routes connecting much of West Africa to Arabs living in northern and eastern Africa. Over the centuries, Islam more or less merged with African cultures until, by 1500, it was widespread through the Sahel.
According to their travel documents, West Africans had a taste for a diverse number of animals: camels, cattle, dogs, donkeys, goats, pigs, poultry, reptiles, sheep, seafood, and wild game. Though the mentions of these animals are numerous, the Arab chroniclers were less meticulous in describing how these animals were cooked.
In the few descriptions available, one sees commonalities in meat cooking methods with Native Americans and people living in the eastern part of West Africa. The Juddala Berbers cooked on a raised platform. As one observer noted: “The meat, cut into narrow strips, was hung on wooden sticks supported by four poles. The drying was watched by a slave who kept up a moderate fire below the meat, night and day. When dry, the meat was packed into leather bags. Prepared this way, it would keep for a long time without going bad.” The Sudanic Berbers ate mutton roasted on a spit, and the northern Tuaregs did the same with other meats. The Tuareg people also roasted meat (goat and sheep) directly in the ashes of a fire.
Pit cooking was observed during the medieval period. The Zanaga of Mauritania roasted meat “in the ground in a deep ditch (pit) where fire had been kindled and covered with sand which had also been heated.” In addition, another observer wrote, “The Imraguen of the Mauritanian coast eat their fish roasted (in a hole dug in the sand).” Most of the old observations occurred in the highland areas of the region, not from the low-lying areas where slave trading activity was at its heaviest. However, we do know that there was cultural exchange and contact in this area, so these techniques could have traveled with enslaved people across the Atlantic.
Some West Africans cooked meat in shallow pits, but it’s unclear to what extent. Contemporary accounts of meat cooking in West Africa present a conflicting picture. In The Art of West African Cooking (1972), a cookbook that introduced the region’s cuisines to American cooks, author Dinah Ameley Ayensu writes: “Lamb is usually grilled or barbecued whole, without the entrails, and served at buffet parties where each may help himself to his choice of the roasted animal.” Unfortunately, Ayensu doesn’t provide a recipe or more context. In her 2005 survey of sub-Saharan food cultures, Fran Osseo-Asare writes: “Cooking is likely still done over wood or charcoal fires, often in a brazier placed on the ground. The most common traditional cooking arrangement involves three stones around a wood or charcoal fire on which a cooking pot or pots are balanced. . . . For roasting a larger animal, such as a goat, a pit may be used.” Again, we’re still left guessing about what happened before European contact.
Ayensu and Osseo-Asare discuss and include recipes for a popular street food of pieces of meat grilled on a skewer. Though both authors speak to a contemporary cooking practice, this treatment of meat stretches back in time. West African cooks tend to butcher animals into smaller parts rather than cook the whole animal. An obvious advantage of this approach is to “stretch” its use. An exasperated white woman named Frances Anne Kemble, or Fanny Kemble, as she is often called, saw this up close and personal while she lived on a Georgia plantation in the late 1830s. In a letter to her friend Elizabeth, Kemble expressed her frustration with her enslaved African American cook Abraham’s in ability to prepare meat the way she wanted it:
Dear E—— . . . I have often complained bitterly of this, and in vain implored Abraham the cook to send me some dish of mutton to which I might with safety apply the familiar name of leg, shoulder, or haunch. These remonstrances and expostulations have produced no result whatever, however, but an increase of eccentricity in the chunks of sheeps’ flesh placed upon the table; the squares, diamonds, cubes, and rhomboids of mutton have been more ludicrously and hopelessly unlike anything we see in a Christian butcher’s shop.
Though Abraham was quite pleased with his presentation, he knew Kemble was not. Kemble noted, “Abraham, however, insisted and be sought, extolled the fineness of his sheep, declared his misery at being unable to cut it as I wished, and his readiness to conform for the future to whatever patterns of mutton ‘de missis would only please to give him.’ ” From then on, Kemble instructed Abraham by sketching out how she wanted her meat cut.
Contemporary West Africans would laugh at Kemble’s frustration and appreciate Abraham’s presentation. Though Kemble’s request for butchered, bone-in pieces required a specific skill set that Abraham lacked, his impulse was to butcher the meat the way a traditional West African cook would have done for a stew. It turns out that the same goes for the way that contemporary West African cooks grill meat.
West African barbecue, if it can be called that, is a wildly popular street food tradition that is called by different names throughout the region: afra (Gambia), chichinga (Ghana), dibi (Guinea Bissau, Senegal), and tsire suya, or sometimes just suya or soya (Nigeria). In this style, the meat (usually beef, mutton, and sometimes organ meat) is thinly sliced or cut into small pieces, seasoned with a spice rub, skewered, and then quickly grilled. Ghanaian cookbook authors Fran Osseo-Asare and Barbara Baëta remark, “ Chichinga is usually made from a variety of protein sources, such as liver or beef (more traditional), chicken (more contemporary), lamb, or goat. . . . The distinctive taste comes from the rub, the tankora/yaji/chichinga powder, which includes roasted cornmeal, pulverized, fried, and then re-ground peanuts, dried ground ginger and red pepper, and salt, as well as other spices.”
James Beard Award–nominated chef Pierre Thiam, a native of Senegal, adds that this food “originates in Hausa land, located in northern Nigeria and southeast Niger, today’s northern reaches of the domain of the nomadic Hausa people who travel throughout West Africa in search of pastureland for their cattle.” These glorious grilling traditions, however, remind me more of Middle East kebabs and Japanese yakitori than southern barbecue.
To the extent that there are large animal meat cooking traditions, we should consider Islamic feasting traditions, particularly those of the Fulani and Hausa peoples living in the northern portion of West Africa. All of the meat cooking examples that I cited from the medieval period are from people who lived in the areas where the Fulani and Hausa peoples now thrive. They’ve had centuries of sustained contact with Arabs. It’s entirely possible that Senegambians and Igbo peoples, via the Fulani and Hausa peoples, were exposed to Arab meat cooking traditions like mechoui, where a whole goat or lamb is cooked on a spit or in a pit. I see a case for West African ways of cooking whole animals influencing the early development of barbecue, but I think more dots still need to be connected. We do know that West Africans had a taste for smoked meat, and enslaved Igbos and Senegambian peoples would have brought that flavor profile to the Americas. Enslaved Fulani and Hausa peoples would have brought a similar flavor profile and the know-how for cooking large, domesticated animals.
So much for the meat of the matter, but what about sauce? For West Africans, a typical meal is a savory sauce, soup, or stew (usually a mixture of meat and vegetables) served alongside, or on top of, a starch. Sauce is usually completely integrated in a dish, but dipping sauces are common for grilled meats. When African-heritage cooks create a sauce, it tends to be quite spicy. As Harris notes, “The Creole cooking of the African Atlantic world is also known for salsas, mojos, marinades, sauces, molhos, rubs, seasonings, and pepper sauces—some of the most flavorful and the most piquant condiments in the world.” By many accounts, African Americans prepared barbecue in the nineteenth century by seasoning it with a fiery sauce with red pepper as a key ingredient. This hints at an African culinary signature on barbecue since the Virginia-area tribes didn’t season food with chiles. The rub here is that, at the time the earliest enslaved people were arriving in Virginia, chiles were not yet in widespread use in their ancestral homelands. They would have been accustomed to other “warming spices” like black pepper, cardamom, ginger, and “Grains of Paradise,” or melegueta pepper. Seasoning with chiles would be something they would learn first in the Americas.
In my final tally, traditional West African ways of preparing and cooking meat don’t synchronize well with eighteenth-century barbecue in the American colonies. Enslaved West Africans had expertise with some meat smoking practices, but cooking large, whole animals in a pit would have seemed like something new or at least unusual to many enslaved people. The stronger arguments for West African influence on barbecue are the cooks’ deftness with seasoning and saucing and cumulative years of honed expertise that were added to what they learned from their Native American teachers. Equipped with that knowledge, barbecue flourished thanks to the handiwork of Black barbecuers.
Back to British colonial North America, we now look at how enslaved West Africans encountered this likely unfamiliar way of cooking. Louis Hughes, who was once enslaved in Virginia, captured barbecue’s nineteenth-century aesthetic: a barbecue “originally meant to dress and roast a hog whole, but has come to mean the cooking of a food animal in this manner for the feeding of a great company.” Previously, barbecue as a social event was marked by smaller gatherings punctuated by games, intoxicating drinks, and, evidently, gunfire. Given the creative experimentation that happened during the 1600s and 1700s, cooks in the 1800s could barbecue large amounts of meat at one time to feed very large groups of people. The genius of the trench method was its complete scalability to cater to a crowd in ways that other cooking methods could not match. Want to feed hundreds, maybe even thousands, of people? Just dig a longer trench. The desire to turn barbecue into a more spectacular social event drove innovation in the cooking method. The hosts wanted a bigger, and better, party.
At this point in time in history, mainstream barbecue and African American barbecue were one and the same. Why? Because most times that barbecue was made, regardless of the context, African Americans were the ones barbecuing. Anything that deviated from what and how African Americans barbecued was not “real” barbecue. One thing that did change was barbecue’s terroir.
The westward expansion of the United States and the development of a robust domestic slave trade fueled an insatiable appetite for enslaved African American labor to develop land for agriculture and other profitable uses. In this time, slavery’s epicenter, as well as barbecue’s, moved away from Virginia. Historian Ira Berlin notes how dramatic this shift was. “In 1790, nearly half of all enslaved African Americans resided in Virginia; on the eve of the Civil War that figure had shrunk to 12 percent.” Wherever Virginians went, they took barbecue with them, and that was made possible by relocating enslaved people as well.
NOTE: This essay has been excerpted with permission from Black Smoke: African Americans and the United States of Barbecue by Adrian Miller. To read more, buy the book here. To learn more about Adrian Miller, check out his bio here.
