Butter Up

From mid April to mid May, it was challenging to be a researcher.   With the start of the rains, my opportunities to beg/goad/charm people to talk with me were greatly constrained. Everyone was on their farm prepping the land for planting and then planting the land. The community became a ghost town from 8 AM to 6 PM, a place that outsiders would assume is populated and ruled by children between the ages 2 and 10.

Fortunately for the anthropologist, but unfortunately for crops and for farmers, the last 2 weeks in May went by with no rain.   This has been the pattern for quite a while now in this region: The rains start with a bang, then take a break, and then return—but often without the frequency or duration that they should.  Though the region has always been guaranteed a rainy season and that the rainy season always involved potential uncertainty, a changing climate ensures that the uncertainty now involves certain uncertainty.

I’ve struggled of late to contend with why anthropologists have to spend soooo much time in the field.  I’ve met students from other disciplines doing research in the area and am always a bit jealous when their 6 weeks of fieldwork are over or they get to fly home for a break in-between research periods to recover from the emotional drought that is fieldwork.  What makes day in and day out life in the community where you are doing the research worth it?  Because patterns and not isolated incidents emerge. Patterns in economy and patterns in mental health are what I seek to trace.  And to see how these patterns interact, I have to endure the wet spells and the dry spells, be it in rain or data.

When the rains take a break and people are no longer on their farms, what people decide to do in place of farming is just as important as the farming.  Once households decided to hold off on planting more crops until the rains returned, women began diverting a good chunk of their time and energy to collecting shea nuts, the tree born fruit that leads to that product known as shea butter.

Shea butter is primarily used as a fat for cooking and is, thankfully, the primary and preferred fat used even though more expensive vegetable oils are in the market place. It is added to the litany of local food ingredients that come from the local environment.  In its final form it looks and feels thick and rich, as if a twin of Crisco.   Though it may look like Crisco, it tastes like buttah.  It took me three different meals to realize that shea butter is the awesomely rich ingredient that was fooling my palette into thinking it was eating dairy butter.  Shea butter melted with tiny fragments of scotch bonnet pepper turned a very dry and filling-less corn meal dumpling into a divine meal.  Luckily, licking the bowl with your fingers is culturally expected here.

She butter is also used as a skin care product.  If ever there was a region that was destined to rule in the skin moisturizing industry, West Africa is that region.  In the tropical forests zones, there’s cocoa butter, a byproduct of the cocoa industry that is used in skin care creams and lotions.  In the savanna zones, there’s shea butter, a distinct product of its own that is used in its purest form as a skin care product.  You can moisturize and cook from the same blob of shea butter. Before the importation of industrially manufactured lotions, shea butter was the thing that people in this region to moisturize their skin.  People still do, but the “luxury” of foreign goods often prevails. A shopkeeper in Accra pulled out her best show to try and sell me on a bottle of lotion baring the Family Dollar logo, a US based retailer emphasizing low-cost products that continues to thrive in the US economic slump.  Already familiar with the Family Dollar line of products, I politely declined and bought the cheaper cocoa butter lotion made in neighboring Ivory Coast.

Despite outside ingredients that are a threat to the local usage of shea butter, shea butter remains a very widely used product in the Upper West, so the manufacturing of shea butter is an important activity in women’s economic activity.Shea nuts take a lot of time and labor to process into butter.  First the fruit (which resembles avocado in texture but tastes perfumey) is removed either by eating or by stomping on or by laying out and letting the livestock go to town.  The nut is then exposed and left to dry in the sun before it is roasted.  Once roasted, the nut is then pounded to remove the shell and get to the meat.  The meat is then boiled and the nutty boil mixture is then processed by arm strength mimicking an industrial mixer to instigate the separation of fat from non-fat.  It’s a process that takes days. 

 As anthropologist Brenda Chalfin has well-outlined, most definitively in her ethnography Shea Butter Republic, shea butter is a product that has risen immensely on the global scene. It’s a commodity. There’s an international market demand for it. But unfortunately, the links for getting the producers of the nut and its product remain weak throughout Sahelian West Africa. Though there is the occasional artisanal scale market in a community adopted by an NGO, most communities lack the resources to develop a localized shea butter industry that can produce enough product to entice a fair price from a wholesaler.  Women therefore manufacture the butter on a household level basis and middle men/women make the profit on the way to the wholesaler.  As the initial producer and processor of the product, women throughout savanna West Africa usually get pittance for shea butter that will end up in a luxury cosmetic. 

Because women are actively engaged in helping on their husband’s farm as well as planning to start their own farms, while still maintaining their ventures into processing shea nuts, I’ve been asking them if it is helpful to have so many activities running at the same time.  The social science research from this part of the world continuously emphasizes that diversification of livelihoods-- not putting all of the eggs into one basket--is what keeps households afloat.  I’m getting similar responses here. Women don’t indicate that they want to rely solely on their own farms for supporting the household nutritionally or financially.  Also, they don’t want to rely solely on shea nuts.  As one woman put it, all of her activities pay her small money, so it’s best to keep doing all of the small money activities.  If she does her own farming and shea nuts, she is a buffer for the potential failure of the husband’s farm.  If her farm fails, her shea nut business is a buffer against that failure.  In a place where crop insurance doesn’t exist and there’s no social safety net that even pretends to help those who need help, this is risk management—a very important pattern indeed.