Bitter Sweet

Growing up in a deeply divided political family, Ayesha Harruna Attah rarely felt comfortable in Ghana. But after becoming a novelist and living in the United States for many years, she realized she had set every one of her books in West Africa—so she returned to see if she could make a life in the place where she’d never quite felt at home.

Bitter Sweet is both her attempt to answer that question and an invitation to West Africa. At its center is the kola nut, a caffeine-rich seed indigenous to West Africa that has played a central role in customs, commerce, and cuisine throughout history—from ancient caravan travelers who chewed the seed to survive harsh desert journeys to the nineteenth-century pharmacist who used kola nuts in his famous recipe for Coca-Cola. Tracing kola’s presence from west to east, Attah begins her quest in the lush Gola rainforest. Then she journeys along the Niger River, through the red sands of the Sahel, across the Atlantic Ocean, and back to West Africa. In the process she traces her family’s roots as kola traders and cultivators in Ghana’s forests and savannahs. She also looks deeply at the present: In encounters with craftspeople, cultural custodians, and descendants of enslaved people who traveled with kola to the Americas, she discovers what this remarkable seed can teach us about West African identity and tradition—and the region’s place in a messy, interconnected world. Blending travelogue, history, and cultural exploration with dreams, songs, and a recipe for ice cream, Bitter Sweet shows us that after the first bitter bite of kola always comes sweetness.