On a Tuesday morning phone call, Daro Umaigba walked me through seven years of chasing suya across four continents.
What I learned was humbling.
This was a food I had eaten since childhood and knew almost nothing about.
When we finished talking, I stepped outside and decided to find out whether I was alone in that. Turns out I was not.
Near the University of Ghana’s main gate at Legon, a third-year Economics student named Akua was at a roadside stall, pulling chichinga off a skewer after evening lectures.
I asked her what she knew about where Chichinga came from.
She thought about it genuinely.
“The Hausa people, right? The Zongo guys.”
Then she bit off another piece. “But honestly, I have never really thought about it past that.”
Suya
That answer, honest and unbothered, said with a mouth still working through perfectly spiced beef, is precisely what Umaigba spent seven years trying to change.
SUYA: A Spicy Piece of Home, his 54-minute documentary filmed across four continents, 12 countries, and 40 cities, is the first film to sit down seriously with the cultural history of West Africa’s most quietly powerful street food.
But this is not a food documentary.
That needs to be said clearly upfront, because the film will fool you at first.
The smoke, the coal, the close-up of spiced beef glistening on a skewer — it has all the visual language of a food film.
But SUYA: A Spicy Piece of Home is something with far more on its mind.
It is a documentary about African Unity, and it uses suya because suya, more than almost anything else on this continent, proves that unity is not only possible but that it has always existed.
We have simply not been paying attention.
As Kwame Nkrumah once said, “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked to the total liberation of the African continent.”
In hindsight, he spoke to political freedom, but the principle stretches far beyond that into the everyday ties that bind us, like suya.
A continent that cannot clearly see itself, cannot name what it shares, or honour what connects it across borders and languages, is a continent that has not yet completed its liberation.
Umaigba makes this case through something as simple as a skewer of spiced meat, and the argument is more powerful than it first appears.
History
The Hausa people of Northern Nigeria are credited with originating suya.
They were pastoralists and traders, people who moved across the West African Sahel with cattle and goods, cooking meat over open fires wherever they stopped.
The spice blend was theirs, but the tradition of gathering around it was never exclusive to them.
When Hausa traders settled in Zongo communities across Ghana, they brought the grill with them.
In Tamale, Kumasi, and the Zongo quarters of Accra, it became chichinga, sold nightly by abochi vendors.
The spice, the skewer, the coal, the newspaper wrap: the same.
The name changed; the communion did not.
Long before anyone was talking about African Unity as a political project, the suya grill was already enacting it.
That is the history Umaigba found when he started following the smoke.
Across Spain, Brooklyn, London, and Kano, the story was the same: wherever Africans go, suya follows. And wherever Suya appears, strangers become neighbours.
What it is made of
To understand why suya works as a symbol of African Unity, you need to understand what it is made of.
The spice blend at Suya’s heart is called yaji.
It is built from ingredients that are individually sharp, pungent, almost aggressive: ground peanut cake, dried chilli, ginger, cayenne, garlic and onion.
Each element has its own character.
Each would overpower a dish on its own.
But when they are combined in the right proportions, something happens that none of them could have produced separately.
The result is a flavour that is layered, complex, and unlike anything else in West African cooking.
Umaigba sees the continent in that blend.
Africa has over 3,000 ethnic groups, more languages than any other landmass on earth and histories of conflict and difference that run deep. Every one of those groups is distinct.
Every one of them could argue for the superiority of their own way.
And yet, from Accra to Lagos to Dakar to Nairobi, when suya or its cousin appears, everyone reaches for it.
The Yoruba man and the Igbo man at the same grill.
The Muslim from the North and the Christian from the South on the same bench, eating from the same newspaper wrap.
The Ghanaian student and the Nigerian trader at the same roadside stall in Legon.
Suya does not negotiate with differences. It transcends it.
This is what philosophers call Ubuntu: the idea, common to many African traditions, that a person is a person through other people.
I am because we are.
Around a suya grill, that philosophy is not abstract.
It is visible. It is lived.
It smells of coal and peanut spice.
7 years
Umaigba began this film at a time when the dominant narratives about Nigeria felt to him like a ceiling. Corruption.
Instability. Division. He chose to follow something that those narratives could not contain.
What he found across seven years of filming was not a food story.
It was evidence that African people already know how to find common ground, and they have been doing it at a charcoal grill for centuries.
The documentary is structured across seven chapters, and the cast of voices assembled is remarkable.
Nigerian comedian Bright ‘Basketmouth’ Okpocha.
Award-winning filmmaker Tunde Kelani.
Rapper and music entrepreneur Tobechukwu ‘iLLBLISS’ Ejiofor, who also served as music supervisor.
Food critic Opeyemi Famakin. Folorunsho Coker, Director General of the Nigerian Tourism Development Corporation.
Obi Asika, Director-General of the National Council for Arts and Culture (NCAC).
Beyond the film itself, Umaigba and his team are currently in active talks with Nigeria’s National Council of Arts and Culture to have suya formally recognised as a Nigerian cultural heritage asset, a step that would be the first of its kind for a street food in Nigeria’s history.
If that recognition comes through, it would be more than a bureaucratic milestone.
It would be a statement that the food of ordinary people, the food of the roadside and the night market and the university gate, belongs in the official story of who we are as Africans.
The documentary is shot in 4K digital film, presented in English, French, and Hausa with English subtitles, and is targeted at streaming platforms, including Netflix, MUBI, BBC Africa and Arte.
Emmy Award-winning producer Adeyinka Oduniyi describes the experience as “comfort food.”
He is right.
But this particular comfort food comes with an African Unity tag.
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Source:
www.graphic.com.gh
