The table was set. The hams were glazed, the jollof turned, the turkeys bronzed and the yams pounded. Hands eager to separate crispy chicken flesh from its bones first clasped together in prayer. After the final amen, the West African Thanksgiving could now begin.
I took the metro on an uncharacteristically cold L.A afternoon to Union Station and bought my onward ticket to Fontana. Final destination: my aunt’s house an hour and thirty minutes away, my stomach ready for my first official American Thanksgiving. There, nestled in San Bernardino County among breathtaking mountains and suburban stillness is a community of first generation Nigerians, and a Thanksgiving meal that is a melange of African and African American flavors.
I consider myself something of a yam connoisseur. As a West African I’ve had yam all ways: fried, boiled, porridged, pounded, souped and even coated, but never ever candied. So then, it stood to reason that what I looked forward to the most from this feast were the candied yams. At the intersection of my yam punditry and my amateur Thanksgiving palette stands the candied yam — the oh so elusive dish that I prized as the final notch in my belt of yam aficionado.
“When its turgid brown skin is peeled back and the white flesh is cooked with nothing but salt, sometimes sugar, it becomes white gold.”
At the sight of the candied yam I had two revelations. First, that these orange blobs drenched in sugar and butter were not in fact yams. Second, this meant that Americans had been calling sweet potatoes yams all along. Until now I had presumed that yams needed no introduction, but upon coming face to face with its transatlantic imposter I believe I need to make one on its behalf. A yam has turgid dark brown skin, it can grow up to 15 meters (45 feet) long, and its flesh is a luscious creamy white. In Los Angeles you’ll find it in a speciality store that stocks international produce. I get mine from ‘African Obichi Market’ on Washington Boulevard; imported straight from Ghana by a wholesaler and sold to little stores like Obichi across Los Angeles.
To tell the story of this peculiar case of identity theft we need to go back 500 hundred or so years. First stop, Central America where the sweet potato originates – although still up for debate – then onward to Europe where it found a new home by virtue of Columbus. We then hop across the Atlantic to the American south where it was grown by way of American colonists, and finally to West coast of Africa flanked by the same Atlantic where the naming crises has its roots.
It’s the tail end of August and the rains have dried up. The masquerades don their apparel and the dancers flex their feet. The fever of festival season raises temperatures of both the land and its people. The New Yam Festival was and is still celebrated across Igboland which spans present day southeastern Nigeria. It’s a time to signal the end of a cultivation season and to celebrate the harvest of the regions biggest cash crop. In pre-colonial Igboland, the yam was a symbol of wealth and status. Today it’s still celebrated for its texture and taste. Across West Africa, yams are a staple food and the king of crops. When I arrived in the States, my first mission was to find an African grocer because my chakras misalign without my yam; I reckon it’s my ancestors getting antsy.
Europe and America traded more than produce on their new world field trips, they also traded people. The transatlantic slave trade from West Africa to the colonies of America and the European administered Caribbean, uprooted continental Africans to create the second largest African diaspora right here in the United States. On slave ships packed too tight, yams accompanied West Africans across the ocean.
“Without question, yams were the most common African staple fed to enslaved Africans on board ships bound for the Americas. The slave merchant John Barbot, for example, noted that ‘a ship that takes in 500 slaves, must provide above 100,000 yams,'” wrote Joseph Holloway in “African Crops And Slave Cuisine.”
The majority of the slaves taken from Igboland were brought to present day Virginia, Louisiana and occasionally the Carolinas. The name ‘yam’ is said to originate from several West African words – Nyambi, Nyam, Enyame – all meaning ‘to eat’. Folklore has it that when slaves encountered the sweet potato – the closest thing to a staple root vegetable, the closest thing to home – they called it what they had called their own cash crop.
Adaorah Oduah graduated from USC Annenberg’s Global Communications Management program in May. She lives in Los Angeles.
Fast forward to the 1920’s and homesickness becomes an identity crisis of national proportions. In Louisiana, sweet potato farmers wanted to distinguish their golden fleshed produce from their competitors. They reached deep into their ancestry and pulled out the yam and thus the confusion began. Sweet potatoes come in many different varieties, but in the U.S two kinds dominate the market: the firm ones, white on the inside, and the soft ones, orange on the inside. The USDA (U.S Department of Agriculture) allowed the trend — set by the Louisiana farmers selling the golden potatoes — to slide and the distinct label ‘Yams: Sweet Potatoes’ has since then been used for golden sweet potatoes aka ‘yams’ to help customers distinguish between the two.
The deception, however, did not go unnoticed by food purists and horticulturists alike, so today the U.S Department of Agriculture requires the term ‘yam’ to be accompanied by the term ‘sweet potato.’ At the same time California sweet potato growers are trying to undo the confusion and drop the word ‘Yams’ from their packaging (White, 2017).
I’ve never celebrated a New Yam Festival but I am Igbo so I feel almost spiritually connected to this root vegetable. When its turgid brown skin is peeled back and the white flesh is cooked with nothing but salt, sometimes sugar, it becomes white gold. Arriving in the States and seeing a sweet potato in its place was almost blasphemous, but the story behind it thaws my annoyance – just a little – because the yam is more than food and more than culture. It is history. The history of the American ‘yam’ is the history of two continents forever connected by an ugly yet illuminating past. It is a story of longing for a piece of home. It is a story of the origins of soul in African American soul food. Southern American foodways light a delicious path across the ocean to foodways in the West coast of Africa, and the almighty yam keeps both histories alive.