Jollof Rice History: How A Dish Took Over West Africa

This post hopes to explore Jollof Rice’s history. Simply, Jollof is a one-pot dish that originated in Senegal and has become the poster child for West African food. Not only does it define this region, but it also connects West Africa to the African diaspora in the Americas.

What is Jollof Rice

Jollof rice is a rice-based dish cooked in a spicy tomato-based sauce. Jollof Rice is spicy and complex, with many layers of spices, vegetables and flavours. It is fantastic that West Africa identifies with this dish because it truly reflects how similar, yet so different, food culture and history are amongst West African countries.

What I will Cover in this Post

This is a two-part series on Jollof Rice. This post is geared at exploring the history of Jollof Rice. The next post will focus on addressing Jollof Rice differences across West Africa, as well as, similar versions outside of Africa.

Compiling this information was a rather tough challenge. As we are all aware, history recorded has always been written through the lens of white men. Thus, they only transcribed and retained the information they deemed relevant. History in West Africa is passed down orally, either through fables, stories or even through recipes.

Like a game of telephone, the story will change as it is passed down and might eventually be forgotten. However, the great thing about Jollof Rice is that you can trace the history based on how the food changes across regions. This is something I will dive more into in the next post.

Jollof History: Ingredients

To understand the history of Jollof, we must first look at the ingredients. Recipes like Jollof are basically the product of trades between cultures.

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Rice is as much African as it is Asian. ¹ African Rice Oryza glaberrima, is one of the two rice species in the world. It may have originated in the flood basin of Niger and carried across West Africa, reaching as far west as Senegal and east as Chad. For centuries, West Africans cultivated and selected a variety of rice cultivars that suited their varied food needs. ¹ If you visit different West African countries today, you will find local varieties that are unique to that specific country. ¹

Because of their expertise in rice cultivation, many Africans living in Senegal, Sierra Leone and Gambia region were enslaved and brought to the lowland regions of South Carolina and Georgie to grow rice. ² These peoples became the ancestors of the creole Gullah and Geechee peoples in the Southern United States.

Tomatoes, onions and peppers are not indigenous to West Africa, but were introduced probably through trade and travel. Most likely introduced to Europe in the early 1500s before it was introduced to West Africa.³ I couldn’t find information on how it made it across the region. I anticipate it is a mixture of trade as well as individual contact with Europeans across West Africa.

The First Jollof Rice

The origin of Jollof itself has been credited to the Wolof/Jollof/Djolof peoples of the Senegambia area, of which the dish gets its name. The peoples in the Senegambia basin had one of the earliest contacts with Europeans in West Africa. Over the centuries, there was an exchange of new goods to West Africa that might have been brought from the “New World” by way of Europe. Ingredients from the new world like tomatoes could have been mixed with already available ingredients to make the earliest Jollof Rice.

However, in discussing Jollof, we cannot forget the fable about Penda Mbaye and her pot of rice. A cliff notes summary is that as a chef in St. Louis Senegal, during French colonial rule, she used rice instead of barley for a one-pot dish. For the details, you can head over to my Jollof Rice recipe (Click Here). However, I am not too sure about this origin, nor am I even confident about the information I have on Penda Mbaye.

How the spread of Jollof Rice might help us understand when it was created

The Americas

The timeline for the popularized fable (set around the 1800s) does not make sense. The time does not directly intersect with transatlantic slavery, which was at its height in the early 1700s. ² The timeline is important as it might better explain the connection between Jollof Rice and Red Rice.

As previously mentioned, the Gullah and Geechee communities descended from enslaved Africans originally from Sierra Leone, Liberia and Gambia basin. Peoples from this area were mainly members of Mende, Mandinka, Bambara and Dyula ethnic groups who had well-established relations with the Wolof. ² The enslaved Africans from these groups brought with them cooking methods that might have included the original versions of Jollof Rice, which they might have picked up from the Wolof.

West Africa

The Dyula are important in the story of Jollof Rice as they might be the starting point for the dissemination of Jollof beyond the Wolof tribe. The Dyula(a Mande-speaking group) nomadic tradesmen had trading influence spreading from the Senegambian coast to as far east as Niger, and as far south as the coast of Ghana.^4,7 They were at the crossroads of an ancient trading system that included the exchange of goods from the forested regions of West Africa and Sahara regions of Northern Africa. As they set up trade posts across West Africa and even new states such as Banda, Bonduku and Gonja in Northern Ghana and Ivory Coast, their trading facilitated cultural exchange such as religion, language and food^{3, 4,7}. Based on the mixing of culture, this can be the best option for the spread of jollof rice across West Africa.

So who actually created Jollof Rice?

That is yet to be determined. But out of this dish, we really see the connections of culture across West Africa and the Atlantic. In my next post, I will speaking specifically on what makes each of West Africa’s Jollof Rice different.

References

1. NRC. (1996). Lost Crops of Africa: Volume I: Grains (Vol. 1). National Academy Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/2305

2. Schaffer, M. (2005). Bound to Africa: The Mandinka Legacy in the New World. History in Africa, 32, 321–369. https://doi.org/10.1353/hia.2005.0021

3. Jenkins, J. A. (1948). The Origin of the Cultivated Tomato. Economic Botany, 2(4), 379–392

.4. Fage, J. D. (1978). A History of Africa. Hutchinson.

5. McCann, J. C. (2009). Stirring the Pot: A History of African Cuisine. Ohio University Press.

6. Ruxton, G. (1910). Practical West African cookery. Chichester : J. W. Moore. http://archive.org/details/b28132762

7. https://www.britannica.com/place/western-Africa/The-wider-influence-of-the-Sudanic-kingdoms#ref516311