manyiwa's musings

There I said it! But I'm not here to make baseless statements. No, that would be unladylike. So here below are my reasons for that statement. 

In my previous blog post about the benefits of shea butter for skin, you may recall that I talked about it’s moisturizing properties for skin. Well let's start from there - more specifically from the root of the hair…ahem, matter.

There’s a lot of craze about Shea butter and rightfully so! If magic could be bottled and sold, it would be labeled Shea Butter.

But before we get all excited let’s start with the basics. Shea butter made from the fruit of the shea tree, mainly found in West Africa.

As I watched the women make shea butter earlier this year, I wondered what the interesting fist-sized balls they were using for the fire were made of. I curiously followed the process from grinding all the way to the molten shea butter (all the while imagining the end result and the different kinds of whipped butter and body scrub concoctions I could make with this!) and still couldn’t figure out the origin of these balls.

Shea butter’s journey from shea nut to butter is a beautiful undulating journey. A journey intertwined in the lives of several industrious women whose joy is found in bringing a decades old tradition to the world. Little Naa’s* mom woke her up mornings at 4am in their little town in Tamale Ghana one day, to participate in the making of “nku” (shea butter in the local dialect).