In 1964 while still in her twenties, Barbara was awarded a technical aid 18-month scholarship by the Canadian government to study large-scale food management and interior decoration with top institutions and individuals across Canada. By 1967 Ghana’s government appointed her Ghana’s official hostess to the 1967 World Expo (the World’s Fair held in Montreal that year), and she prepared a Ghanaian banquet for 500 people, renting the equipment and staff she needed, and bringing Ghanaian ingredients with her. She returned to her work at the YMCA, but after a year announced to her parents, “Look, if I can go to Canada and do this kind of function for 500 people by myself, why am I still working for somebody?” Her experience gave Barbara the confidence to establish her own business, borrowing about $200 from Barclays Bank and insisting on doing it by herself.
Before leaving Canada after the Expo, she had dinner with some friends, and announced her aspirations: “I’m going home. I want to start my own business. I want something with F for food, fashion, and flowers. Find me a name.” One of her friends thought a while and said “But Barbara, you always do everything with flair anyway.” Bingo. “Flair Catering Services” was established in 1968, and has always been distinguished by its sophisticated and quality preparation and presentation of Ghanaian traditional dishes as well as cuisines from other countries. Barbara also established the nonprofit Flair Vocational Training Institute to help equip young people, especially young girls, with marketable skills in the hospitality industry. Over 1,500 young people from throughout Africa have been trained through her institute’s efforts.
Barbara exudes Ghana’s famed hospitality and generosity. Her disarming smile, humility, and infectious joy and optimism draw even strangers to her and make them feel special and welcome. In 2011 President Mills awarded her one of Ghana’s highest medals, the Order of the Volta, for distinguished service to the nation. A deep spirituality and sense of gratitude, coupled with boundless energy, sparkling creativity and belief in the value of hard work make her an inspiration to those around her. I can scarcely remember sitting around her generous dining room table without a host of family and visitors welcomed there.
However, hers is a tough love that has been tested during some dark days in Ghana. She defiantly closed her successful Accra restaurant, The Calabash, after military personnel began “bullying their way through, thinking they could come in and eat free.” She escaped by seconds being caught in the crossfire of a 1966 coup when she was the last person to leave the Ghana Broadcasting Company after cleaning up from filming a cooking show. She has weathered food, water, and power shortages, political and economic instability, and social upheaval with persistence and an unshakable confidence in the goodness of God. In short, Barbara epitomizes the “can do” attitude (what I call “betumi”) now recognized as a key ingredient for successful development anywhere.
Barbara decided early on to keep her company small enough that she could know and supervise her employees personally (several dozen now), and be close to the fifty or so students who attend her catering school each year. This was a conscious decision not to expand into a huge business, but to remain a small efficient one.
Long before “culinary tourism” became an official term, Barbara was regularly traveling to England, France, and North America with her staff and students, exposing them to international standards in the tourism industry while promoting Ghana’s cuisine and fashion with her signature “From Ghana with Love” extravaganzas. She could raise many thousands of dollars in a single night while showcasing Ghanaian fashion designers, floral arrangements, and foods. An advocate and role model for women’s rights, she has long been an active member of the professional women’s group Zonta International.
Now in her seventies, Barbara shows few signs of slowing down. She recently single-handedly began a campaign to upgrade food safety and sanitation skills in Ghana’s informal and semi-formal hospitality industry. She has begun by organizing courses that are being expanded to include more sites, and is hopeful that it will soon be possible to establish a nationwide certification program. In characteristic giving fashion she welcomes this opportunity to share her culinary expertise and stories with a larger audience. She has also recently broken ground on a new site and embarked on fulfilling a life-long dream: to expand her current catering school into an African Culinary Institute, capable of educating students to prepare not only Ghana’s regional specialties and Asian and Western dishes, but eventually highlighting regional food from across sub-Saharan Africa, from west to east to south.
2 Crane, Louise. Ms. Africa: Profiles of Modern African Women, Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1973, p. 16.
INTRODUCING GHANA
Ghana is vibrant and intensely alive. Its essence is difficult to capture, for it is a collage of innumerable constantly shifting sights and sounds and smells:
• Fishermen straining and singing in tune with the rhythm of the waves as they stand on the sand along coconut tree-lined coasts and pull in nets
• Wooden pestles rhythmically thumping in wooden mortars, pounding boiled cassava and plantain or African yams into fufu while skillful hands turn the dough
• Flutes, drums, keyboards, electric guitars moving bodies and feet and voices in fields, churches, and nightclubs, day and night
• Vendors streaming along streets gracefully balancing heavy loads on their heads or calling out and waving phone cards, plastic bags of plantain chips, peanuts, tiger nuts, whole pineapples, dish towels, sunglasses, dog chains, CDs, chewing gum, green South African apples, chocolate bars, newspapers and magazines, soccer balls, etc., etc. … a constantly moving roadside market passing by car windows
• Neatly stacked peeled oranges and coconuts ready to quench thirst
• Smiling children eating sweet mangos with juice dripping down their arms
• Fashionable young women in bright, dramatic outfits and high heels with elaborate hairstyles smartly moving between offices and shops
• Musical laughter and loud voices everywhere
• Constant construction, with cement and glass skyscrapers and malls and restaurants and overpasses and freeways popping up everywhere (sometimes clogging roads and drains and straining water and electrical systems)
• Gorgeous textiles, classic and new
• A hopeful, youthful energy in the air, fueled by investors, oil, and the “African maker” movement
• New technology everywhere—cars, computers, notebooks, i-pads, and ubiquitous cell phones
• The faithful kneeling on prayer mats or chanting
• Opulent gold jewelry and huge, dramatic umbrellas and pomp displayed at durbars with kings and attendants sitting in glory
• In the north, cattle grazing, vegetables and yam slices drying in the sun, skilled leatherwork and woven fabrics, mosques, distinctive round mud-walled architecture, colorful woven Bolga baskets
• Rivers and lakes, tropical rainforest, elephants and crocodiles, red dusty lateritic soil, Guinea fowl along roads and fields, roosters crowing
• A swirling mix of peoples, national and international: Ga, Akan, Dagbani Ewe, Fanti, American, Nigerian, Indian, European, Syrian, Chinese …
In 1957, at the time of independence, the “Gold Coast” renamed itself after the ancient wealthy West African medieval kingdom of Ghana famous for its gold. The Republic of Ghana is over 92,000 square miles, making it slightly smaller
