Rose Asonge does not know how old she is. She puts it somewhere between 75 and 85 and does not seem troubled by the gap. What she does remember is how many farming seasons she has seen, which in her part of the world is the more useful number anyway. Seasons tell you about rain, harvests, hunger and work. A birthday tells you very little.
I have watched people from Europe hear this and immediately reach for sympathy. Rose finds that funny.
The HR department nobody appointed
Officially, Rose is one of the women who makes Shea butter. Unofficially, she runs human resources, and she has never seen a job description in her life.
She knows everyone in the village, every family, every history, every quiet feud. Whatever the problem is, Rose finds a way through it. In a cooperative where more than thirty women decide everything by consensus, and nothing passes until the entire group agrees, the woman who can get thirty people to a shared answer is not a nice extra. She is the machinery. You can read how that decision process works in Love at Our Shea Butter Co-op, and I promise it is stranger and more effective than any meeting culture I have worked in.
The greeting that ruins your composure
Rose greets people with a dance. Not a small polite one either.
I have arrived in that village tired, dusty and worried about a shipment, and been met with a full performance of delight from a woman who has buried a husband and a daughter. It gets me every time, and I have stopped pretending otherwise. If you ever wonder why I keep getting on planes to a place with no reliable electricity, that is a decent part of the answer.
What she has carried
Rose's husband died when her youngest child was still very small, and she raised all five children by herself. She now cares for four grandchildren, whose mother died giving birth to the youngest of them.
Read those two sentences again and then read what she actually says about her life:
"I'm happy that I had an opportunity to take care of my children and grandchildren. I am sure they are doing well and one day they will take care of me. And that is the most important thing in life."
The word in that quote I keep getting stuck on is opportunity. We would have said burden. She said opportunity, and she meant it, and she was not performing resilience for a visitor. This is the philosophy people in the village call Ubuntu, roughly "I am because we are", and it is not a poster on a wall there. It decides who eats when food is short and who raises the children when a mother dies. More about how that hit me the first time in how FairTale GHANA really began.
The marks on her hands
Marking the body is old work in Northern Ghana, and it is not decoration in the way a tattoo usually is in Europe. Across the peoples of the north the marks have carried identity and clan, protection, and the passage from one stage of life to the next. Some are made in early childhood, others much later. The tradition also goes well past the face: women here carry patterns on their hands, forearms and shoulders.
Rose's are a record. She has told me that the marks note the important events of a life, added as they happen, so that by the time you are somewhere between 75 and 85 your arms carry the things worth remembering. She explained it to me once and I lost half the detail on the way home, which is my failing and not hers. Next time I am bringing a camera and letting her tell it herself.
What I am sure of is this. The woman who decides whether a batch of Shea butter is good enough has her own history written on the hands she checks it with.
The elder who teaches the craft
Rose has made Shea butter through more seasons than she can count, and the younger women learn the craft from women like her.
This matters commercially, not only sentimentally. Every one of the eight steps can be done badly, and the mistake always shows up later in the butter. Nuts dried wrong, kernels roasted a little too long, paste whipped by someone whose arms gave up early. There is no machine and no laboratory correcting for it. There is an old woman who can tell by looking, and who will tell you.
When quality is discussed at our cooperative, Rose's name comes up. We have learned not to bet against her opinion on butter. The full process is here: how our Shea butter is made.
Sorting Shea nuts with Rose. She is faster than me and too polite to say so.
Rose's forecast
Rose says our Shea butter production will grow at least five times in the next few years.
That is a bolder projection than anything in my own business plan, and she made it without a spreadsheet. It is also not a wish. The cooperative's capacity already runs ahead of our orders, which means the group could produce more tomorrow if the demand were there. Rose has apparently decided the demand is coming.
Given her record, I would rather be on her side of that bet than against it.
Come and see the women at work on Instagram. Rose does not know how old she is, and she is still the one deciding whether a batch is good enough.
FAQ
Who are the women in the FairTale GHANA cooperative?
More than thirty women in a village in Northern Ghana who own and run the cooperative themselves. They set their own standards, decide who joins, and make decisions by consensus.
Who teaches new members to make Shea butter?
The elders. Women like Rose, who have made butter through decades of seasons, train the younger members until their batches meet the cooperative's standard.
What do the marks on the women's hands mean?
In Northern Ghana marks on the skin have long carried identity, clan, protection and the passage between stages of life, and they are not limited to the face. Rose's own marks record important events of her life, added over the years as they happened.
Why do some of the women not know their exact age?
Birth records were not routinely kept in rural areas of the region when the older generation was born. Many elders count time in farming seasons instead, which for their purposes has always been the more practical measure.
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