Hibiscus is a Personality (Notes from Accra)

🇬🇭 The Madina Market in Accra opens at 5:30am. By 6:15 the smell of grilled tilapia is everywhere. A woman named Auntie Akua sells hibiscus juice from a green cooler. Each serving is a tied sandwich bag with a corner bitten off. Twenty pesewas. Two and a half American cents on a bad currency day.

Hibiscus, in West Africa, is called bissap or sobolo or zobo depending on which country you are in and which auntie is making it. In Ghana it is sobolo. It is brewed from dried hibiscus flowers with pineapple, ginger, and clove. Sometimes a stick of cinnamon. Sometimes a bay leaf if the auntie is having a moment. The result is bright red, slightly tannic, and tastes like a Negroni that took a personal day.

Why I came back to Accra

I am in Accra for ten days. Jay is not. Magnus 🐻‍❄️ is not. (Ghana's pet import paperwork is a project we have not had the courage to undertake. The Samoyed stays in Copenhagen with my sister, who reports daily.)

This is my second time in Ghana. The first was 2015, working with a microfinance group in Cape Coast for eleven days. I was 27, in a hotel that had a generator that kicked in twice a night, and I lost ten pounds in nine days because of an over-acquaintance with the local groundnut soup. I have been thinking about Ghana for eleven years. I came back because of the bissap stall, which I remembered with the clarity I usually reserve for very expensive meals. Auntie Akua's stall is the same stall. Her cooler is a different cooler. The juice is the same juice.

The sandwich bag with the corner bitten off

Auntie Akua bites the corner off my bag with the precision of a sommelier. She has been doing this since 1997. She knows three customers by their car horn. She tells me, in the offhand way Ghanaians deliver information, that the trick to good sobolo is the clove and the patience. Mostly the patience.

She is 62. Her granddaughter, age 8, runs the till on Saturdays. The till is a tin tomato can with a slit. The granddaughter is taking advanced math at her school and explains, while making correct change in two currencies, that her teacher is a man who taught her uncle and her uncle's uncle. Auntie Akua nods. This is how it works.

The sandwich bag is the thing tourists photograph. (I am a tourist. I have photographed it.) For Auntie Akua and her customers, the bag is the cup. The bag is the cup the way a paper cup is the cup. The granddaughter would like to invest in a small reusable bottle system. Auntie Akua has not decided. The sandwich bag has worked for thirty years.

The Buka casting director three booths over

Three booths down, a man is being filmed eating banku. The camera is a phone on a tripod. The director, who I learn later is a man named Kojo who casts for a chain of buka restaurants on Instagram, is asking the man to chew slower. He calls it the slow chew. The man, who has just finished his shift at the post office and was planning to eat in peace, agrees, because Kojo is paying for the banku and the okro stew. The slow chew gets twelve takes.

(In Accra, in 2026, every Tuesday morning is a small film set.)

Kojo's account, which I look up later in the apartment in Cantonments, has 78,000 followers and a verification check mark and a series called The Slow Chew where ordinary Ghanaians eat ordinary food and discuss it with the unhurried seriousness of a Bordeaux sommelier. The post office worker, whose name is Kwame, eventually gets two takes that Kojo uses. Kojo pays him an additional 50 cedis (about four dollars) for his patience. Kwame uses it to buy banku for his son when he picks him up from school.

Easter Sunday at the hotel in Cantonments

Easter Sunday I am taken to brunch by a friend of a friend, a Ghanaian-British marketing director named Esi who has flown in for the holiday. The restaurant is on the top floor of a hotel in Cantonments. The buffet has waakye, jollof, kelewele, and an inexplicable platter of croissants. The saxophonist plays Careless Whisper twice. Both times unironically. By the second pass, Esi and I are laughing into our jollof.

Hibiscus juice arrives in a champagne flute. Esi calls it sobolo mimosa. The waiter, whose name is Daniel and who has been a server here since the hotel opened in 2014, nods approvingly. Esi proposes a toast to the sax player.

The sax player, whose name is Albert, was at the wedding she attended last summer in East Legon. He played Careless Whisper there too. He plays it everywhere. He has, in the words of his sister, made a career out of one George Michael song and zero shame. Albert is 51. He has three children and a small house in Adenta. He is the most relaxed man in any room he enters. Esi tips him in Ghana cedis and a card that says, in English: Albert, the sax.

What ten days in Accra actually costs

The numbers, because every travel piece eventually has to do this. Round-trip Copenhagen to Accra in May 2026: 7,800 Danish kroner (about €1,050). The apartment in Cantonments through Airbnb: €38 a night with a balcony. The taxi from Kotoka airport to the apartment: 90 cedis (€6). Breakfast at the market most mornings: 8 cedis (50 cents). The Easter brunch at the Cantonments hotel: 280 cedis a head (€18). The hibiscus mimosa: free with the brunch, refilled three times.

The wifi at the apartment was good. The wifi at the market was nonexistent and lovely. The wifi at Cafe Kawa, two blocks from Independence Square, was excellent and the cappuccinos were 22 cedis (€1.40). I worked there one afternoon and watched a man in a perfectly cut linen suit conduct three back-to-back business meetings without ever raising his voice. The cappuccino was, on a calorie-per-cedi basis, the best deal of the trip.

The Coke bottle did not survive

The plane home, six days later, smells like neem oil and shea butter. Auntie Akua sent me off with two liters of sobolo in a Coke bottle and a Tupperware of shea cream her cousin makes. The Coke bottle does not survive the security check at Kotoka. The shea cream does. It is still in my carry-on, six months later, where I refuse to retire it because it is the best smelling object I own.

What to bring back, what to leave

Bring the shea cream. Bring the kente fabric scraps from Tema if you can find them. Bring the cocoa, which is better than what you can buy in any European supermarket. Leave the sobolo (it does not survive the security check anyway). Leave the Careless Whisper saxophone solo as a memory, not a recording. Bring Kojo's Instagram handle if you want to feel like Tuesday morning is a film set.

I will be back. The Trip Ledger updates with Ghana for the second time. The 36.97 percent does not change. Some countries you log twice. Some countries you log forever.

The sobolo, in Auntie Akua's bag, is a personality. Eleven years on, the cup is still a sandwich bag with a corner bitten off. The granddaughter is still doing the math. The post office worker is still going to be a Slow Chew star. Albert is still playing Careless Whisper. Ghana is still Ghana.