Damata Abukaria gets up early in the morning and prepares food for her family. Today is a special day for the women of her village. It is the first day to harvest the Shea nuts in northern Ghana. The women in their brilliantly colored dresses gather just outside the village. They walk into the low Savannah grasslands of Western Africa on the same path that their ancestors traveled, to find a familiar group of "Karite" trees (Shea trees). | AS A CHILD she may have seen a new tree start growing. Each fall she would returned and seen it slightly larger. Now in her late 30's the tree might produce its first mature nuts. Damata may not realize it but that same tree will produce nuts for the next 8 generations. | FOR A PEOPLE so connected to their natural surroundings the sounds of these nuts hitting the ground is considered is a call to become apart of a tradition shared with their ancestor. It is understandable that to her this is more than just the harvest of a commodity. It is gather food for her family, a medicine to provide healing and protection from their environment, and it is the secret to her beautiful skin. | THE NUTS ARE taken back to the village and sorted. Over the course of the next few days the outer covering of the nut softens and removed by hand. She then prepares a small fire, by her house, and boils the nuts. The nuts are then spreads out on the red clay to dry in the sun for a couple of weeks. In the wooden mortar they are lightly pounded to crack the outer shell. She then removes the inner nut by hand rinses them. The shea nuts are set out to dry beside her house. In a few days Damata will open the nut and remove its precious content. | THE POWER OF the exclusively African butter remained a secret for centuries. When the western world shea butter it became a "must have" for natural skin care.
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