Community Needs and African Museum

I thought I would talk with Samuel Obeng about the smoky spinach stew the chefs serve at his Bronx restaurant, Papaye, but he steered the conversation toward weightier matters. “I want to set up an African cultural center here in the Bronx,” he told me. “In Manhattan, they have a museum about sex! So why can’t I have an African museum? We can teach our kids how people back in Ghana dress, how they talk. We can teach our kids how to drum.”

Obeng, who is 49, came to New York 22 years ago, settling, like most of the city’s 27,000 Ghanaians, within bunting distance of Yankee Stadium. A serial entrepreneur, he filled the conversation with the words “innovation” and “efficiency,” intoning them like blessings. With the authority of someone who has already made it, he noted the need for his community to commit itself to its American present, not its Ghanaian past. And yet he has a preservationist’s instinct. There is his dream of a museum, of course, as well as the restaurant that he bought for the ways it connects him, and his friends, to Africa.
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The day I visited Papaye, the call of the homeland was on display. A TV glowed green with a soccer pitch — Ghana versus Senegal in the Africa Cup of Nations — and before the place was even open, Ghanaians stood outside peering in, waiting for the greatest-hits collection of dishes that they miss: starchy mashes called fufu; peanut-butter soups with rice balls; the spicy, smoky spinach stew, thickened with ground pumpkin seeds, so obsession-inducing that I eventually ended up with three versions of it in my fridge. By midday, the place had the intimacy of your favorite uncle’s rec room, only for the whole neighborhood. Customers slurped funky soups, nodding along to the talk and the music, its chewy rhythms bouncing around the small dining room.

“Music is very important to Ghanaians!” Obeng said. “I want to have a band at the restaurant, so people really experience the culture.” He imagined it as an attraction to draw customers (“I’ve had white people eating here, from Brooklyn!”), but just as much, it seemed, as a means to help hold onto his Ghanaian past.

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