These Photos Show the Women Behind the Shea Butter in Your Beauty Products
When Abena Boamah launched her shea-butter skincare line, Hanahana Beauty, last year, she was relying on an aunt in Ghana to send large shipments of shea butter to her home in Chicago. “She was sending so much she had to mail it in batches, so for days I’d be getting packages of shea butter at my door,” says Boamah. As the small company grew, Boamah knew she’d need a better way to source the moisturizing seed butter, but she wanted to make sure that the money was going directly to the people who made it.
So, last summer, she flew to Tamale, a city in Northern Ghana, and found the Katariga Women’s Group, a collective of about 60 women making shea butter. Boamah spent a month with the women, learning about their process and documenting it through photos and video. “It was such an inspiring learning experience for me that I wanted everyone else to know about it too,” she says. In December, she mounted a photo exhibition about the Katariga women in Ghana’s capital city of Accra; the exhibition will be on display at South by Southwest in Austin in March.
The photographs capture a side of the skincare industry that most people who use these products never see. By sharing them, Boamah hopes to connect other women’s groups with small buyers like herself. “I want to bring more visibility to these producers so they’re able to make more money and not have to go to the market every six days or wait six months for a new buyer to come,” she says. Learn more about her project, and donate to help Boamah bring the exhibition to more cities this year.
Photo by Abena Boamah Acheampong1/5It all starts with a shea nut.
In Northern Ghana, where much of the world’s shea butter is produced, collectives of women make a living by processing the nuts of the shea tree into butter. The Katariga women begin by buying shea nuts in bulk or collecting the shea nuts from dense forests of shea trees, then boiling them for about half an hour until their shells come off, as in the photo above. Next, the women will grind the nuts, either by hand or with a mechanical grinder, until they're fine. After, they'll roast the nuts over an open fire, then put them through a milling machine that turns them into a paste.
Photo by Abena Boamah Acheampong2/5Every batch is whipped by hand.
The women add hot water to the shea paste and whip it with their arms for 30 minutes to an hour. The whipping is done when curds form at the top of the pot. The quicker it whips, the better the nut, the women say.
Photo by Abena Boamah Acheampong3/5The shea curds are boiled over an open flame.
The curds are separated from the water and cooked again for about an hour. When the curds are boiled, black dirt rises to the top. The women skim the dirt and separate it. Later, they’ll form the dirt into blocks and use it to feed the flames. The oil that remains in the pot gets packed into bags and left to set. Once it cools, the shea butter will remain solid unless it’s melted down again. The butter is an amazing natural hair and skin moisturizer, and it also provides UV protection. Some people use it as a cooking oil.
Photo by Abena Boamah Acheampong4/5The finished shea butter has dozens of uses.
Samantha (above), one of the leaders of the Katariga women, uses shea butter on her lips. Samantha took Boamah under her wing. At first they talked through a translator because Boamah only speaks Twi, and Samantha would only speak Dagbani, another Ghanaian language. "But, after a while, Samantha decided she’d speak Twi to me,” Boamah says, as a sign of her trust. When Boamah went back to Ghana in December, she gave her photos to the Katariga women. "It's become quite common for people to go to Africa, take pictures of people, and blast it all over social media without ever thinking of their subjects again," Boamah says. "There was no way I wasn't going to give the women their pictures. I feel empowered when I see myself in a photos; I wanted to give them a chance to feel empowered by seeing themselves."
Photo by Abena Boamah Acheampong5/5The shea butter is sold in local markets and across the world.
Besides local markets, the main avenue for selling shea butter is large distributors, who’ll then sell it to skincare, haircare, and other companies all over the world. Hanahana, which means "flowing" and "malleable" in Twi, now uses shea butter exclusively from the Katariga women. Boamah hopes to encourage other small buyers to connect with women's collectives and buy shea butter straight from the source. “Even though we live in different parts of the world, we have something in common, which is that we are black women making products, and our art has often been capitalized outside of our control,” Boamah says. She recalls Memunatu, one of the Katariga women saying to her, “I wake up every day, and I do this and it makes me happy, very happy, but I am tired. Ma bre paa.” “We do all this work, and it does make us happy as creatives," says Boamah. "But if you’re not being monetarily appreciated and if people don’t know your story, it can be extremely hard to grow or sustain any work.”
