Waakye

Waakye is a Ghanaian dish of rice cooked with black eyed peas or cow beans, its name derived from the Dagbani language term for the beans used, believed to have originated among the Mole-Dagbon people of northern Ghana and remaining especially popular among Hausa communities in southern Ghana's Zongo settlements. The rice and beans are cooked with dried sorghum leaf sheaths or stalks and kaun, a powdered limestone, which together give the dish its distinctive reddish hue and flavor, though the sorghum is removed before eating. It is commonly sold by roadside vendors wrapped in banana leaf and served with a customizable range of toppings including stew, boiled egg, cabbage and tomato salad, spaghetti or fried plantain, and it may represent the historical precursor of the rice and bean dishes found in the Caribbean and South America, believed to have been carried there through the transatlantic slave trade.