At an event in Abidjan in late October, Alexandre Quest Bede noticed someone staring at him. Then the stranger walked up to him with a T-shirt and asked for an autograph.
“He pointed at me excitedly and said: ‘You’re Monsieur Gnamakou, I know you from Instagram!’” recalls Bede at the poolside bar of Bissa, a boutique hotel in the upmarket Deux Plateaux neighbourhood on the eve of Abidjan cocktail week.
Gnamakoudji, often shortened to gnamakou, is a ginger juice and a beloved staple in francophone Africa, including Abidjan, the commercial capital of Ivory Coast.
For Bede, a doctor turned mixologist, gnamakou is a big go-to ingredient for cocktails and mocktails, highlighting the region’s many unheralded flavours. That playfulness with ingredients is on display at the second edition of Abidjan cocktail week, which runs from 31 October to 10 November.
Abidjan’s first cocktail week was held last year after six weeks of planning by Bede and his business partner, Yasmine “Afrofoodie” Fofana, a blogger and the founder of the Abidjan restaurant week.
The duo’s latest launch was a great opportunity to plug a gap. The cocktail week concept, already popular in Europe and North America, had been embraced by only a few African countries such as Nigeria, Ghana and South Africa. The festival is also the latest in a series of concerted efforts to encourage alcohol-loving Africans to return to their roots.
Across west and central Africa, communal drinking remains an integral part of commemorations of life and death, from funeral arrangements to evening pleasures at maquis and chop bars. But due in part to colonial-era stigmatisation and bans, local gins and other alcoholic drinks have long been seen as unsafe for consumption, inferior, and in the era of social media, not Instagram-worthy.
“There’s no reason why we should continue using a foreign language to speak to our ancestors,” says Bede, while holding a bottle of Aphro, a made-in-Ghana premium palm spirit.
The efforts to undo negative perceptions about homemade drinks in the region have begun to yield fruit. In Nigeria and Ghana, entrepreneurs Lola Pedro and Amma Mensah have entered the drinks industry with unique offerings: Pedro’s distilled palm spirit and the sugarcane rum brand Reign respectively.
In the former Ivorian capital of Grand-Bassam, about 21 miles east of Abidjan, an Ivorian-American couple’s home has become a microdistillery for the Vinqueur drinks range, which includes non-alcoholic syrups made from baobab and pineapple extracts, alongside vodka, gin, rum and wines made from mandarins and ginger.
“Yasmine and I, we don’t care what flavour is in the glass; we should just have Africa in the glass,” says Bede, who wants more Africans to see food and drink as soft power. “We’re not present on the global stage because we’re not enhancing our own techniques, not putting our own ingredients, not telling our own stories, simple as that. Francophone Africa is the last on the path, so we’re pushing super hard for that.”
For the second edition of Abidjan cocktail week, visitors are again choosing from curated menus of drinks fused with brands such as Aphro and Reign, alongside local elements.
This year, premium ticket holders also attended masterclasses in bartending. Bartenders from the Accra Bar Show festival, including Kojo Aidoo, the head of the Bartenders Guild Ghana, were also present to show solidarity, and to make drinks.
The goal, say the organisers of cocktail week, is to keep a fixed date every year so tourists can plan holidays around it. Its audience seem satisfied – and entertained.
One of them is Ademilade Afolabi, an Abidjan-based tech executive who loved the spirit of regional harmony at a session she attended. “Abidjan feels like African Union vibes … the barmen are from Ghana. I’m Nigerian dancing with this Cameroonian babe, and the song is Wizkid’s [a Nigerian singer].”
Afolabi adds: “There’s this whole ‘Africa to the world’ movement going on in terms of Afrobeats and fashion, so why not also alcohol? Most alcohol consumed [here], whether in fancy or less fancy places, is imported. If we start placing importance on locally made alcohol, it makes the market move from being importers to exporters.”
Besides a few sponsorship deals, participation fees from bars and ticket sales, Abidjan cocktail week is largely financed by its cofounders, who see the event as a labour of love. And they are pressing on regardless of any challenges, keen to build a legacy.
Fofana, who was born in Abidjan to a Malian-Senegalese father and Guinean mother, says: “It’s not what pays the bills … but the main thing for me with our events is to put my country [Ivory Coast] on the map as far as local ingredients and local talents are concerned. Our goal is [for people to] come and see what Africa also has to offer.”
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