Waakye

Waakye is a Ghanaian dish of cooked rice and beans, commonly eaten for breakfast or lunch. The rice and beans, usually black eyed peas or cow beans, are cooked together, along with red dried sorghum leaf sheaths or stalks and limestone. The sorghum leafs and limestone give the dish its characteristic flavor and a red appearance and the sorghum is taken out before consumption. The word waakye is from the Hausa language and means beans. It is the contracted form of the full name shinkafa da wake which means rice and beans.

Waakye is commonly sold by roadside vendors. It is then commonly wrapped in banana leaf and accompanied by one or more of wele stew, boiled chicken eggs, garri, shito, vegetable salad of cabbage, onions and tomatoes, spaghetti or fried plantain.

The dish, which originated from the Hausa people, may be the origin of the rice and beans dishes commonly found in the Caribbean and South America, brought there through slave trade.