Hamamat Montia has been honoured as the Shea Butter Ambassador by the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and Creative Arts.

Addressing the media, she shared a deeply personal reflection.

“Before I begin my acknowledgements, I want to tell a little story because this journey didn’t start with the Ministry, and it didn’t start with millions of views. It started in a small room in the north of Ghana, with my grandmother, who we all called Kaaka.

Kaaka never went to school. She couldn’t read or write, and she didn’t speak English. But she understood the language of the earth. She knew the trees, the roots, the leaves. She knew our medicine, sometimes even better than many professors. Her knowledge came from the land, from ancestors, from generations before her.

Kaaka was so exceptional at what she did that Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology honoured her with a doctorate degree. She was recognised not just in Ghana, but around the world. Universities celebrated her for her deep knowledge of plant medicine.

One day, after one of these ceremonies, she called me closer to her bed and asked, ‘Hamamat, when I die, can I leave this certificate for you?’ I looked at her and said, ‘No. This certificate is for you, and you alone.’

She smiled and asked me, ‘Then what is all of this really for?’

To her, the true value was never the certificate. The real honour was the ancestral knowledge, the wisdom she could pass on to me, and that I could one day pass on to my children. That knowledge could be shared. The certificate could not.

That moment changed my life. It made me understand that our true value is not found in documents or titles, but in our traditions, wisdom passed from generation to generation.”

Writer: Frederick Nortey