What Mortars, Grinding Stones, and Herbs Reveal About Our Shared Soul

There’s a rhythm to an African kitchen that sings older than borders. The thud of a pestle meeting mortar. The scrape of pepper on stone. The soft clap of dough being folded, shaped, and blessed by the hands of someone who learned it from someone who learned it from someone long gone.

We might not talk about it much, but these ordinary objects—those mortars, pestles, grinding stones, calabashes, and even the way herbs are bundled and boiled—are sacred whispers from the past. They show us something most school textbooks never will: that Africa, for all her countless tribes and languages, is a continent of cousins.

Let’s start with the mortar and pestle.

You’ll find it in a Yoruba compound in Western Nigeria and in a Wolof village in Senegal. In an Asante home in Ghana and in the heart of a Kikuyu household in Kenya. A mother pounding yam in Abia State, Nigeria, might not speak the same tongue as her sister mashing matoke in Uganda, but the tools they’re using—and the rhythm of their pounding—would feel familiar.

Grinding stones are the same thing. Before electric blenders and supermarket spice packets, African people understood the power of pressure and patience. The pepper, onion, and locust bean were ingredients. And the stones that helped prepare them were more than kitchenware. They were heirlooms. we didn’t throw them away. Some were passed down like songs and stories.

And the herbs. Ah. That one is deep.

From the Yoruba ewe to the Dagara’s healing roots, from the Berber spice blends of North Africa to the forest-based remedies of the Congo Basin, Africans understood plants like kin. The same bitter leaf that shows up in a Cameroonian pot might appear in a Nigerian one, slightly different in name but identical in purpose. Not because there was some continental recipe book. But because the land spoke to its people, and they listened.

These similarities are not accidents.

They’re echoes.

Because long before the colonial masters arrived with compasses , African people were moving, mixing, migrating. Bantu speakers swept across the continent in one of the greatest population movements in human history—spreading language, farming, and food traditions. Trade routes connected Timbuktu to Mombasa, Kano to the Swahili Coast, like a pot of slow-simmered soup, was always being stirred and shared.

What we call “traditional” today was once revolutionary. And what we think of as “tribal” might, in fact, be continental.

But colonialism, with all its mischief, tried to slice those connections. It taught us to see difference before similarity. To say “this is Yoruba” or “this is Igbo” without realizing that both were using nearly identical stone tools to make similar soups, singing songs with drums that echo each other’s cadences.

We didn’t just share tools.

We shared a worldview. One where the earth was alive. One where food was not just not for eating but offering. One where the kitchen was a temple and the pestle a priest.

So what do we do with all this?

We remember.

Because when we see the same mortar in Malawi and Mali, the same herbs in Ghana and Guinea, we are seeing the fingerprints of unity. The remnants of a time before fences. The truth that despite our passports and our politics, Africa was never divided in spirit.

Maybe, just maybe, if we start with the kitchen, we can remember that our homes were never meant to be so separate.

And neither should we.

we should  never forget.