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TABLE OF CONTENTS
★ Women
★ The battle of the medicated soaps
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(a) Market
The discovery of soap itself is difficult to trace, as it may have occurred independently in different parts of the world.
After all, toss some cooking grease into a campfire, let it mix with wood ash, and you’ll see bubbles form: the earliest sign of soap.
When it comes to Black Soap, many credit the Yoruba people as its original creators — the inventors of the now globally recognized dark bar.
One of the largest cultural groups in Africa, the Yoruba number over 40 million worldwide. Their influence spans Nigeria, the Republic of Benin, and Togo. Deeply rooted in tradition, their ancestral knowledge—including the making of black soap, mostly handcrafted by women—continues to shape skincare practices and herbal medicine to this day.
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Black soap’s journey across the continent is part of an oral griot-like tradition by the women of West Africa.
Among the pepper sellers of Yoruba markets, the recipe for black soap was shared with Ghanaian women by these Nigerian traders.
This is why the Ghanaian name for black soap is Alata Samina, which translates to “pepper trader’s soap”, in the Akan dialect (spoken primarily in the Ashanti region of Ghana).
In Yoruba, the word alata similarly means “a seller of pepper,” tying both languages and histories together through the legacy of trade.
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Even travelers weren’t immune to the charm of black soap. According to James Welsh, an English explorer of the 16th century who journeyed through the Benin River region, the soap carried a fragrance reminiscent of violet.
