Stirring the pot: gastrodiplomacy, identity negotiation and integration in the Ghana- Nigerian jollof war discourse

Food serves as a powerful cultural symbol through which identities, relationships and boundaries are negotiated. In West Africa, jollof rice anchors one of the region’s most visible cultural rivalries: an ongoing contest between Ghana and Nigeria, widely known as the “jollof wars,” over whose version of the dish reigns supreme. Though framed as playful banter, this rivalry is an underexamined site of identity work, especially within intra-African contexts where scholarship on food diplomacy has favored formal, state-led campaigns. Guided by Social Identity Theory and Critical Discourse Analysis, this qualitative study analyzes 150 jollof-related posts from YouTube and Facebook. Findings demonstrate that participants position jollof rice as a marker of belonging and national pride, using satire, exaggeration and humor to assert superiority while managing rivalry; and in diasporic spaces, rearticulate competition as a shared African identity. This study advances gastrodiplomacy as a bottom-up communicative practice rather than a top-down state strategy, foregrounding everyday discourse as central to how food becomes diplomatically meaningful.