Stunning! Meet a 90-Year-Old Retired NUTRITIONIST | Kafui interviews Mrs. Charlotte Brookman-Amissah

A Life Well Seasoned: A Conversation with Mrs. Charlotte Brookman Amissah

Nine days before her 90th birthday, retired nutritionist Mrs. Charlotte Brookman Amissah sits down with Kafui Dey for a conversation that spans colonial-era Ghana, wartime Britain, Edinburgh kitchens, northern Ghana postings, and nearly three decades of feeding patients, nurses and students across the country's public health system. Quietly spoken, precise, and occasionally wry, she reflects on a life shaped by discipline, movement, and a mother who ran Saturday chores with the rigour of a head of department.

On Turning 90

She does not feel any different. She cannot quite believe she is approaching 90. She has never particularly liked the fuss that comes with birthdays — the pomp, the attention — and says so with characteristic directness. She is a shy person. She has been kept in the dark about whatever her family is planning and considers this a good thing. At this age, she says, you do not want surprises. You never know how they will turn out.

What Nutritionists Actually Do

When most people hear nutritionist, they think food. Mrs. Amissah's training was broader than that. She studied institutional and catering management at the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science, covering not just the kitchen but the full apparatus of institutional life — housing students, managing stores, overseeing hygiene, running the books. Her internship at a teacher training college in Bumley, Kent — formerly the residence of the Archbishop of Rochester, with its own chapel — took her through every department: assistant cook, dining room, stores, student housing, and finally the bursar's paperwork. That rounded experience, she says, was what made her adaptable when she returned to Ghana and found herself posted to a nurses training college rather than the hospital kitchen she had expected.

What Ghanaians Eat and What Worries Her

She is direct: Ghanaians have adopted too much Western food and moved away from the traditional diet, which she considers genuinely healthy. The bigger problem is preparation and proportion. Palm soup is a good example — vegetables, garden eggs, shrimps, mushroom, some smoked fish, that is all right. The issue is what arrives on the plate alongside it. A mountainous bowl of fufu surrounded by six pieces of meat, crab, fish, and whatever else. Too much protein, she says, and far too much carbohydrate. The carbohydrate is the main culprit for the obesity she now sees in children who did not exist in her time. The recommended meat portion is a quarter pound — about the size of a fist. When she tells Kafui this, he holds up his fist. That, she confirms, is enough.

Her advice is simple: a well-balanced diet, cut down on carbohydrates, increase protein and vegetables, eat more fruit even if it is expensive, and at least two or three times a week. Eggs are healthy — but not fried in a pool of oil, which is the typical Ghanaian preparation. Boiled or lightly scrambled is better. The fist rule applies to fufu as well, though she acknowledges that most Ghanaians would look at a fist-sized portion and think you were joking.

She also recalls the community nutrition vans that used to travel around Ghana in the 1970s — the Information Services Department vehicles with loudspeakers, stopping in villages to advise people on nutrition, health, and current affairs. She does not know when that stopped. She thinks it should come back.

The Hardest Part of the Work

The most challenging part of her career was not the kitchen under pressure or the institutional logistics. It was the patients who were referred to her for dietary advice, given a detailed diet sheet, and came back worse because they had not followed it. Usually she would then ask the patient to bring a family member to the next appointment — someone who would be at home, who could be advised alongside the patient and help ensure the diet was followed. Diabetic patients were the most difficult. When you tell someone who has been eating six fingers of plantain their whole life that they are now allowed one, the look on their face, she says, is not happiness. But it is for their health.

A Childhood at Achimota

She was born in Accra but grew up on the Achimota School campus, where her father taught history, geography, Latin and Fante. Life on campus was peaceful and full. They had the swimming pool, the Aborum, a big garden behind the house with all sorts of fruits. She remembers picking yaw — the small black velvet fruit — and running around with the boys because her two older sisters were close in age and often left her out, so she found her companions among the younger boys instead. She climbed trees. She played doctor with her youngest brother, who was assigned the role of physician while she and her elder siblings held a cat still and he prodded it with a pin. Their mother arrived, shouted at them, and they let the cat go.

Her father distributed all three daughters to different secondary schools — the eldest to Holy Child, the second to Achimota, and Charlotte to Wesley Girls. She never asked why. He also took the family every weekend to visit castles, botanical gardens, and historical sites — Cape Coast, Elmina, the Aburi Botanical Gardens where she first saw nutmeg growing on a tree and a guide cut one open to show them the inside. When they moved to London, the same education continued: Kew Gardens, Westminster Abbey, Buckingham Palace. She was there for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 — standing in a prominent spot in London, watching the procession go by. She is a fan of the royal family. She collected the magazines.

Wesley Girls and the Year Before London

She went to Wesley Girls in 1951 as part of the pioneering intake when the school moved to its new hilltop site in Cape Coast. Only four blocks and a chapel then. She was happy from the start — she knew a friend there already, Kate Akosa, and the housemother was a family friend who looked after her. She recalls Miss Compton, the strict English principal who ran a tight ship. You did not want to be sent to Miss Compton. Even her walk was enough to make the girls nervous. The lesson that stayed was discipline and time-consciousness — wake up at 5:30, bath, breakfast, prayers, class, chores. Her least favourite chore was the bathrooms. Too many people using them.

She stayed only one year. Her father was appointed liaison officer for Ghanaian students in London and left for the UK. She followed after the first year.

The Journey to London and a Life in Britain

She sailed to England on the MV Apapa in 1952, during its sixth voyage. The sea was smooth until the Bay of Biscay, where the water turned rough and the dining room grew emptier each day as passengers succumbed to seasickness. She was not affected. They docked briefly in the Canary Islands, which she found beautiful, and then continued to Liverpool where her father was waiting. She spent the drive to London with her eyes wide open, watching the unfamiliar landscape go by.

She completed her secondary education at Streatham Hill and Clapham High School by 1955, placed two years above her Ghana form level and forced to work hard, particularly in Latin. She passed. She was the only black girl in the school. There was, she says, no discrimination at all. Not from classmates, not from teachers. She thinks the dynamic changed when large numbers of Caribbean migrants arrived and people began to feel their jobs were threatened — a pattern she recognises as similar to what has happened in South Africa with other African migrants.

After completing her diploma at Edinburgh — two years of study followed by the internship in Kent and a final exam — she worked at Shell headquarters in London, cooking for thousands of staff. The sauce section was the hardest: a battery of frying pans, orders coming in for ten omelettes at once, the stove blazing, and no room for mistakes. She worked under skilled chefs in a kitchen where every role was specialised — a sauce chef, a pastry chef, a roast chef — and learned speed and precision under pressure.

Marriage, the North, and Returning to Work

She met her husband at the British Council in Edinburgh, where Ghanaian students were introduced to each other and where they were taught ballroom dancing. He was studying forestry at Edinburgh University. She says she was not a good dancer. He was. She danced with him anyway.

She returned to Ghana in December 1959 for the wedding — her father, by then appointed Ghana's first ambassador to Ethiopia, could not give her away, so a family friend, Sir Tsikata McCartey, stood in. The ceremony was at the University of Legon. She wore ivory with embroidery, no train, full skirt. It was nice.

Her husband was posted to Yendi. Then they went back to England for a year while he studied at Oxford. Then back to the north again — Nalongo, Tamale. Four years in the north in total. She could not work. She raised her children and absorbed herself in family life. Her mother, she says, was a jack of all trades — she sewed, crocheted, baked bread, made tatale and beans for students at Achimota after siesta, and during the Second World War made toys and supplied them to Kingsway. Charlotte thinks the cooking interest probably came from watching her.

In 1965 she finally applied for a position at the Nutrition Division of the Ministry of Health. She remembers the exact date she started at Korle Bu: 1st December 1965. She had been waiting to get back to work. The four years of raising children had not diminished that readiness.

A Career in Motion

From Korle Bu she was posted to Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital in Kumasi, but found the catering department too small to accommodate three staff. The secretary offered her the option of running the nurses training college instead, overseen by the domestic bursar, with an additional attachment to the child welfare clinic. She stayed eight years. Then she transferred back to Komfo Anokye's main hospital kitchen, where the industrial catering training from her Edinburgh years finally came fully into its own. She stayed there until retirement in 1996 — taking one additional year on contract before finally stepping back.

At the child welfare clinic she ran demonstration sessions for mothers, showing them how to prepare weaning foods for their babies, explaining how to sift maize flour properly for ablamu so there was no residue the child could not digest. She saw babies return months later visibly healthier. She saw the food aid introduced after 1983 — bulgur wheat, unfamiliar and difficult to work with — and taught communities how to grind it and make porridge before it hardened like rock. She dealt with visiting surgical teams from Europe who came annually to treat cleft lip and palate patients, and provided them with midday snacks and lunch.

Her proudest professional memory: a member of staff who always complained that she was too fussy and too strict. The woman left Ghana, went to the UK, and wrote to Mrs. Emisa to thank her. Working there, she had seen that the standards were exactly what she had been taught. Some years later, she wrote again to say she had been promoted to supervisor. Reading that, Mrs. Emisa says, she felt great.

On the Hardest Thing About Growing Old

Loneliness. You hear that a friend is gone. Two days later, another one is gone. After a while your circle begins to disappear and if you have nothing to fill the time with, you feel it. She fills hers with gardening in the summer — a small plot that yields quite a lot — twice-daily walks with Chance the labradoodle, and time with her grandchildren abroad. Chance came into the family because her youngest granddaughter, aged thirteen, called a family meeting, dressed in a jacket and trousers, connected a presentation to the television, and made a formal argument for why the household should have a dog — complete with health benefits and reasons. A visitor present that evening said the case was solid. Chance was named by Mrs. Amissah: he was there by chance.

The Meal That Is Her Life

Grilled chicken. Lots of vegetables — broccoli, carrots, cauliflower. Baked potatoes, no butter, split in half. No sugar, no pepper anymore — she gave both up for health reasons and does not miss the pepper at all. Occasionally, she allows herself some Cadbury fruit and nuts chocolate. That, she says, is enough.

Her Final Word

Train your child the way you want them to go. Discipline them well. Make sure they know you love them — you do not have to say the words, but hold them occasionally, make them feel it. Cook with them. Make them independent. And eat a balanced diet. A little protein, a little carbohydrate, a lot of vegetables, some fruit whenever you can afford it. It is not complicated. It just requires attention.