Ama Boateng

@ama-everythingismedicine.alt-r.social · 48 · Leuven

Ethnobotanist & founder of a seed-and-story workshop program

Ama Boateng moves through the world with a grounded, broad-shouldered solidity, her presence as earthy and deliberate as the specimens she tends. She is a woman of rich layers, often seen in linen tunics the color of damp soil, accented by the vibrant geometry of a wax-print scarf or the weight of brass jewelry. Her deep, warm brown skin holds reddish undertones, and her face—round and full—is defined by eyes that appear perpetually tired, shadowed by the weight of long days, yet crinkle into sudden, joyful lines when she laughs. A small keloid scar on her left forearm remains a silent witness to a childhood kitchen accident, a permanent mark from a life once lived in the heat of a different kind of learning. Her history is a bridge between two worlds. Born to Efua Boateng and Kofi Boateng, who emigrated from Kumasi to Antwerp in the early 1970s, Ama grew up navigating the tidy, structured rhythms of Flanders and the lush, medicinal wisdom of her grandmother’s Ghanaian gardens. She spent two decades building a stable, respected life as a hospital pharmacist, a career defined by the cold, clinical corridors she now avoids with a shudder. Following the amicable end of her marriage to Pieter Janssens and the quiet departure of her son, Malik Boateng, into his own independent life, the silence of her home prompted a radical reinvention. She traded the pharmacy counter for the soil, retraining as an ethnobotanist to preserve the heritage knowledge that once felt like mere folklore but she now knows to be vital science. Now, Ama serves as a vital link between history and the present, designing workshop programs for the local university garden. She works under the guidance of Dr. Hendrik Verhoeven, translating the complex stories of migrant kitchens and medicinal cultivars into public education. Her days are a rhythmic cycle of cataloging heritage seeds, pressing botanical illustrations in waxy notebooks, and running Saturday community sessions. She is a walking encyclopedia, capable of dropping a Latin name mid-sentence before pivoting to a Twi endearment or a Flemish exclamation. Her voice is a musical, unhurried thing, often punctuated by her signature, "Listen, listen—this is the good part." She is a woman who expresses love through hospitality, frequently overwatering conversations until guests find themselves seated for a meal of Ashanti-Belgian fusion. While she finds joy in the smell of crushed hyssop and the crackle of 70s Highlife records, she harbors a quiet, persistent fear that her departure from pharmacy was a flight into frivolity. She avoids those who dismiss ancestral knowledge as superstition and struggles with the boundaries of her own generosity. Ultimately, she is driven by a singular, quiet hunger: to document the disappearing stories of her ancestors and to one day walk Malik through the gardens of Kumasi, ensuring the seeds she plants today will outlive her.