INSIDE BATTLE OF JOLLOF WHERE WEST AFRICA’S FAVORITE ARGUMENT TURNED INTO A CULTURAL EVENT
Battle of Jollof does not settle the argument. It makes the argument the event. Six editions in, the festival has transformed one of West Africa’s favorite rivalries into a high-energy meeting point for culture, competition and community.
By Asteroid Media
Ask a Nigerian and a Ghanaian who makes better jollof and you have already made one mistake: assuming the conversation will end quickly.
The argument has survived family gatherings, Twitter wars, TikTok debates, international celebrities and enough side-eyes to qualify as its own diplomatic crisis. Jollof is food, obviously, but across West Africa it is also memory, nationalism, migration and a strangely effective way of identifying your people in a room.
Battle of Jollof understood that the argument was never really about rice.
On September 12, 2026, the event returned for its sixth edition, taking over Brooklyn’s Major R. Owens Health & Wellness Community Center with the now-familiar ingredients: a jollof competition, Nigeria versus Ghana basketball, music, fashion and several hours of culturally sanctioned bragging. Complex described the day as a celebration of the African diaspora, with Wale, Tobe Nwigwe, Angela Yee, Akbar Gbajabiamila, Guapdad4000 and NBA player Saddiq Bey among the performers and guests.
By the end of the night, everyone had something to argue about.
Ghana won the jollof competition. Nigeria won the basketball game 60–56.
Perfectly balanced, if you ask nobody from either country.
Before The Battle Became A Battle
The idea began in 2019 with Arinze Emeagwali, a Nigerian-American brand marketer raised in Queens. He had grown up eating jollof, but later began recognising the dish as something larger: a cultural shorthand that could instantly create conversation between West Africans.
His original instinct was not to settle the argument. It was to use it.
Emeagwali partnered with sports and media executive TJ Adeshola and Abdul Karim Abdullah, founder and CEO of AfroFuture, to bring Battle of Jollof to life in New York in 2020. The founders envisioned a space where friendly national rivalry could sit beside a bigger idea of shared Black and African identity.
The structure was almost mischievously simple: if Nigeria and Ghana were already competing over jollof, why not let them compete on a basketball court too?
Food gave the event its cultural memory. Basketball gave it theatre. Music gave it atmosphere.
Suddenly, an internet argument had somewhere physical to live.
The formula worked because the two competitions speak the same language.
Basketball produces national pride without requiring explanation. So does jollof.
The first three editions kept both contests largely centred on Nigeria and Ghana, and Ghana reportedly dominated the early culinary rivalry, winning the first three jollof competitions. By 2023, Battle of Jollof had reached Nike’s New York headquarters, where Victor Oladipo, Jidenna, Kayvon Thibodeaux and others joined an edition supported by Nike NYC and WhatsApp. Ghana won both the basketball and food contests that year.
By 2024, however, the kitchen had expanded beyond the two loudest participants in the Jollof Wars.
Restaurants representing Nigeria, Ghana, Liberia and Senegal entered the cook-off, a particularly important shift considering jollof’s history is widely traced back through Senegambian food traditions and the old Wolof/Jolof region. Ghana took the food title again, while Nigeria finally claimed the basketball game 53–52.
That expansion quietly improved the entire concept.
Because the great internet mistake of the Jollof Wars is acting as though only Nigeria and Ghana own the conversation. Across West Africa, jollof has travelled, mutated and become local in different ways. Liberia has its version. Sierra Leone has its version. The Gambia does. Senegal has the culinary lineage that predates the online argument altogether.
Battle of Jollof is at its best when the joke opens the door to that history.
Then Nigeria Finally Won The Rice
The fifth edition in 2025 pushed the event into another scale.
Roughly 2,000 people gathered at Pier 36 in New York for an event combining the cook-off, a diaspora-focused one-on-one basketball tournament and the Nigeria-Ghana game. NBA and WNBA players, musicians and chefs moved through the same space, while the National Basketball Players Association donated $5,000 in the event’s honour to One Love Community Fridge.
And after years of culinary humiliation, Nigeria finally got its moment.
Chef Ope Amosu defeated Ghanaian chef Nana Wilmot to secure Nigeria’s 2025 jollof title, while Team Nigeria also won the basketball game 80–74. The event had evolved from a funny diaspora gathering into something with legitimate cultural pull.
Battle of Jollof’s official world now includes merchandise inspired by places including Lagos, Accra, Liberia, Senegal, Ethiopia and Anambra, another sign that the brand increasingly sees itself as something wider than a yearly Nigeria-Ghana argument.
Season Six Came With Receipts
Which brings us back to Brooklyn.
The September 12 edition staged a three-country jollof competition alongside the headline Nigeria-Ghana basketball matchup. Ghana reclaimed culinary bragging rights, while Nigeria’s 60–56 victory on the court reportedly completed a third consecutive basketball win.
Wale performed at halftime, while the wider crowd mixed athletes, musicians, media figures and members of New York’s African diaspora. After the main event, the celebration continued in Manhattan with an official Battle of Jollof afterparty featuring Jerk X Jollof and Madrid collective ZSONGO during New York Fashion Week.
The interesting thing is how naturally all these pieces now coexist.
The jerseys matter.
The food matters.
The soundtrack matters.
The outfits definitely matter.
And the basketball game matters just enough for people to shout at each other while remembering that the person in the opposing jersey probably has an auntie who would feed them immediately after.
A Rivalry That Actually Builds Community
Battle of Jollof works because it understands the difference between rivalry and division.
The founders have consistently described the event as a celebration of the similarities within the African and Black diaspora rather than an attempt to erase national differences. Adeshola has spoken about pride in both shared experiences and cultural nuance, while Abdullah describes the platform as a place to honour stories and allow younger generations to see their culture treated as mainstream.
That might be the real reason the event has lasted six editions.
You do not attend because somebody will finally determine the objectively superior jollof. No amount of voting could accomplish that. Whoever loses will simply accuse the room of bias and return next year louder.
You attend because the disagreement itself feels like home.
For diasporic communities, especially, food can perform a remarkable kind of time travel. One plate can bring back a family kitchen, a December holiday, a city thousands of miles away or a parent whose recipe has never been written down.
Battle of Jollof takes that intimacy and blows it up to arena scale.
Six years after three friends decided to turn familiar West African banter into an event, the joke has become infrastructure for community.
Nigeria can have the basketball score.
Ghana can keep this year’s rice trophy.
The real winner is an argument good enough to keep bringing everybody back to the same table.