MAIZE, SLAVERY, AND AFRICAN STOMACHS

COO

Food—or rather the lack of it—has now become truly an elephantine problem for Africa. In Kenya, early this year the government announced that 10 million were in danger of starving. The crisis sparked off one of the biggest citizen-driven humanitarian efforts I know of in an African country.
Overall, since 1990, Africa’s hungry have increased by 20% and now estimated to be 32% of our continent’s population of 850m. As far as food for Africa’s hungry, especially the adults, goes the killer application is corn/maize – posho flour for making ugali.
However, the irony of this is that some of Africa’s problems today have their roots in the arrival of maize on our shores in the 16th Century.
We owe this astounding insight to a book that very few people in Africa have read. A marvellous work which goes by the title “Maize and Grace: Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop” by a good man called James C. McCann.
So what is McCann’s take? First, that maize was unknown in Africa until the sixteenth century, although it has become Africa’s primary food product. Of the 22 countries in which maize constitutes the highest proportion in the national diet, 16 are in Africa.
Three-quarters of the maize consumed in the world today is eaten in Africa. McCann, therefore, argues that apparent that the changes it brought about in cultivation and consumption habits were radical and require careful historical analysis.
He identifies 1540 as the date for the first documentary evidence of maize cultivation in Africa. Maize quickly became an essential food crop in the Asante kingdom, as important as gold mining and the slave trade. Without the infusion of carbohydrates into the West African farmers’ diets, he argues it’s doubtful that Asante or any of the other slave-exporting economies in that part of the world could have been such energetic participants in the Atlantic slave trade. Maize (ugali), you might say, made slavery possible.
You could argue, if you wanted to stretch it, that had there been no ugali, and therefore slavery on a small scale or none at all, then the economic and political development of the Americas, would have been different. Maybe the US would not be a super power today.
McCann also addresses the opposite question; whether maize has been beneficial to the Africans, or whether it has contributed to the continent’s long history of impoverishment.
His verdict is that without its high carbohydrate content, and without its adaptability to Africa’s difficult tropical climates and terrains, Africans would be less well fed and life would be more difficult.
On the other hand, given the fact that maize is the crop of people living in the world’s poorest continent, one might ask, is there a connection?
McCann joined with a team of researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health in a research project on Ethiopia, where the connection between poverty and maize seemed strong. The results of the research seemed to indicate that in areas where maize was being cultivated, anopheles mosquitoes were bigger, lived longer, and more effective in spreading malaria. That, it would seem, is because a lot of land had to be cleared for the crop. Maize, it saved, and also killed us, in equal measure.
(Thanks additionally to insights on the political economy of maize by Robert L. Tignor)