Kenya remains hooked on a staple food forced on the population by British colonialists, as climate change and research show it is becoming increasingly unsuited for successful farming in the region.
According to Yale’s Tropical Resources Institute, the Portuguese first introduced maize to East Africa in the 16th century along the Swahili coast. The crop supplied their trading forts after they wrestled control of coastal trade from Arabs. However, maize cultivation in Kenya was substantially driven by the British colonialists, who grew it widely for export to feed World War I soldiers and to provide their farm labourers with food portions, or poshos as Kenyans would refer to them. This replaced diverse traditional foods with the ‘Kenyan’ white ugali which was considered plain and tasteless by your grandfather’s father.
Quickly after declaring Kenya part of its East African Protectorate in 1895, the British government kicked out Africans from the country’s fertile highlands, which covered Nairobi, Kiambu, Murang’a, Kirinyaga, Embu, Tharaka-Nithi, Meru, Nyeri, Nyandarua, and Nakuru counties.
As the colonialists ramped up farming, their need for labourers soared, at the same time as local tribes were reeling from the Great East African Famine (1887-1889) that had killed up to half of the population as well as rinderpest and cattle lung illnesses which had wiped out a lot of the livestock in East and Central Africa.
Kenyan families that had enjoyed a period of being food-sufficient until the 1800s were now reduced to going from village to village begging for food and even boiling their leather sandals for some sustenance.
To lure Kenyan men into providing labour, the British began offering them food and patches of land for providing labour on white settler farms.
Related News: Seaweed farming provides a lifeline for drought-ravaged coastal maize farmers
Related News: Maize farmers destroy Fall Armyworm at 80% less cost thanks to killer wasp
Related News: Hot-selling pigeon pea triples maize harvests
The security of a guaranteed meal, the promise of being allocated a plot of land to farm, and an opportunity to make ‘money’– an as yet foreign concept to Africans– was far more appealing than it would have been at any other time in Kenya’s history.
The onset of the First World War in 1914 saw the British government demand that these farmers grow maize as it was a rich calorie food that could be easily stored and transported to the frontline.
The war strained the colonialists’ resources and only intensified their need for increased labour to increase maize acreage.
According to historian Gregory Maddox, the crown’s demand for food, livestock, and men from the local tribes to aid in the war effort was so great that it contributed to a “man-made famine caused by the theft of food.”
Mzee Mwakala, an elder of the Wagogo people who lived in Dodoma, what would later become the capital of Tanzania, recounted that the Germans and later the British took food– mainly millet cattle and goats– for their soldiers.
The forceful enlistment of 430,000 askaris and porters into the Great War saw many of Kenya’s strong able working men who would have previously done the land tilling, herding, and protecting of village gardens from wild animals go on to die in the war. This meant that most crops and livestock could not be replaced.
Also as the war was raging on, a millet epidemic wiped out what was still the main food crop for most Kenyans.
“Women were in trouble during this time and had to take up men’s jobs such as going out to the lake to fish to keep their families afloat,” Dorothy Liwewe, a young girl at the time ruefully recounted.
After the war, maize was a valuable export commodity for the white settlers who only cultivated plain white maize which was preferred in European diets and seen to be superior for its ‘purity’, visual appeal, and caloric density than the more nutritious yellow maize which is rich in Vitamin A but was considered livestock feed in Europe and North America. This negative stereotype was further reinforced amongst Kenyans by the distribution of mainly yellow maize as food aid during food shortages.
Maize was progressively adopted by Kenyans, first by the labourers at white farms in the early 1920s as it required less labour to grow than traditional crops and also grew in closed cobs which prevented birds and other pests from directly picking off the grains.
In time, maize was being processed into flour in hammer mills or posho mills which are optimised for larger grains like maize with softer outer layers that are easier to process more efficiently. This saved both time and effort, especially for people living in cities as well as labourers. A flourishing commodity market had emerged by this time. Rather than storing excess maize for future use, farmers were under pressure to sell their surplus. Larger markets were available for their crops, and there was a growing need for cash to cover taxes, purchase goods, and meet other financial demands.
While maize is the key staple food in Kenya and most of Africa, researchers are warning that its yields are decreasing across Africa as it is unable to cope with the increased pace of climate change-driven droughts and it also falls short of providing people with their full nutritional requirements which were present in indigenous crops like millet and sorghum. This is evidenced by the increase in Kwashiorkor cases as Africans moved away from their traditional diets through the 1900s to maize and rice as their main sources of food.
Unlike indigenous crops, maize-focused diets and farming often produce lower and much more easily destroyed yields by adverse climate conditions than traditional crops which contributes to greater food and nutrition insecurity in the continent.
Related News: Green maize farmers double profits through transplanting
Related News: Kenya could achieve maize self-sufficiency in 5yrs from improved farming practices– World Bank
Related News: Nyeri tomato tree farmer earns big after opting for fruit over maize farming
According to the World Agroforestry Center, before colonialism, Kenyans practiced shifting cultivation with crops such as millet, sweet potatoes, bananas, yams, cocoyams, African pumpkins, cassava, and sugarcane all being grown on different plots of land ensuring different foods were available throughout the year.
This is why many Kenyan men who had left their families to work on white settler farms in the 1910s and 1920s revolted against the boringly white portions (posho) of maize/ rice they received as part of their pay, which they considered a step down from the diverse foods their pallets had been used to.
But almost three decades after the arrival of the British, maize remained and remains Kenya’s leading staple food, seeing most Kenyans giving their children and grandchildren a food that they had never heard of growing up.