SLAVE MAIZE:
Vino Tinto
THE TRUTH ABOUT MIELIES Most Africans consider maize (corn) to be their staple food but few are aware that this cereal grain carries a history of slavery, colonisation, modernisation and globalisation. KARABO KGOLENG
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he origins of corn are not explicitly clear but scholars widely agree that it originated in the Mexican highlands around 1500 BC and was established in Africa around 1500 AD. Before the introduction of maize, African staple diets consisted of sorghum, rapoko, millet, manioc and yam. How did maize come to dominate the dishes of billions, what has been its societal and environmental impact, and is it a viable option for food security?
ECOLOGICAL IMPERIALISM AND THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
According to Professor Mucha Musemwa, Head of the School of Social Sciences at Wits, an American environmental historian, Alfred Crosby coined the phrase ‘ecological imperialism’, a theory about the “biological expansion of Europe from 900 to 1900”.
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It began with Christopher Columbus who left Spain on several voyages financed by the Crown. In the year 1492, the territories now known as Latin America were conquered. “When he left Spain, Columbus took a boat full of plants, flowers, animals, people and bacteria. When he landed in the Americas, he unleashed all of these on the new terrain, which lead to the destruction of indigenous plants and animals, and the spread of disease. The people of Meso America, the Aztec in Mexico and the Inca in Peru succumbed to the conquistadors’ weaponry, which was also biological. About six million died of smallpox”, says Musemwa. The political empire-building that took hold in Latin America also transformed the local ecology. The Spaniards drove the social and environmental reproduction of Europe in this New World, having brought all the goods that make up European life with them across the ocean. They returned to Europe, taking with them
