On Boxing day of this year, I thought hard about the state of Black Food. Then an idea came to me to that I could potentially use the creativity of artists to help solve this critical issue. If there is one artist whom I think would be most qualified for that purpose, it is Dean Hutton. My pick of Dean Hutton follows her victory, or rather of her installation at a gallery in Western Cape. Back in July of 2017 newspapers all over the world carried a story about an unusual case about a ruling by the South Africa magistrate DM Thulare. In his ruling, Thulale ruled that the words “fuck white people” were neither racist nor hate speech. The case had been brought against a south African gallery that had displayed the work of Dean Hutton which bore the above words. The suit had been filed by Cape Party, a white separatist group that aimed at making Western Cape a separate republic.
It is important to mention that Dean Hutton, who is herself white had placed a notice next to the installation that explained that the purpose of the exhibition was aimed at getting White people to face their privileged position in society. I had been following the case for a while and like many, I was curious about what the final judgement would be. Well, it did finally come and it was not what I had expected.
The White South African Govt passed numerous laws to keep supposedly superior Whites from sleeping with Africans. They officially said that Africans can't fuck White people, end of the story. Those laws were in the books for about 67 years. At some point the law was upgraded through the passage of Immorality Act following doubts on the effectiveness of the less stringent Mixed Marriage Act. The Mixed Marriage Act appeared to have the obvious loop hole of having people just fuck without the cumbersome process of marriage, a process that did not offer any more pleasure to the process except some of the headaches we witness in some cases today whenever separation becomes necessary.
The anxiety of preserving purity was not only against Blacks, even Indians were not spared. After many whites started getting employed by Indians, this seemed to offer the Indians an unfair competitive advantage in access to White women. So a law was passed against white women working for Indians too. That is how Dean Hutton got the idea to challenge the crazy laws.
My immediate question followig the judgement was if it would have been any different if the words were fuck Black people. It did not take me long to realize just how just how unnecessary such a statement would be since the very power that Dean Hutton was trying to get white people to question exponentially disadvantages Africans in serious ways. One such way is damaging their food culture. What would be an equivalent provocative statement then would be “fuck Black self-hate”. Such a statement would naturally be accompanied with a statement that explains that the aim of the statement is to examine how self-hate has contributed to the suffering and diminishing Black people’s ability to empower their declining food culture and by extension, themselves.
To be fair, I will be the first to admit that such a statement would not elicit the same kind of emotional reaction from people intended as the primary audience for many reasons. But that should not deter me from at least trying. It is a painful situation to be in a position where you are bombarded with actions, words and deeds that one knows very will can only lead to backward results. When it comes to traditional and indigenious food, the trend is that that food has been put in a box that is labelled inferior. It is a mind boggling idea for anyone who has not either experienced that food racism or noticed it.
When I was growing up there were two words that were thrown around if reference to chicken that clearly demonstrates this malaise. I grew up most of my life knowing that there was only one type of chicken. That meant that there was no need to distinguish one chicken from the next, all chickens were, well, chickens.
But then a negative evolution happened right before our eyes without much notice. Packaged as advancement and progress, a new type of chicken was introduced. It had all the qualities that would naturally entice both the farmer and the buyer. In this case, the buyer in question was obviously assumed to be the sophisticated urban customer. It is amazing looking back that given the subsistence farming that was conducted in my village, the food was mainly grown for the cities and other countries. That meant that the power imbalance between those who worked and those who benefited from the labour dictated that the views of the farmers were equally biased against the village farmers.
The newly introduced chicken did not only come to improve the market and the fortunes of the farmer and the buyer but had other ominous consequences. First and foremost, the relationship between the farmer and the buyer was so unequal as to jeopardize the viability of the long term existence of the farmers. Those intended as the market had so much power and influence over the lives of the farmer that at some point, the farmers ability to supply the demands of the market ends up consuming the farmer. The city and foreign buyers had so much that the farmer needed but the farmer only had two things that the market needed, that is his labour and his produce. The farmer’s own children were being prepared, not to farm, but to fit in the new culture of the urban and foreing dweller. Most of the born in the previous generation and in mine are mostly in urban and foreing countries.
That imbalance can be best seen in the manner or results of the introduction of a new breed of chicken. The new chicken was celebrated as an agricultural breakthrough. The chicken grew much quicker and that meant more to the farmer. But the farmer was not sophisticated enough to do the deep math of the true cost of the chicken innovation. The chicken was therefore called “ngirigaca” the vernacular version of the word agriculture.
The traditional chicken could not possibly be unaffected by this new development. Unfortunately, the new term for the chicken exposed the unequal relationship between them and the new and the old order. The old chicken got the short end of the stick, just as in all other areas of interaction. A word that was borrowed from the swahili came to the rescue. Shenzi is an swahili word for that denotes something backward, stupid or ignorant. Our people therefore domesticated into
“Gicenji”. It was hence the term that became the accepted term for referring to the traditional free-range chickens. Along the same lines, it is an accepted saying to use the term eating white as an indication of eating a balanced diet or a superior manner.
Things stayed that way for a long time. The broiler chicken reigned in the market. A stroll in town is all one needs to do to confirm that dominance. There are numerous eateries around the capital city’s downtown area as well as other highly populated urban areas where the broiler chickens are roasted in big rotisserie machines. They are the default chickens that are consumed by the urban and sophisticated urban masses. But those chickens were rarely consumed in the village when I was coming up. Those folks in the village ate the same chicken that they had given derogatory names. In the end, the healthier chicken still ended up causing a disease of the culture. That disease is called self-hatred and it has gone a long way in emasculating the spirit and ultimately the health of the country. That was then, now we have the foreign powers coming in droves to cash in on the dominated and emasculated culture.
Foreign food companies are now taking over the local broilers chickens. KFC and Burger King can be spotted across the city and at the most popular eateries. Our cultural foods have now been put in a box with a big stamp on it that says “yakeee”. Yummy is for the foods of the winners. Ironically, the yakey foods are mostly available in joints whose byword in the U.S is whole paycheck. That is the reason why I saying fuck Black people will not be all too necessary, they are eating it. Our food culture is not only in a box but it is in an upside down box. Those suffering from white privilege think that white food is healthier than their own but everywhere that privileged food gets introduced, the people suffer. Now China has half of its population is obese.
So what does Boxing day represent? I would say a boxing match where our food is facing heavy punches enough to fuck our health and our existence, all while thinking that all is yummy with our lives. Our cultural crisis is turning us into a second-hand people. Decolonize that and stave off a gigantic crisis that is looming on the horizon.