Celebrating Wainya in Exile
Celebrating World Food Day at UNC Greensboro started in pomp and celebration by cooking with the students all day. I counted 28 students who spent some time in the kitchen along with the staff and the professors who spent the whole day preparing food and talking. The discussions in the kitchen were more meaningful to me and the students. Funny enough, the majority of the students did not show up for the keynote later in the evening. Many had classes and other commitments. To be honest I also suspect that they were exhausted. Preparing food from scratch in between classes is not a simple task. I say that because some students returned to the kitchen three times.
The kitchen smelled so nice that it would draw students from nutritional classes down the hall. The food was being prepared at a facility in the Nutritional department. Meredith Powers and a group of students still had enough time to make memorable artistic pieces using seeds and local foraged plants. I shared some of my seeds from St. Croix as well as Tamarind seeds. The theme song was Kwa Waing’a Ndigachoka and Water Got No Enemy from Fela. I counted 14 different nationalities presented. It was great to have two fellow Kenyans present.
If I was to price the true cost of the food per plate starting with the organic food to the labor and energy, the food has to be close to $120 dollars per plate. Everything was made from scratch. Some people claimed that they would swear by the vinaigrette, others by the drink and yet others by the Black Beans. It was the first time for many students to eat an almost exclusively organic meal. . Only one person mentioned meat as the event was vegan. Kudos to all those who put the event together. It was almost 9.00 o’clock when I got home and almost 11 o’clock when I stopped talking.
Yet the biggest accomplishment yesterday was that I celebrated Wainya,a famous medicine man from my region. This medicine man was slandered by the British colonialists and the ignorant Kenyans for political reasons. He would later be so reviled in our community that he became the embodiment of the devil. I am extremely ashamed to have sang the song that denigrated and vilified our own heroes. My sincere hope is that others will join me in celebrating food instead of denigrating its spirit by consuming things that are not food as food. Almost all of us are guilty of the same crime I committed as a young boy by singing hateful songs of praising their oppressors as their source of salvation.
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The world is equally at war and facing imminent destruction because of false ideas and promises that many have come to accept. Those false ideas have little benefit in the end for anyone. I can tell you that because I now know what many who still sing that song are slowly realizing. The salvation they were promised has utterly failed to materialize. Instead of waiting any longer, many are abandoning their commitment to such false hope. I may not know much, but singing the hateful song of the W word(Waing’a as the local version of the N word) I am resurrecting the dignity of Wainya as well as the dignity of those who are living today and the future in the country where Wainya once performed his craft in diligence. I am not aware of any such attempt, at least not on any American university campus.
The lecture highlighted the value of dignity as a component of food justice while also taking the first bold disruptive steps to expand the definition of food beyond just calories and flavor. The reductive thinking , truncated of any substantive emotions in growing, preparing, cooking and serving has come at a great cost to our health, environment and to education. That the food was prepared at the cooking lab of the Nutrition Department is quite significant. It turns out that it was the first time an organic menu of such a price tag had been prepared on that facility in the memory of those presently in charge.
That African food can lead the way in improving the imagination of what food is cannot be underrated. Given the contribution that Africa has made to the building of both the economic powerhouse that America is and the food culture as well, it is just right that when the time for giving spotlight comes, that we are right there in front. Surely the injustices we have suffered are too much and too long. Africa can’t just selflessly give to others for the sake of others, this go around we are giving to our sake and for the sake of others. The great news is that we are making progress. The gene is out of the bottle and I know that some of us will never go back where we once were.
I saw the evidence of that in the words and facial expressions of professor Hewan. Following my lecture in one class, one White student come over to see he could attend the next session which was for African students only, professor Hewan was very firm and polite in her response that the event was exclusively for a particular group only. The student understood and didn’t press the matter. But it was actually one African student who wondered if I wasn’t worried that some people would look at what I was doing as being reverse racism. I responded that when I was in college, there are things I wish someone had told me. That is what I am doing with the African students. If someone in my college days had called a meeting to talk about surviving in college as a minority white person in Kenya, I wouldn’t have attended. Nevertheless, Africans have to realize that they are complex people with a lot of issues to solve just like any other groups of people. Getting together to solve those issues doesn’t disadvantage anyone else in any way.
There was no better place to do so than in Greensboro where on February 1 1960, a group of 4 Black students attempted to interrogate a lunch counter at Woolworth. They had no idea how things would turn out. I am lucky to say I know that most people took something away yesterday, what they will do with it, only the gods know. In the meantime I am resurrecting the African wisdom, similar to what Wainya had, in contemporary times and getting some positive results while also getting recognition and pay which Wainya never got. In so doing, the next generation will be in a better space. A space with ample space for all, especially the indigenous people who have taken great care of the environment and still hold so much promise in healing our past wounds. But we have to listen, remember and celebrate those past heroes.