A Drum Beat For A Fingerling

During my last visit to my family farm in Kenya last year, I showed up loaded, as always. This time I wasn’t loaded in money, but  in all manner of goodies, and lessons to boot!

In many ways, the goodies and the lessons were too intertwined to be distinguishable. One example turned out so perfectly that it sounds like a drumbeat to me. I will tell you why.

I grew up on a farm for a significant part of my early life. When I finally caught that proverbial “midnight train to Georgia”, I figured that I was going into the future, where life was much simpler. I never for one minute thought that I would be back in the farming business again. I was fully convinced that life in the city was much easier, more fun, and admittedly, more civilized. Why would anyone want to work like a beast of burden in the village while the city life was always beckoning, with its flashy lights and limitless possibilities?

It never occurred to me that my thinking was the main logic behind colonialism, that my country Kenya had emerged from less than 15 years prior. The British wanted a future that rested on someone else’s back. 

I obviously didn’t know better then.  Now I don’t only know better, but I also do better. Doing better starts with actively and consciously decolonizing my thinking and my food. That is a taller order than most people would fathom.

That is why I carried organic fingerling potatoes in my luggage. I was keen to introduce a new variety of potatoes to my village. I obviously had more organic seeds with, me but I consciously chose to talk about potatoes, for its historical & symbolic effect.

Potatoes are a staple, and a colonial relic in my village. One of those colonial practices includes the planting of only a single type of potato. After a while, that variety would go out of style, and another one would be introduced and hold the monopoly. I know all too well what a dangerous set up that is. Even worse, I noticed that farmers would sometimes split one potato, and plant small pieces, to increase the number of “seeds”. That practice was prevalent in Ireland just before the Irish Potato Famine. The slicing of seed potatoes is the equivalent of inbreeding. The pollen from the same potatoes might end up pollinating the other potatoes sliced from the mother potato. When a virus hit the country, it wiped out the entire potato crop in Ireland. The tragedy of the potato virus was exacerbated since the Irish were growing only one type of potato. 

The Irish starved, and that starvation triggered the biggest exodus from Ireland in its entire history. 

In the urban areas, potatoes and corn form the majority of the food consumed. Fish and chips is the poor man’s lunch that harkens to our colonial relationship with the British. My home village is the potato basket of the major urban areas.

In comparison, the same virus hit Peru, but nobody even noticed. That was due to the fact that the Peruvians were growing over 400 types of potatoes.

It doesn’t take a genius to see the potential danger lurking in the shadows of my village. Though I didn’t have 400 unique types of Peruvian potatoes to carry, I decided to start with one: the Fingerling Potato. I planted the 1 pound, 8 ounce bag, or about 680 grams of seed potatoes in December of 2022. There were probably 15 potatoes planted that day. Today, 6 months later, we went back to check on the experiment.

We couldn’t have been more surprised. For one, a single one of the fingerlings potato plants had a massive potato that was over half a pound. Secondly, the original potatoes we had planted produced many times more potatoes. In the past six months we had left the newly planted seeds almost entirely alone. We took very little care of them and did not spray anything. The rain was no where close to being sufficient, but we still managed to harvest a decent amount.

Finally, I was amazed by the three attractive colors of the potatoes. There was the white ones; then there were the brownish red ones and the most wonderful purple ones. It was easy to mistake the purple fingerling with a purple sweet potatoes. I am not a big fan of potatoes, in fact I don’t eat potatoes, but I am also practical. If someone else is going to eat a potato, it would be prudent that he or she does so with the least harm to the environment with the toxic chemicals and chemical fertilizers. It’s also wise to fend off anything that could potentially crash our food shed. I am also a firm believer in futurism and I have no way of predicting what discoveries can be found for the use of the Fingerling or it’s extract. It’s better to have it and not need it instead of the other way round.

After the harvest was done, I looked at the biggest potato that came from the small fingerling potato; it was pleasing in my sight. I immediately thought about the bees that must have pollinated them. I wonder whether those little pollinators could tell the difference between a death worshiping “fiat potato” from an organic, pure variety, as, to us humans, they’re all potatoes by name. We will probably never know for sure. But that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. Perhaps they could detect the difference. Assuming they did, it is logical to assume that a new dance was invented to communicate the message. I would call that the pure Fingerling bee dance.

I only wish I could have been there to play the drums for the bees, while they did their Fingerling Dance. My whole focus would be to wake up my family, and the whole village, and tell them about the wonderful abundant possibilities on the other side of our colonized food system. 

A logical way out of that colonial fakery is to giver it a finger. After all that Finger is a major part of the Fingerling Drum Beat. The Fingerling Drum Beat is all about giving life and nurturing justice. Anyone with doubts can visit my village and taste it.

Eat Organic Meat

You might think that this is a joke but I can tell you what my research indicates. Organic pastured lamb like the one you see here is becoming more and more rare. This particular one has to be shipped here all the way from New Zealand. As more and more land in the world is consumed by toxic GMO crops that use over twenty billion liters of glyphosate and tons of chemical fertilizers, the space available for growing healthy meat will continue to be squeezed into a rare commodity.

I don’t need to tell you what that will do to the price of pastured organic meats. The outcome is not only quite predictable but has been played out numerous times in the past and in nature.

The perfect example was the introduction of Indian cows in Africa, first in Eritrea by the Italians and later in Kenya. The Italians were implementing the agreement made at the Berlin Conference to colonize Africa.

Those Indian cows had been exposed to rinderpest virus and had developed a resistance to it. The African cows and the wild animals with hooves, otherwise known as ungulates were immediately ravaged by terrible disease. So many buffalos, wildebeest and zebras died that the lions started starving and eating humans instead.

All the famous tales you hear of Africans and their Indians counterparts who were building the Nairobi Mombasa railway were part of this tragic experiment that brought rinderpest to the continent. Many tacks of land were abandoned as people migrated to area that were further away from the man eaters. These abandoned tracks of land are part of what become the national parks in East Africa. There was a major famine that occurred around the same time. Many Africans starved as the animals had died and others could not farm due to fear of the Man Eaters. The decline in ungulates caused the growth of thick bushes that promoted the proliferation of tsetse flies in areas that had been free of tsetse flies. Africans started suffering from sleeping sickness.

The irony of it is that the fiat tourism scam that is touted as a major source of foreign currency for those countries is heavily dominated by the citizens of the same countries that brought both the rinderpest as the latest human virus in the form of seeds and chemicals that are the current “man eaters”.

Before you rush to feel sorry for the “poor black cursed race” just remember that the whole colonial enterprise by the British was first perfect in Ireland. While there were no man eaters or rinderpest in Ireland there was a close example in the potato famine just 50 years before the rinderpest saga. The potato famine was so bad, obviously aggravated by the British Colonialism, that the Irish became man-eaters them in the form cannibalism. The only recoursefor the Irish was to migrate from Ireland in droves. The family of the late president JF Kennedy was part of those migrants. Millions of Africans affected by the rinderpest virus couldn’t migrate to U.S or other parts of Europe like the Irish. Funny enough, Barack Obama was elected as president 45 years after the death of JF Kennedy.

Unlike the Irish who migrated elsewhere, we are facing a modern crisis that we cannot runaway from. The famine and rinderpest conditions have been replaced with more modern money making merchandise in the form of toxic chemicals and toxic seeds that is turning the food system in “man eater”. Laws are being passed to make it illegal to save and exchange seeds. In Kenya, there are talks of a bill to will criminalize the use of cow manure to grow one’s food. Here is “food Berlin Conference” geared towards the colonization of what I call “just food”. Our food system appears as though it is infected by tsetse flies and hence suffering from sleeping disease or shall we say sleeping nutrition? This type of food is so good at putting us to sleep that the whole world has developed a strange disease that has put us to sleep maybe we can call this disease “Naptitude”.

April Fools Food

Today is the first day of the month of April. It easy to forget that the calendar we use is relatively young, and that it has just as much politics behind it as it does astronomical science. Even less obvious is the idea of how our calendar revolves around food.

Many are aware of the definition of time by the position of the moon, the sun, or both—hence lunar, solar and lunisolar calendars.

The truth of the mater is the current Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, goes back to 1582, when the calendar jumped from October 3 to October 15. That jump corrected the Justinian calendar, which had been in use since 45 B.C. The Gregorian calendar was first accepted mainly in catholic countries in Europe and the colonized territories of those European countries.

In other words, the calendar in use today has imperial significance. That is not a hard thing to detect. The original Roman calendar had ten months. March was the first month and it was named after Mars, the god of war. In total, 4 months were named after Greco-Roman gods, and 6 months were named numerically.

To this day, September, October, November and December are the three month with numerical names. But those four name’s don’t represent the correct numerical position of those months. September, October, November and December were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month respectively.

Two months of July and August were added and named after Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar respectively.

Indigenous people under the influence of the Papacy lost their indigenous calendars, the majority of which revolved around the local food production. I have been talking to many elders, as well as scouting for information amongst the many books written about my culture, as I have come to suspect that many of the food issues that we are currently facing globally is largely due to the fact that we are not in alignment with our calendar, and by extension, with our consciousness. It is practically impossible to be normal and healthy using a calendar of the empire. The reality of the matter is that the Empire calendar we live under has facilitated the creation of the most destructive period in recorded history, better known as Anthropocene.

It is a very strange feeling for an indigenous person who is in tune with his natural calendar to live under Anthropocene. I have meet many people who consider themselves very wealthy, but their calendar was way off the natural cycle of time and space. Not all are lost. There is an emerging interest in something different from what we currently have.

I call the attempt to liberate oneself from the jaws of the vicious calendar and culture Anthrofoodism, the act of eating and living in a manner that is aligned to our indigenous evolution, and to the principles of indigenous time and space. The failure to gain that level of literacy is bound to make one a victim of April Fools Food.

May I ask you if you know what date it is today? Better yet, I could just ask you if you know your food date today.

Remember that the word April comes from the Latin word “Aperiio” which literally means to open up; implying the opening up of flower buds. In my indigenous language, the month is named Mùthatù, probably from the fog that appeared during that time of the year. To mark the month, an ancient Roman rite was performed in which young men would carry strips of goat skin and ran around the streets naked in celebration of fertility. Today, a similar tradition continues by the carrying leaves of palm around but for a different reason altogether. Yet the roots of that practice goes back to the fertility rites in Ancient Rome.

I am celebrating my “openness” into fertility of of my indigenous consciousness and the realignment of my concepts of time and space. Central to that alignment is food. For surely, falling a victim of April Foods Food has to be the perpetual antidote to openness, fertility or life in general. That is what I term as death worship.

I highly recommend that we each consider doing likewise. If you don’t, you may be living under an April Fools Food Calendar.

Thayù Thayù

Food Ties that Transcends Hate

I received the brightest news of the year and probably for the covid era. The story came from a teacher of a 4th grade student at a school I have spoken in Murang’a town.

The student( whom I will call Wendo) has a long-term friend whom she cares a lot about. The friend( whom I will call Pendo) happens to be a Swahili girl from a nearby informal neighborhood known as Mjini. Mjini is probably the oldest informal settlement in the area, having been inhabited by a minority of Muslim community before independence. The founders of Mjini informal settlement arrived in the area on September 17 1900 in a group of 600 porters of the first colonial district administrator attched to the East African Protectorate, Francis Hall. Hall and the porters has travelled all the way from Mombasa where the headquarters of British East Africa Protectorate.

The porters stayed in the area and the inhabitants of Mjini are the descendants of the porters for Francis Hall. I have been visiting Mumbi, the estate next to Mjini where my relatives have been living continuously for over 5 decades. Over that time, my impression and knowledge of the inhabitants has changed tremendously. The place had a reputation of a small ghetto with all that shady characteristics that made me weary of settling foot there during my young days. I would later learn about the impact of the colonial reign that Francis Hall started has on my family. The six hundred porters were accomplice to the crime of colonialism. The British were colonialists and the porters were collaborators. It is still amazing to note that the community the descendants has lived relatively unmolested by the larger Gíkuyu community especially when one contrasts their experience with that of African nannies that travel to Arab countries for work under an immigration system known as Karfala. Karfala allows the local Arabs to sponsor a worker or nanny for a visa that is tied to a particular employer only. That limits the options of the employees and unfairly confers great power to the employer. The stories of abuses from emotional to sexual, and even death are unacceptable. That is the backdrop of the relationship between the two communities.

That Wendo,( Not her real name. Wendo is the Gíkùyù word for love),who is from the local Gìkùyù community, comes from a humble background. Her parents are daily laborers and have a total of 6 children. Their circumstances at home are quite tight that they have been forced to send two of the children to the maternal grandmother in order to ease the burden of the household costs. Wendo noticed that her best friend named Pendo(not her real name. Wendo is the Kiswahili word for love) never brought any food for lunch. Pendohails from the community of the former porters . So Wendo decided to do the only thing she knew could help: she told her mother. The wonderful mother decided to pack extra food every single day so that her daughter's friend could have something to eat for lunch.

That went on well and the problem at hand seemed to have been solved. After a while the Wendo returned to her mother again to report that her best friend didn't have the textbooks required in class. The mother requested her daughter to share her textbook while she tried to save enough money to fulfill her daughter's request. Time however wasn't on their side. The year came to an end before the savings were enough to buy the necessary books as promised. However, there was an urgent need. There was a fee for end of year exams of about $.40 per student and Pendo’s family couldn't manage to raise the money. Wendo humbly requested her mother to come to the rescue of Pendo. The mother promised to help but she was not clear on the deadline and neither did she have the money. She was not at all aware that the money had to be cleared before any student could sit for the final exam.

The mother got distracted with the vicissitudes of a peasantry in the rural setting. The exam time came and Wendo asked for the exam fees. Wendo’s mother raised the money and her daughter sat for her 3rd grade exams. The new term started this year and Wendo was promoted to 4th grade.

Wendo’s dutiful mother showed up on the 3rd day of school in order to meet her daughter's new teacher. After the discussion of her daughter's performance, she explained to the teacher about Wendo’s best friend and her concern about her status relative to the challenges that Wendo had shared with her. The mother's only request was simply meet the girl she had been sending food to.

The teacher, who was in the staff room sent for the two girls to come to the meet Wendo’s mother. Unfortunately, only the daughter showed up. The mother was visibly dismayed and partly concerned. The daugher arrived with a regret and explanation regarding the absence of her friend even before the mother could pause the question. Wendo’s best friend had been held back for lack of exam fees, she explained . The mother looked at her daughter in disbelief, unable to hold her tears, she asked Wendo why she didn't ask for assistance on behalf of her friend. Wendo reminded her mother that she asked once but her mother did not have money at the time. The daughter figured that the mother would offer the help once she got some extra money without the need to be reminded. The mother sobbed uncontrollably. The Wendo’s mother begged the teacher to intervene and assist her in getting her daughter's friend to 4th Grade as she was willing to sacrifice anything to keep the Pendo from being held back in 3rd grade.

The teacher could not believe her eyes. How does a mother cry and get so emmotional over someone she hadn’t even seen. The biggest connection between Wendo’s mother and Pendo is that she had fed Pendo on humanitarian grounds as well as on account of the friendship between the two girls. The teacher had to call another teacher to witness the rare incident.

I am not sure what will happen as that is an area I am not privileged to know. What I can say is that that level of utu(African humaneness) consideration was a common practice amongst the Gíkùyù community that the porters and Francis Hall found there back in 1901. Food was a human and was shared in times of need. While the Swahili student was a descendant of the porters , the mother of the student was a descendant of the indigenous Gìkùyù in the area. The coming of the colonial period carted away a great wealth of resources and food knowledge that has seen the local community being food insecure and illiterate. The community is still suffering from the consequences of the injustices that Francis Hall and his porters helped met out on the local indigenous people. That is exactly what I struggle everyday to correct. I know that injustices are loss to everyone involved: the food scarcity if now a national epidemic as well a global crisis. We are all in the same ship and the ship is drowning.

The story made me sobb as I am aware of the above display of our humanity through our aversion to hunger not in our family but our community. The new British colonial and it's attendant religious order too has divided the consciousness of the community, causing an upsurge of individualism to wrecking havoc on our foodways as well as well as our humanity. I am aware of how the American empire is contributing to the misery of these families through the weaponization of the dollar. Yet we in the West and other industrialized countries are contributing to the damage of the environment to the point of making it extremely difficult for families such as these to earn a living.

I was so touched and inspired to support the friendship of the two girls for as long as they are in school. I talked to the mother at length and she is okay with it. I plan to do a fundraising dinner in honor of the three friends: the mother, her daughter and her daughter's friend. We have become so displaced from our center as human beings that it has become rare to witness this level of love, friendship and humanness in our community and elsewhere. That the friendship is for such young people across cultures is commendable in light of the vicious divisions along sectarian and religious lines. The most indigenous thing to even though both the Christian and Muslim community have often discriminated against indigenous people is to start with celebrating the young friendship, after all it is symbolic of what existed before Francis Hall and arrived uninvited.

The old traditions amongst the local Gíkùyù is experiencing a resurgence as indigenous people gain a deeper awareness of the fiat system that is about to drive us to extinction through the senseless divisions amongst ourselves. That's why I give these two lovely young friends the distinction of eating the healthiest food possible on account of their love of food ties that binds. If I you feel drawn to these bonds enough to want to lend a hand, please feel free to reach out. My goal is to raise 3,000 dollars to build a cow shed and buy a milking cow, some fodder and organic seeds for her garden. That way she can have organic milk for an income, organic manure and a vegetable garden. The three of them will manage everything collectively in order to have enough food. Her half acre farm will be a demonstration of farming food, animals but most importantly, love and power of food as practiced by the indigenous community before the colonial era.

Foodie Without Borders has agreed to work with me to set up a Food Library Literacy Love Garden which produces milk, manure and food to support the families of Wendo and Pendo to produce food organically. They will have a heifer, organic seeds, a cow shed and a class on how to cook the healthiest food. Please visit www.foodieswithoutboarders.org to support the effort.

Ann Arbor Reloaded

It a great time to be spending the rest of the week in Michigan. I will be starting with a residency at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. I will be giving a workshop of Afro Futurism: A Black Odyssey with students and a whole session with staff from the dining services. Fela Kuti once said that where African music goes, it stays. I salute Baba Fela for those words. Thanks to my dear brother and senior in activism and stand up I first came to Umich back in 2018 for the first time to speak to a class.

I argued that it is unconscionable that African food ranks so low in the American market. I hear a lot of competition between this Jolof Rice from this place and the other while the market share that Africans commands is a tiny fraction relative to our population and the historical contribution of Africa to American food. While competitions have their place, the league you compete in matters more than just winning. You might be a heavyweight playing in a high school league.

After my lecture, my point got to Steve Mangan, the head of dining services of a cafeteria that serves over 27,000 students. While taking a tour of the main dining hall, I met the amiable head. We struck a conversation and in an almost joking manner, Steve asked me if I could start an indigenous chef program at Umich. I was all in. We agreed on starting the following year. I worked with @chefturchan and staff to create a whole line of recipes. Those recipes with names that fills me with nostalgia about my village and African flavors that mimic Afro Beat and Jazz. I am back again to share and to learn. That is the way of the future. I actually saw the first kosher kitchen at Umich during my last visit. Since then, they have added a Halal kitchen. My fight now is that in not too distant future, they will add an Afro Futurism kitchen. That is a small request to make in the effort to restore a vanquished African food culture in the West and at home. History is good Learn but Future is best to have.

Eat well

Beef Without Beef

Dr. Charles Sydnor is a beef farmer and a retired surgeon from Snow camp North Carolina. The almost 80 years old owner of Braeburn Farm has a marvelous product that I treasure. For the last 9 years, I occasionally find the time to visit him and take a tour of the 500 acre farm on his electric cart.

During the tour, I get to see the sustainable operation that he has built for the last twenty years or so when he decided to shift his operation to organic. The biggest difference in this operation from other organic operations is that Dr. Sydnor raises a type of cow known as Red Devon. Why Red Devon, you may ask? According to Dr. Sydnor, a doctoral student did his thesis on finding out the best meat in the world. That endeavor concluded that Red Devon was ranked at the top. So Dr. Sydnor, with the help of a wealthy financier from New York acquired both embryos and simens from New Zealand. That was the beginning of the Red Devon in North Carolina.

The second interesting story about the farm is the way the cows are raised. The herd is divided according to age. It takes about 3 years for a calf to mature into a steer that is ready for market. Each herd is moved to a new pasture every single day. Each pasture has a watering system from the twenty thousand feet of piped well water that allows the cows to drink fresh water every time. Dr. Sydnor told me that pond water is not healthy for animals as it liable to have some contamination from cow dung and other microbes. In other words, these cow don’t eat around their feceas and don’t drink dirty water.

It typically takes the cows about two months before they return to the first pasture. At that time, the cow dung has fully composted. Finally, this system of grazing ensures that the grass stays tall and the cows only eat from the top third of the grass, which are also the most nutritious. The outcome is that these cows stay healthy and add on weight without the use of corn or soy as fattening agents.

In the end, the soil gets better and a superior product is produced with negative carbon impact. While vegan and vegetarian diets have their advantages, using toxic chemicals to produce such food is more damaging to the environment and our health than consuming organic pastured meat such as what Dr. Sydnor is producing. If you going to eat meat, be mindful of its environmental impact as well as your health impact. what I can say is that while I am not a big fan of beef, I truly treasure the quality I get at Braeburn Farm. This kind of meat will be history in a not too distant future. Even if it will be around, the price will be too high for most people to afford. The first time that I visited the farm for some meat from Braeburn Farm was back in 2014. The price of processing one steer was a whooping $600 but that price has since gone up to $1000. Yet the price of the meat has stayed the same. I call that localized and organic welfare. I always encourage African and African Americans to join this bandwagon. Dr. Sydnor may have retired from medical practice but not from offering his beef welfare to the community. I honestly don't have any beef with his beef!

My Food odyssey Between NC and U.K

My Food Odyssey

I am humbled to be heading to Elon University for the 3rd time on a two-day residency. I am especially thankful to @omolayonkem for a long and productive relationship of mentorship and collaboration that started at Elon. She and her late brother treated me to a special dinner over 5 year ago while they were in town. I have followed Omolayo as she went from Elon to Nigeria as a volunteer, then on to graduate school at SOAS and then to Ireland where she settled with her family.

I am especially thankful for her recommendation for me to speak at SOAS during a World Food Program at SOAS. It was a memorable experience. My experience with the panelists as well as the African students as SOAS was greatly enriching. Yet being in England was very difficult for me. Being around the people there was even more difficult. I couldn't keep my mind from the painful history of my family and the falsehood of what outwardly appeared like a prosperous society. The British colonial rule devastated my family and my country in irreparable ways. Food features prominently in that agony. Whether the role of food has been big or small, I have made a conscious decision to understand that painful relationship through the lense of food.

Abdullah, the Moroccan driver who picked me up from the airport, told me an interesting story of a rich man who was so obsessed with his wealth that he wanted to be buried with all of it. I wanted to stop him midway to as if the person was an Egyptian Pharoah, I held on my question. He looked me and asked me if I knew how the family got around losing their inheritance. I was even in the mood to guess. Abdullah turned back slightly and faced me in the backseat of the Mercedes cab and announced that the family buried the man with the a check of the value of his estate. I felt as though Britain then, and America now are like the man in the story, they want everything for themselves. Indigenious people are being infected with the same disease of valuing objects over life.

Omolayo is my hero for she exemplifies what Africa lost and badly needs: self-love, dedication and excellence. Empires lack that too

INdiGENOUS Liquid Blockchain

Almost everyone with average education or general literacy knows about Bitcoin  and that BlockChain technology behind it. In case that technology is new to you, take heart by pulling a seat and a cup of tea.  I say that because this post is neither  about Bitcoin nor Blockchain technology.  The technology in question is an indigenous liquid that is the innovation equivalent to Blockchain. Yet few have heard about it, leave alone talk or write about it. I am not any better or at least good enough to talk about others. That's why I should talk about myself first.

It was in the early 1970s right before I started school. I had all the time to play around our ancestral farm and to interact with all the plethora of senior elders who were deeply versed about all matters related to our culture. One day will aimlessly following Awa Mùkurù(my father's oldest brother) around our farm( he was a great storyteller and I loved spending time with him), he pointed to a particular plant mid-sentence  and told me that the plant was known as "kìgwa Kìa Arìithi" (shepherds sugarcane).  Before I could even sneak a question about the purpose of the plant with a funny sounding name,  Awa mùkurù went on to inform me that the plant was the one used to make tea before the coming of the missionaries and the proselytization of Chinese tea, later mislabelled as English tea. Walah, we too had our own tea that was phenomenally tasteful as well as sustainable. 

Today I made the tea of my ancestors and unblocked the tea that had been chained into my past for over 45 years. The flavors were so rich and the act so valuable that I can only compare it to the innovation of Blockchain that allows trustless transactions and also adds a bit of the old content in the creation of new blocks, hence blockchain. In my case, I am being connected with my ancestors through tea that was local and just. The tea that was introduced by the British was stolen property of the Chinese. That tea was the subject of the most expensive espionage when Robert Fortune was able to successfully sneak out tea plants from China and thereby broke the Chinese monopoly on the popular drink. For a long time, the Chinese had refused to sell tea in any other form except in processed form. After 1848, the British managed to grow the tea in Ceylon and other parts of India and were soon able to control the global tea industry.  

Those of my ancestors who acquessed to growing and consuming tea stolen from the Chinese were accomplices to a crime of handling stolen products and then victims of another crime of having their own tea sentenced to oblivion at the cost of stealing the fertility of their own land for colonial enterprise. I find it rather ironic that the Chinese were at least the ones who made the cups, spoons, sugar dishes and kettle that were necessary in the cooking and serving their tea during my youth. While the utensils in my village are still largely manufactured in China, there is growing interest in Chinese medicine. In other words, the consumers of stolen tea are now suffering from the consequences of the foreign diet and looking for help amongst the Chinese and Asian who were part of the tea triangle in the 1800s.

The biggest capital investment by the British in Kenya by 1903 was the railway from the coastal town of Mombasa to Kisumu. The project drew a lot of criticism from many circles that it was labeled as the “lunatic lane". Surely, the whole tea business doesn't rank far from being a lunatic drink. In addition to normalization of processed sugar, it made tea a cash crop in my region. That has had a negative impact on food security, our water quality, forest cover as well as the growing of food for the international market that is skewed against my community.

A bigger irony is that I am consuming this tea in the American South for the first time. The South has its own fractured history of stolen flavors and labor from Africa. I hope to cook this tea at my next residency at Elon University next month in celebration of Black History Month. 

While the tea has been dormant for years in my psyche, it will rise rapidly and be consumed at institutions of higher learning by the next generation of warriors of food justice..