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Accepted Paper:

How an American stranger became a "genuine" African: the success story of maize in Central Angola  
Maria Neto (Faculdade Ciências Sociais, Universidade Agostinho Neto)

Paper short abstract:

Based on a variety of sources, this paper explains how maize became a staple food in central Angola well before the Portuguese conquest. It highlights its links with slave trade wars and the role of African women to the successful acclimatization and cultural appropriation of maize in that region.

Paper long abstract:

This paper will discuss some issues of a success story in times of distress. As a well-known consequence of the transatlantic slave trade several American plants became part of people's diet inside Africa. The most striking examples are manioc and maize, considered today "traditional" African staple foods. Both written sources and oral traditions confirm that in central Angola maize was replacing local sorghum and millets (massango, luco and massambala) well before the Portuguese conquest of the region. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when slavery wars caused waves of refugees, maize proved to be of great help since it can be cultivated as a vegetable crop or as a grain to make flour. In the nineteenth century the development of the Ovimbundu long-distance trade, during and after the slave trade, stimulated agriculture surpluses both to feed traders and porters and to exchange it for wanted goods. As in many African societies, agriculture was then essentially the domain of women, except for the clearing of new fields in the woodlands. So, the successful acclimatization and cultural appropriation of maize by local farmers and its relatively rapid expansion to distant frontiers, like today's Zambia, was mainly the work of women who empirically managed to find the best technical solutions for its cultivation in different environments. After the Portuguese colonization of the Angolan central plateau, in the early twentieth century, African peasants responded to new market opportunities with a renewed expansion of maize crops that became for a short time Angola's main export.

Panel P16
Commodity frontiers and knowledge regimes in Africa, 1800 to present
  Session 1 Friday 19 July, 2019, -