Why we should decolonise ourselves from unga and ugali

What you need to know:

  • Ugali has its advantages, like it saves time and it is filling compared to other meals, so it will remain our staple food, but let us also decolonise our food preferences.

  • At the national and household level, we should decolonise ourselves from unga and ugali by diversifying our food sources.

In 1958, M. N. Harrison, the colonial government’s chief maize researcher, visited Mexico and Colombia for maize research with support from the Rockefeller Foundation. He brought back Mexican maize, which later became the Kenyan high breed variety and which was released for farming in 1964.

In a strange twist of fate, last week the Jubilee government announced it would be procuring maize from Mexico to arrest the soaring price of unga for making ugali. History was repeating itself; we were back to Mexico asking for the same seed.

Ship speed aside, many Kenyans are relieved to have the subsidised flour. The Jubilee administration should, however, explain why they had not anticipated the looming maize deficit.

But how did we become so reliant on maize and ugali as our staple food? History could explain this. Before the colonial occupation, staple diets among Kenyan ethnic groups were dominated by tubers, millet, sorghum, legumes and traditional vegetables. The Portuguese had earlier introduced maize to the Kenyan Coast but it only became popular after the British occupation in the early 1900s. British and Afrikaan settlers started farming maize for export to British markets, where the white maize was preferred in British corn Exchange markets to the yellow variety that was commonly grown in the United States.

The colonial occupation and demand for labour in settler farms in Kenya, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa further led to an increased demand for maize as the preferred food for African labourers. Maize meal provided a high energy diet for farm workers and miners.

HEAVILY RELIANT

Interestingly, only settler economies in Africa like Kenya, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and South Africa are heavily reliant on maize meal. Ugandans consume posho (their name for ugali) alongside other starch sources. Further afield in Ghana and Nigeria, where the British occupation was not based on settler economies, one is spoilt for choice at the variety of food sources. Fufu, rice, kenkey and pounded yam haven’t taken a national monopoly as our ugali.

The introduction of the hammer mill, the posho mill, in the late 1920s boosted the production of maize. Smaller grains like millet and sorghum were pushed aside for maize meal by the fast-growing urban populations of Nairobi, Harare, Lusaka and Johannesburg whose appetite for posho, pap or nsima, was insatiable.

Increased demand for maize led African farmers to start growing and selling maize, which did not go down well with the British settler farmers. In retaliation, the settlers lobbied for legislation and the Native Produce Ordinance was passed in 1935, establishing restrictions on grain movement from African farms and a two-tier pricing system with higher prices for the settlers. This system eventually creating centralised maize marketing boards with superior milling technologies like the roller mills used in industrial production of unga.

Industrial milling of maize gave the settler millers a monopoly on maize sales to the urban populations and some rural areas. The main beneficiaries of the current unga shortage are the same millers who have been benefiting from an exclusionist system. Low-income households’ food budget is now at the mercy of the millers.

FOOD INSECURITY

So, what to do? Parliamentarians should get to the bottom of the current maize politics and end this cyclic maize-dependent food insecurity. It is sad that more than 50 years after independence, we still can’t feed ourselves and we are still heavy consumers of maize starch.

Ugali has its advantages, like it saves time and it is filling compared to other meals, so it will remain our staple food, but let us also decolonise our food preferences. At the national and household level, we should decolonise ourselves from unga and ugali by diversifying our food sources.

Kenyans can take back their agency at the individual level by eating traditional foods. We can also mill our maize in posho mills in the shopping centres as we did before. Better still, counties can support local millers in addition to diversifying food sources. The move towards brown ugali is a good compromise. Farmers should be encouraged to grow drought resistant alternative starch sources which should be packaged to compete with ugali.

Have an ugali-free day.

Dr Njoki Wamai is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

@njokiwamai