14/07/2023
A lot of Africans and non-Africans don’t know plant domestication in Africa began 7,500 years ago; Africa domesticated 2000+ crops that we know of.
During the history of mankind, there was a point when humans began planting and growing their food, even selling it for trade, there was a gradual shift from hunting animals and gathering food sources to farming and animal domestication. Sometimes hunting-gathering-fishing happened alongside farming.
This period is referred to as the Neolithic revolution. With the Neolithic revolution came inevitable changes in the social life of humans. All humans did not simultaneously transition to farming and cultivation of plants at the same time or period; this is as a result of several reasons.
For starters, not every environment favoured farming, the soil quality, types of available plants, amount of rainfall, climate change and soil depletion are all factors that might have affected this.
In Africa, as silly as it may seem, some people are of the opinion that Africans remained hunter-gatherers until around 1500 AD and were ignorant of agriculture until a more “civilized people” taught them how.
This, of course, is false and contrary to glaring evidence available. For example foods like the finger millet, pearl millet, Emmer, yams amongst many others were cultivated more than 3000 years ago, some even much older. Some crops were domesticated from around 5,500-5,000 years ago. Experimentation with domestication began around 12,000 years ago with the Qadan culture people.
Once Africa cracked sorghum, and pearl millet, it cultivated over 2,000 more crops. From wild fruits like ebony and gingerbread plums to cultivated grains like finger millet and African rice, Africans have cultivated a diverse range of foods. Africa began to domesticate vegetables like amaranth, bambara bean, celosia, cowpea, dika, eggplant, egusi, enset, lablab, locust bean, long bean, marama, moringa, native potatoes, okra, shea, and yam bean. Africa domesticated buckets of different types of fruits: balanites, baobab, butter fruit, carissa, horned melon, kei apple, marula, melon, tamarind, and watermelon. Other notable crops include artichokes, clover, leeks, lettuce, dates, cabbages, carrots, grapes, mustard seed, sugar beet, and hyacinth bean. The continent is also home to wild grains like desert panic and wild rice. Additionally, Africa has domesticated high diversity crops such as yams, kola nuts, and groundnuts. This agricultural heritage showcases the ingenuity and knowledge of African farmers throughout history.
In this article, we didn’t cover exhaustively all the different kinds of foods Africans developed. The lowest count of the types of food developed by Africa is 2,000 edible crops and foods. Humanity doesn’t know yet the full variety of foods domesticated by Africa because it is among the least researched continents on earth. In some “circles” (including among some Africans), there is a belief that food domesticated in Africa is either inferior, less nutritious or less useful to mankind. History says otherwise. Africa’s contributions add diversity to humanity’s food supply and provide resilience against pests, climate change and world shocks. Consider the contributions of Africa’s agricultural developments to the ingredients of Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Carolina Rice, Coffee and Sorghum.
SOURCES: The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine. Lost Crops Of Africa. The National Academies Press. 1996.
