28 Abibisika (Black Gold) Points

Rank: Unranked Obibini

Is there anything African about contemporary African food?

Senegal, April 2019. Once again, the bakers are on strike. The price of wheat flour is too high. For majority of the Senegalese citizens, France famous baguette has become a must-have for a proper breakfast. Therefore, in this time of bread crisis, a solution must be thought out. While some have anticipated the strike by storing enough bread in their fridge, for others this is the perfect time to go back to the way of the ancestors by eating millet-based meals for breakfast.

This situation illustrates quite well how Africans have come to appropriate foreign food as their own by simultaneously relegating their local food to temporary solutions for emergency cases. In discussions about decolonization, African diet is often wrongfully overlooked. Indeed, the shift in our diet has a negative impact both in our economy and our health. First, by replacing African rice with Asian rice, wheat flour with millet flour and so on, we have become dependant on foreign countries to the detriment of local farmers who struggle in finding clients for their products. Secondly, our local products are by far more nutritious than those used in our current diet and it’s not a surprise that kidney diseases and other lethal illnesses are rampant in the continent.

In his book Etudes sur l’Islam au Senegal (a study of Islam in Senegal) published in 1917, Paul Marty describes Senegalese diet as such: a diet based on millet, rich in vegetables and where meat is eaten on infrequent instances such as celebrations. In the same vein, Abbé Boilat in his Esquisses Sénégalaises (1853) narrates that, in the kingdom of Walo, the Wolof breakfast consisted of millet porridge (laax) with either milk, butter, tamarind, or baobab fruit and sometimes sweetened with honey.

This goes to show that the African diet as we know it now is a mere vestige of colonization. It is therefore in our interest to replace the imported and heavily processed products with local and organic ones. Being African doesn’t equate eating poorly as we are also deserving of high-quality food. Furthermore, eating typical African food should not be only for those with low-income. It is in our duty to consciously choose the food we allow in our kitchen and in the Senegalese context it could all start by replacing baguette with a succulent laax.

“Ku xamul foo jëm da ngey dellu fa nga juge” – Wolof proverb
“If you don’t know where you are going, go back where you come from”

Mously D.