18 
In which the recipe for irio changes (Kenya, 1900–2016)
How the Empire impacted on subsistence farming in East Africa and introduced colonial malnutrition
Contemporary recipes for the Kikuyu porridge or paste known as irio, Kenya’s national dish, suggest that it should be made with potatoes, peas and maize.2 But in June 1988, a nostalgic correspondent in the letters section of the Nairobi newspaper the Daily Nation recalled how in his youth the irio that gave him the lovely feeling of a tight stomach after a good meal was made with plantains and njahi (lablab beans). And indeed, over the course of the twentieth century, the recipe for irio has changed. By the 1960s, njahi had been replaced by Phaseolus (e.g. kidney and lima) beans. These were introduced to Africa from South America by the Portuguese in the seventeenth century. The Kikuyu subsequently grew them to sell to the trading caravans that used to pass through their lands, but it was not until the twentieth century, under the influence of colonial agricultural officers, that they started to eat these beans themselves.3 By the early 1970s, they had become such a key ingredient that on 12 June 1971, the Daily Nation reported that local kiosk restaurants were likely to take irio off their menus because of a shortage of beans. There seemed to be a consensus that the dish simply was not irio unless at least half of the paste consisted of mashed Phaseolus beans.4 The paper bemoaned the fact that Kenyans were witnessing the disappearance of a traditional food. But in fact, the 1960s incarnation was already a reinterpretation of the original dish. The ever-changing irio recipe reflected the changes in the Kikuyu diet as a result of the pressures colonialism placed on indigenous agriculture.
Published in 1931, Studies in Nutrition summarised the results of the first survey of human nutrition in a colonial context. Between 1927 and 1929, the medical student John Foster examined 27,000 Kenyans on the reservations. His colleague Dr John Henderson chemically evaluated the diet of hospital and prison inmates in Nairobi. He was joined by Dr Francis Kelly, who conducted a series of experiments that involved adding iodine, cod liver oil, milk, bone meal and chalk to the hapless inmates’ meals.5 The importance of vitamins and minerals in the human diet had only just been discovered, and scientists and doctors were beginning to apply this knowledge in a number of dietary investigations around the world. The study was ground-breaking because this was the first time a colonial government had assessed not whether their subjects had access to enough food in order to survive, but whether the food they ate was sufficiently nutritious to safeguard their health. It accorded the Kenyans an unprecedented measure of respect by assessing the quality of their diet using the same League of Nations’ minimum standards that were applied by researchers to the diets of the urban working classes in the ‘civilised’ world.6 The results were written up by J. L. Gilks, the Director of Medical Services in Kenya, and John Boyd Orr. Orr had just published the findings of a British survey showing that about a tenth of British citizens were suffering from hidden malnutrition, in that while they appeared to have enough to eat, their diets did not provide them with enough iron, calcium or vitamins.7 The Kenyan study revealed equally depressing levels of hidden malnutrition among the Kikuyu.
The scientists concluded that the Kikuyu were malnourished because they were vegetarians. In contrast, they thought the Maasai were particularly well nourished as they consumed large quantities of meat and milk. British nutritionists regarded meat, milk and eggs as the panacea for all dietary ills. It had been demonstrated that if Britain’s poor were given access to these foods, it was possible to significantly improve maternal and infant mortality rates while virtually eradicating deficiency diseases. However, the scientists’ interpretation of the Kenyan data rested on a fundamental misconception that assigned one particular diet to each tribe and failed to perceive differentiation within the African communities. It was only the Maasai warriors whose diet was rich in animal protein. The non-warrior Maasai were, in fact, largely vegetarian: they ate maize, millet, plantains and beans, supplemented by a few berries and a little honey. This diet was similar to that of the Kikuyu women. A careful reading of Foster’s data shows that despite the fact that they avoided milk (as they thought it interfered with their reproductive capacity), Kikuyu women ate surprisingly healthily. They injected beneficial quantities of calcium and manganese into their food by adding greens and the specially prepared ash of swamp plants to their irio, taking the place of spinach in the recipe at the beginning of the chapter.8 Foreign beans were beginning to make inroads into the Kikuyu reserves, but protein-rich njahi beans were an almost sacred part of the women’s diet, associated with health and fertility. Irio made of njahi and plantain was eaten at all the important female rituals such as clitoridectomy, marriage negotiations, weddings and after childbirth.9
It was the Kikuyu men who were malnourished. Kikuyu life had been severely disrupted by the arrival of white settlers in the early twentieth century. Few of the haughty Maasai deigned to work for the whites, but the Kikuyu were treated as a labour pool. While their wives and children stayed behind on the reserves, the men went to work on the railways–Nairobi was founded in 1899 as a rail camp–or as labourers on farms. They were given daily rations of 2 lb of posho, a cheap maize meal. In much of south and eastern Africa in the 1920s millet was still the staple grain, and the men found cornmeal porridge insubstantial and unsatisfying in comparison.10 One old Bemba man from Northern Rhodesia told the anthropologist Audrey Richards that when he moved to work in the southern industrial area, he at first ate his way through ‘one bag of flour and then a second. Then at last I said, “Well, there it is! There is no food to be found among the Europeans. Their foods are ‘light’.”’11 Not only did maize porridge fail to produce the satisfying feeling of a tight, full stomach, it was severely deficient in protein and vitamin B. The ‘Kikuyu diet’ that the study condemned was, in fact, a version of the industrial ration that was doled out to indigenous workers around the Empire–African slaves, indentured labourers, Aboriginal farm hands, Canadian First Nations. The researchers do not seem to have realised that Kikuyu men were more prone to malaria, respiratory diseases, intestinal disorders and tropical ulcers not because of an inadequate ‘traditional’ diet but due to the poverty of the rations the cheapskate British fed to their workers.12
Studies in Nutrition recommended that the health of the Kikuyu would be improved by the introduction of better animal husbandry. It blithely suggested that every family should have access to cows.13 The authors’ intentions were good, but their recommendations demonstrated their ignorance of African circumstances. The Kikuyu on the reserves had been forced to relinquish their cattle. This was why the 1920s researchers had found no evidence of them eating the sour milk, blood puddings and broiled meat that as recently as 1910 European observers had noted were an integral part of their diet. That the Kikuyu should drink milk was therefore not a practical solution. It would have been more sensible to suggest that the men should add greens and ash to their maize porridge.14 The aim of the study was to improve the nutritional situation of the East Africans, but in the end it probably did more damage than good, as it confirmed the long-held but misguided colonial belief that the best way to help the natives was to ‘improve’ indigenous agricultural practices.15
When J. L. Gilks retired from the Kenyan Medical Service in 1935, he was replaced by A. R. Paterson. While in office, Paterson wrote an excruciating monument to imperial condescension in the form of a guidebook for Africans entitled The Book of Civilization. ‘Folk are poorly fed in Africa because most Africans are not good farmers, and particularly are they not good farmers because they do not know how to keep the soil fertile’, he postulated. He went on in a vein reminiscent of those seventeenth-century agricultural reformers who insisted that the Irish would never be civilised until they took to the plough: ‘When cattle in Africa are used for their proper purposes–to provide milk for the children and meat for [them]selves, and manure for [their] fields, and to draw carts and ploughs–then, but not sooner will people thrive.’16
In the inter-war years the colonial authorities in East Africa strove to transform subsistence peasants into commercial farmers. They claimed that economic prosperity would naturally lead to an improvement in nutrition. But the policies the administrations imposed were designed primarily to benefit Britain rather than the African population. The economic strain of the First World War, followed by the Depression, intensified the British determination to reconfigure the African colonies so that they fulfilled the role that had been assigned to colonies since the beginning of the Empire as producers of useful agricultural commodities and importers of British manufactured goods.17 The Kenyan agricultural department experimented with bean varieties, giving out lima, rose coco, Canadian Wonder and Boston bean seeds in search of a suitable candidate for the colony’s infant canning industry.18 But the most concerted campaign was directed towards extending and intensifying maize farming. The aim was to persuade East Africans to relinquish the traditional staples of sorghum and millet in preference for maize. The surplus crop could then be released onto the market and used to feed workers their ration of posho and to supply the region’s mushrooming urban population. Maize was priced preferentially to encourage its production, and newspaper advertisements, pamphlets, posters and films presented it as the quick-maturing, high-yielding ‘wonder crop’ of the modern farmer.19 By paying higher prices for the new crops, the government ensured their take-up, as the Africans grew them in order to raise cash to pay the poll tax.
The African countryside as it is today…
The traditional practice of planting a number of crops mixed in together was discouraged by most British agricultural officials, who regarded African farming methods with contempt. The jumbled fields offended British sensibilities, just as the messy fields with beans and squash straggling around the maize plants had affronted the early colonists in America. The canning companies did not want bags of mixed beans, and the practice of ‘pure planting’ was imposed by agricultural officers, who would inspect the fields to ensure that the plants were organised in an orderly fashion. The archaeologist Louis Leakey ‘had heard it argued again and again that if a Kikuyu would only divide up the plot of ground that he happens to have available, and would plant his maize in one part of it, his bean in another and his sweet potatoes in another and so on, he would get a bigger yield of each of these crops, and moreover, a better one. But would he?’20 The answer was that he would not. Intercropping with beans was a protective measure because they fixed nitrogen in the soil. The maize monoculture the British advocated became known as ‘maize mining’ because it stripped the soil of its fertility.21
… and the African countryside as it might be. A. R. Paterson’s vision of rural Africa after it had been ‘improved’ by the introduction of the plough.
In 1935, the agricultural officer for Kenya’s Central Province, W. L. Watt, noted with satisfaction that njahi ‘has lost its supreme position in the Kikuyu districts’.22 It was replaced by Phaseolus beans, which were both a subsistence and a cash crop, as any surplus could be sold to the canning factories. His triumph was misplaced. With the disappearance of njahi from their diet, the Kikuyu lost one of their richest sources of protein. In the case of maize, East Africans took a little more persuading before they accepted that it really was a superior food.23 After all, reality did not bear out the inflated claims of the government. Maize requires just the right amount of rain at a precise moment in its growing cycle in order to achieve its potential. If all goes well, yields can be phenomenal, and between 1927 and 1947 Tanganyika’s government statistics show that in some years maize yields were very high. But if the figures are averaged out for all 20 years, then overall maize performed worse than millet and sorghum. It did have the advantage that it matured in about half the time of the traditional crops and it could be eaten as a vegetable as well as a grain, but it was not quite the wonder crop it was made out to be.24
Nevertheless, the relentless campaign to impose maize eventually took effect and it became the dominant dietary grain, even for the women and children living on the reserves.25 Today East Africans regard maize as a quintessentially African food and find millet or sorghum porridge bitter and unpalatable.26 As the recipe at the beginning of the chapter shows, for Kenyans maize is now an essential ingredient in irio. Claims once recognised as propaganda, that maize is tastier, more nutritious and higher-yielding, have now come to be regarded as common sense. But the men who found cornmeal porridge disappointingly light and insubstantial were intuitively correct. As we saw in Chapter Five, the transference of the maize plant to Africa without the Mesoamerican knowledge of how to prepare corn by boiling the kernels in lime water, has resulted in dependence on a food that is deficient in both protein and vitamin B. The crop’s reliance on a specific pattern of rainfall in a region with unpredictable precipitation makes it a ‘false icon of… food security’.27 The East Africans would have been better off if they had continued to grow millet, sorghum, njahi and plantain, using traditional farming methods.
One positive consequence of the Kenyan nutritional study was that it brought the problem of malnutrition in the colonies to light and led to the setting-up in 1936 of a Committee on Nutrition in the Colonial Empire. The committee commissioned reports on the nutritional health of the colonies and the findings were damning. Jamaica, Antigua, West Africa, the Far East, Mauritius and Ceylon all returned evidence that malnutrition was an Empire-wide problem. Mauritians were reported to be smaller and unfit, and the Ceylonese were thought to be suffering from lack of food due to overpopulation. The governors of Jamaica and Antigua concluded that poverty was the cause of underfeeding. ‘Parents cannot afford to buy food’, stated the senior medical officer on Antigua. On the Gold Coast the director of the medical department identified the attention devoted to mining and cocoa as detrimental to subsistence farming and forest conservation. Besides poverty, low wages, poor yields and the lack of food crops, the ignorance of ‘Government officials and those who have power over the nutrition of others’ was identified as one of the primary causes of malnutrition.28
The Second World War diverted attention from the problem of colonial malnutrition, but after 1945, the authorities returned to their old plan of improving indigenous nutrition by commercialising the colonies’ agricultural economies. A number of misguided schemes sought to transfer the farming techniques then currently effecting a revolution on British farms to Africa, where they were wholly inappropriate. Ironically, given that it was the slave trade that had led to the disappearance of West African mangrove rice farming, the Gambia Field Working Party attempted to ‘introduce’ rice farming to the region’s swamp lands. Two tractors were dispatched in 1947, but when they sank into the silt on the rice fields, the experiment was abandoned.29 In 1948, the Colonial Development Corporation was set up to organise the production of agricultural commodities such as sugar, rice, cocoa, eggs, meat and vegetable oils, both to feed Britain, suffering in the grip of post-war austerity, and to sell to the United States in order to earn much-needed foreign exchange.30 The corporation did manage to set up a successful palm oil plantation and two sugar estates, but most of its schemes failed. The abattoirs, fruit-packing plants and canneries, fishing projects and banana, citrus, coconut, palm oil, rice, sugar and cocoa plantations all folded. Most of the eggs shipped to Britain from the poultry farm it established in the Gambia were declared unfit for human consumption.31
The Tanganyika groundnut scheme was perhaps the most costly of the string of failures. Between 1946 and 1951, the project absorbed the equivalent of three years’ worth of development funding for the entire Empire. It was the brainchild of the Ministry of Food, which sought a source of cheap vegetable oil for Britain’s fat-hungry population. Machinery was shipped to Tanganyika to clear the land in order to create a huge peanut plantation. But the tractors either broke down or their equipment was not strong enough to tackle the stubborn tree roots and deal with the hardness of the sun-baked earth when workers attempted to harvest the crop from the small area they had succeeded in planting. This was hardly a demonstration of the superiority of mechanised farming. It cost more to clear the land than it was worth even once it had been planted with peanuts. The little groundnut oil that was gleaned from the plantation made a negligible contribution to Britain’s requirements. The money would have been better spent on repairing northern Nigeria’s railways, where there was a glut of groundnuts but no infrastructure to take them to the ports.32
The colonial schemes did little to alleviate hunger or improve nutrition in the colonies. Rather than bringing to light the negative impact of colonial policy on indigenous diets, investigations into colonial malnutrition began to construct the still persistent notion that hunger and poverty were endemic to the colonies.33 The various post-war ‘development’ schemes failed even to produce food for Britain.34 More lamentably, the string of development failures did not sufficiently discredit the belief that Africa would be best served if it were transformed into a version of south-eastern England. This misguided way of thinking continued to colour post-colonial development policy even into the 1980s. East Africa was left with a less nutritious staple, which reduced the interest and variety of the indigenous diet while also making the population more vulnerable to food scarcity. When the world demand for dried Phaseolus beans fell in the 1970s, Kenyan dried bean cultivation also declined as women switched to growing green beans for the European market.35 Hence the complaints in the Daily Nation in 1971 that the bean content in irio was falling and the eventual disappearance of beans altogether from the dish, to be replaced by European white potatoes. When contemporary Kenyans at a kiosk restaurant contemplate a volcano-shaped mound of potato–pea–maize irio, it should bring home to them the cry of Thomas Sankara, former president of Burkina Faso: ‘Do you not know where imperialism is to be found?… Just look at your plate!’36