Oral East Africa>Boycott maize, it is a revolutionary act Part I. At the hut of the story

Ya kesho ni ya kesho

I have been struggling to figure out how I should start this story until recently I saw a mason when I was out on an evening walk. He said ‘ya kesho tumeawachia kesho.

It is not just what he said, but how he said it, that proud resolve that underlined a philosophy of his life. Going to work for unga, maize-meal to feed his family only for the day.

Like most of my countrymen, he was resolute and confident in the wisdom of his past that he should live like this, in his old tattered paint-stained clothes, working for just enough. But where did this stoic philosophy that permeated my country come from?

The answer may come from World War One, when Kenyans almost faced starvation after disease destroyed the millet harvest. Farmers ate their millet seeds meant for replanting in the next season, and surrendered their food source to the British colonists’ maize.

I fixed to write about maize when I went recently on a job to Lwala village in Sori, Migori. I got the Nairobi call, from a friend which meant work.

As a production studio in the country side, you get the Nairobi call when the procurement processes have dragged through the delivery timelines and the contractor is short on time. The contractor then has to subcontract to a mashinani guy, (whose quality they highly doubt,) to deliver last mile clips impromptu and at a bargain.

Yet we are happy to play this crucial role of the value chain. In fact, at Seamless Frames we hope to specialize in this process and offer the highest quality last mile solutions for video and photography projects in Western Kenya.

I digress, we set off for Sori which turned out to be a pleasant road trip into the heart of South Nyanza’s flat lands and undulating hills that oversee the lake as Kenya drops away into Tanzania.

Mami water

Rural Nyanza is dotted with Kenyan middle-class ambitions of small retirement homes. Mansard roofs rise in mostly red, blue, maroon, and black hues, from the shadows of little bomas built in reverence and devotion to water. Black tanks stick out in chimney-like altars next to the brick houses seeking for crucial life while just yonder homesteads are eaten away by the crawling reach of the lake that can claim geographical alterations over massive swathes of its banks.

I was thinking about Japanese art, something to do about absences when I thought about the homes I saw.

If I were to paint them, they would be hidden by the thickets, and one could not tell whether they were inhabited or not. They would all look like my dead grandmother's house, overran by indigenous thicket.

As we drove through the landscape dotted with sturdy thickets of thorn acacia trees, patched up with braids of emaciated eucalyptus you could see in between the homes and the patches of land with wilting maize plants.

I have a sense for the dramatic, and I have to ask Oyier if this is normal. It is strange having been a journalist in the city where we report numbers.

If I were to do a story on maize, I would go to the ministry of Agriculture and get an estimate of how much maize is projected for the August harvest.

I would also check East African Grain reports and see what the scientific communities have to say and call Tegemeo institute for some insights into what the various data sources said. I would be on a deadline, and that would be a small story and I would do what I have done over the last decade, report.

Retired bureaucrat

Now I find myself on the field and it felt rather strange. What looked to me like an imminent disaster may just be what is norm, and that as a town mouse, I was bound to get excited of all the village thrills. So I ask Oyier if this is normal, I think, and whether these many people do agriculture here.

Another prejudice, as a city writer I tend to imagine the rural farmer in quite disturbing ignorance. They are peasant. But what rolls past me are homes of retired bureaucrats, private pensioners in beautiful homes putting science and the miracle of maize hybrids into the earth and yielding yellowed out spindles that could not hold the weight of a maize cob.

So I called Dr Dennis Otieno from the Tegemeo Institute and asked him if he had done his usual surveys of maize growing areas and whether I was being alarmist for what I thought would be complete crop failure in Western Kenya.

I ask anxiously given what I assume was an admittance by Agriculture PS Paul Rono that there are only available stocks to last to the next main harvest, starting in August in most counties. That, given the floods, some farmers lost their crop and we are anticipating a La nina season at the end of the year which would mean drought.

But he assured me that the harvest may be lost but there was a good harvest during the long rains.

He told me he was in Muran’ga and was witnessing some failure there too. He was however confident we would get the estimated 38 million bags just like last year and that would have to be supplemented by the duty free imports.

American ideas

One thing I learned is that the Americans have been paying for his surveys and they halted their funding, and just like many things that do not work with the state, this surveillance would rely on his pocket, just like this story would rely on mine.

According to his expert analysis, the problem could be manifold, the farmer, our people are not the best farmers who could master the rocket science of administering input at the right time and quantity. It could also be rogue agrovet owners selling counterfeit seeds. And I add … or the government offering fake fertilizer.

But in reality he says, the issue is the adaptability of the hybrid species to peculiar local climates which in essence means everything with this crop is doomed to fail. It always was.

Maize was introduced to Kenya by the Portuguese blah blah blah, but it was institutionalized by the British settlers. They wanted to get on the bandwagon of the rise of the American corn empire that rode on a crop that could not be produced profitably. Using their influence they decided for entire countries a policy of subsidization to support its global mass production and create a dependency for their monopolies over seeds.

By 1951, The Americans were sponsoring Kenyan Settlers; M.N. Harrison, chief Kenyan maize breeder, in the White Highlands of Kitale to produce the first hybrids that would constitute the maize miracle. This miracle food would underwrite the social contract of this country; after the independence government gladly claimed it as its own.

Maize was a colonial project that ought to have died at independence. The kernel of this corn was rooted in the racial appropriation of African labour for free, and artificial prices that had been passed on to consumers during the British colonial times.

Kenyans would soon realize that maize could not be produced profitably. It would require constant funding of research controlled by foreigners and annual subsidies of market protectionist voodoo.

It would also turn into the twitch of national trauma, the memory of being paid for your labour in maize meal coded in the philosophy of the masons' life. Waking everyday kutafutia watototo unga.