Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (review)

Most historians write history as if the human experience has been a matter of ripples and waves, not of tides. James McCann is more interested in tides. The subject of his book is maize, the Native American crop that arrived in Africa not many years after 1492, along with potatoes, sweet potatoes, cassava, various beans and squashes, peanuts, and tobacco. Today, maize is a crop of importance in all the major regions of Africa south of the Sahara. In southern Africa in 1999, maize accounted for two-thirds and more of all cereal production. And in Africa, unlike the other continents, almost all of this crop is eaten by humans, not livestock. Among the nations of the world, the leading consumers of maize per capita in 1999 were Lesotho, Zambia, and Malawi.

McCann tells us why Africans value maize so highly. It is the most adaptable of all major food crops. In one variety or another it can survive and even prosper in climates as different as those suitable for wheat and for rice. Maize produces more food per acre or unit of labor than any other cereal. It produces edible food faster than other crops, a welcome trait in times of crisis. It requires relatively little care after planting, no special tools, and children can harvest the ears by hand. The ears are wrapped in leaves, safe from all but the most determined birds, and, if necessary, can be left on the stalks for weeks. Leaves and stalks can be utilized as livestock feed, fuel, and building materials.

The disadvantages of maize are also significant. It is intolerant of drought, a vagary of weather to which Africa is especially subject. It is less broadly nutritional than the potato; depend on it too heavily and you will suffer pellagra, a disease common in the American South during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like all crops, maize has its special parasites. During the 1950s something called American Rust swept through the maize fields of Africa, jeopardizing the health and even lives of natives; then, before science invented a cure, it disappeared. It seems likely that American Rust or something like it will return.

Maize is an "open pollinator"—that is, it crosses with other varieties promiscuously, which is how the extremely productive hybrids dominating national and international markets came into being. These are miracle plants, but their productivity depends on their being, in every generation, hybrids. When the indigenous farmer frugally plants kernels selected from his previous harvest, his next one will in all likelihood be smaller. Hybrid maize, therefore, is commercially addictive, obliging the farmer every season to return to the international seed sellers.

The author's botanical descriptions and explanations (thumbnail-size in dimension, but that is all most readers need) help us comprehend the long history of maize in Africa. It arrived during the sixteenth century from all directions—north and south, east and west, Christian and Muslim—to become a major food source during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. McCann provides thoughtful histories of its early decades in northern Italy and Ethiopia, demonstrating how politics affects agriculture profoundly—and vice versa as well.

But Africa's farms were not dominated by homogenous fields of maize during the early centuries of its history there. It was just one of a number of crops with contrasting soil requirements and growing periods that farmers planted in hopes there would be something to harvest and eat no matter what the vagaries of weather. Then, in the twentieth century, especially during the middle decades, Africa's society and agriculture "modernized": men migrated into cities for jobs in mines, manufacturing, and various kinds of service and became dependent on the importation of food they knew from the countryside left behind. Hybrids of maize arrived from America that were varieties adapted to take special advantage of new fertilizers and biocides. To many, this...