“Many of the dishes are no longer eaten by sophisticated urban Africans”
A social history of eating small grains in Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) c. 1920s to the 1950s
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.51185/journals/rhca.2021.e554Keywords:
small grains, maize, food history, African urban culture, Bulawayo, Southern Rhodesia, ZimbabweAbstract
Founded in 1840, the city of Bulawayo provides a lens into understanding urban development and city cultures of consumption in southern Africa and Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe). Home to a demographic range of both black Africans (of several ethnicities) and whites, by the time of Responsible Government in 1923, not only had the city established itself as the economic hub of the budding British colony but was also a reflection of the complex black-white relationships that characterized the colonial period. Using the story of African small grains – sorghum, millet and rapoko – cooking and eating patterns, this article traces the development of food in the city of Bulawayo. Relying on archival sources from the National Archives of Zimbabwe and secondary literature, this paper uses the social and political food history of African small grains to rethink facets of the story of black-white socio-political relations and changes in African urban cultures from the early 1920s until the dawn of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland in 1953. Drawing attention to the city life of Africans, this paper shows how their eating patterns shifted over time, as different socio-political and economic factors including increased economic interaction between blacks and whites, drought and state interventions shaped the reasons and ways to produce and consume small grains in the city. We argue that, while in many cases urban black families were compelled by the colonial economic agenda and encouraged by social trends to adopt new ideas on what to eat, they equally also exercised agency and their own volition in retaining old culinary systems, adopting new ones or adapting both to suit their changing circumstances. This illustrates how African culinary practices were shaped by their ever-changing social and economic contexts and were neither static nor heterogeneous. Contributing to a growing historiography of African urban society, this paper demonstrates how the history of social relations and changes in consumption in Bulawayo in the colonial era can be viewed from the stomach.
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