African Cuisines and Colonization in the Nineteenth Century

In the nineteenth century, Europeans invaded Africa. Between 1878 and 1913, every country on the African continent with the exceptions of Liberia on the west coast and Ethiopia on the east fell to a European power, and in 1935, Italy took Ethiopia. Three things enabled Europeans to colonize Africa: quinine, a New World herb that warded off malaria; the steamship, which made sailing upstream into the interior of Africa possible; and machine guns, which allowed a handful of men to control millions. France had the greatest amount of territory, almost thirty-six percent of the continent, which it controlled with the French Foreign Legion. England followed with more than thirty-two percent, mostly in the east and south, including modern Egypt, the Sudan, Uganda, Kenya, part of Tanzania, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, and South Africa. Germany and Belgium had almost eight percent each. Portugal, Italy, and Spain split what was left. This is why there are croissants and baguettes in Nigeria and the Ivory Coast in West Africa, spaghetti in Ethiopia and Eritrea on the east, and curry and chutney in British east and West Africa.

            The British attitude towards people of other cultures was profoundly racist. These colonial powers caused complete disruption of the life and the land, the cuisine and the culture. They forced the native people to grow non-native staple crops like peanuts and cacao, which displaced native African foods. By the end of the nineteenth century, Africa was the world’s leading producer of cacao. This caused the economy to shift from a self-sufficient barter system to cash, because the native people now had to buy food with money, so they had to work for wages. Some went to work on rubber plantations in the Belgian Congo, under the extremely harsh rule of King Leopold. Workers who didn’t do their work well enough or quickly enough had their hands or feet cut off. The Congo was also rich in copper and tin. But South Africa was a gold mine and still until this day.

            Many of the ports of Africa were originally settled by European countries as stations where their ships could stop for repairs and supplies, including food. South Africa, almost halfway between Indonesia and the Netherlands, served this purpose for the Dutch East India Company, which first established a colony there in 1652. They immediately planted fruits and vegetables that would keep the ships’ crews healthy and free from scurvy and other vitamin-deficiency diseases: “sweet potatoes, pineapples, watermelons, pumpkins, cucumbers, radishes, and citrus trees such as lemons and oranges.” They also made a dried meat, like jerky, called biltong. By the eighteenth century, the Dutch brought slaves from Malaysia and their spicy cuisine, including one dish called Kerrie-kerrie, later shortened to curry. Another Malaysian spice mixture composed of onions, ginger, dried shrimp or prawns, and chilli powder, is called a sambal.

            In eastern Africa, in Ethiopia and Eritrea, injera bread, like a thick, elastic sourdough crepe, is “the daily bread, tablecloth, and silverware.” The bottom of an enormous round tray the diameter of a small table is lined with injera; the stew is on top of the bread, soaks into it, and is used to scoop up the food with the hand. The east also has strong Indian influences because the British brought experienced workers from India to work on the railroad in Africa, including one young man named Gandhi, who later led the successful fight for India’s freedom.

Sanitation, Nutrition, Colonization: The Nineteenth Century in Europe

           In the 19^th century was the overall scientific revolution. When scientists and engineers took the theories and instruments discovered during the scientific revolution in the 17^th and 18^th centuries and created practical applications for them. Hence, they created machines that caused revolutions in industry, medicine, and science. Using microscopes and experiments, scientists proved that organisms invisible to the naked eye made food and wine ferment and caused diseases in humans and also animals.  So, in the 18^th and 19^th century scientists were taking a new look at nutrition and sanitation then proved studies about microorganisms or as you call it germs and genes. Next are some of the phenomenon and causes that also contributed on the industrial revolution towards humankind: cholera epidemic in London, yeast destroyed wine in France, and crossbreeding plants by Luther Burbank.

      A. England: dr. Snow and the Water Supply

            In 1854, a cholera epidemic struck London. This disease causes death by draining the body of all fluids in a violent and rapid way. Eventually this epidemic was considered strange, where people in one neighbourhood got cholera while people a block away didn’t. Dr. John Snow who was a physician, finally figured it out, while people were getting their water from different wells. Those who got cholera used a well that was contaminated by people dumping the contents of their sick babies’ diapers down it. Dr. Snow had the handle from that pump removed, and ended the cholera epidemic. From this and other scientific experiments came germ theory and an understanding of how diseases spread. The transmission of cholera, typhoid, salmonella, and other sanitation diseases is through a “fecal-oral”, where you will obtain from poor personal hygiene. In the mid–nineteenth century, London and Paris established public health departments to deal with sanitation in the growing cities.

      B. France: Yeast

            It was a national disaster when the wines of France were ruined. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the wine in France went sour, smelled and tasted bad. It was not even good vinegar. Vintners were mystified: there was nothing wrong with the grapes as they grew on the vines, and they had been harvested, stored, and processed the same way as they had for centuries. But there was no wine in France. It was a tremendous blow to the national economy and to the national pride. Although fermentation had been known for 5,000 years, since the Egyptians discovered that it turned grain into beer, exactly how it occurred remained a mystery. A scientist, Louis Pasteur looked under his microscope and became the first person in the world to see exactly what caused fermentation, which is yeast. He also discovered that if the wine was heated to a certain point, it could kill the organisms that caused the wine to turn sour. While the ones that made it ferment and turn into good wine lived. This process of heating foods to destroy organisms that cause spoilage was named after him, pasteurization.

     C. The U.S.: Luther Burbank

            Americans were also influenced by evolution and the advances in agricultural science in Europe. Luther Burbank invented a better potato, one that would be more resistant to disease, by crossbreeding potatoes to create a hybrid. It was further modified and became the Idaho potato. While he moved to Napa, California, where he experimented with more than 4,500 species of plants, including seeds and seedlings from India, France, Chile, Persia, Mexico, and Japan, and built or crossbreed many other new plant, including the Santa Rosa Plum; the plumcot, a plum-apricot cross;  the Shasta daisy, and even the white blackberry.

 

Mesopotamia: Food, Culture, and Gods

          The Fertile Crescent is an area of land that runs from the Mediterranean Sea on its western end, then curves around in a crescent shape to the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern Iraq, down to the Persian Gulf. It was in this part of the world, the land called Mesopotamia, which means “between the rivers,” that scientists believe an advanced civilization began approximately 5,000 years ago—around 3000 B.C. The cities in Mesopotamia were surrounded by walls for defence, and inside the walled city was another walled mini-city, the temple. Inside the temple was the most important building, the granary, where the city stored its food. Priests and priestesses honoured the gods full time by preparing food for them and celebrating with feasts on their special days. So, from the earliest civilizations, food, religion, and government were connected.

           The abundance of food in Mesopotamia is evident in the records of what was presented to the gods and goddesses, who needed to eat four times a day. Their mainstay was bread, as it was for humans. The main god, Anu, and three main goddesses, Antu, Ishtar, and Nanaya, got thirty loaves a day—each. They also got “top quality dates,” figs, and grapes. There was also much meat given every day to them and to other minor divinities. This was sacred food, ritually prepared. The millers, bakers, and butchers had to recite prayers of thanks to the gods and goddesses as they ground the grain, kneaded the bread, and slaughtered the animals. Then the priests placed the food on golden platters and set it before the gods, perhaps on a table. Historians don’t know what happened then, but speculate that the priests ate the food themselves or sold it if the temple needed money.

            In Mesopotamia, foods were preserved by drying, salting, covering them in oil, or in the case of dairy, by turning it into clarified butter and cheese. Ingredients mentioned in other sources are pomegranates, arugula, fish, pistachios, cherries, plums, lentils, anise seed, grasshoppers, eggplant, jujubes (a kind of date), vetch (a legume), honey, turtles, sesame seeds, and pork. They did not eat horses, dogs, or snakes. Such culinary creations call for great skill, so cooks were a highly regarded professional class who served apprenticeships to learn their trade. They were specialized, with cooks separate from bakers and pastry cooks. Their services were affordable only to the wealthy. A royal household might have 400 cooks and 400 pastry chefs. The gods mirrored this: a major god like Marduk might have a minor god, who would be known as “Cook of Marduk.”