A History of Food Without History: Food, Trade, and Environment in west-central Ghana in the Second Millennium AD.

Abstract

African foodways are often portrayed as unchanging traditions plagued by chronic food insecurity and forever subject to the vagaries of environmental change. These assumptions are based mostly on the present and obscure our ability to determine why and under what circumstances these problems arose. I provide a long-term perspective on continuity and change in food practices over the last millennium in Banda, west-central Ghana, as the area was drawn into increasingly global networks. Using archaeological, archaeobotanical, environmental, ethnographic, and documentary evidence, I trace how new crops were adopted, how people responded to environmental, economic, and political shifts, and the development of food insecurity.

People in Banda relied on pearl millet for much of the last millennium supplemented by sorghum in wetter periods, along with cowpea, okra, and shea butter. The area first became involved in long-distance trade during a wet phase (1210-1450) while much of the subcontinent was experiencing dry conditions, making Banda an ideal location for iron smelting. From 1450-1650, Banda was heavily involved in northern-focused trade networks and produced ceramic, iron, copper, and ivory objects locally. Some of these goods—most notably ivory—may have provided access to emerging Atlantic trade networks. The American crops maize and tobacco were adopted by c. 1600-1660, in the middle of a centuries-long drought. Maize remained a little used crop even as the Asante state took control of the area (c. 1773-1825), suggesting that the role of maize in the development of the forest-based Asante has been overemphasized. The most significant break in food practices occurred during the mid to late 19th century, a time of upheaval associated with the internal slave trade and shifts in political and economic control over much of the subcontinent. Banda peoples were forced from their homes, and when they resettled, chose to rely on the fastest yielding and low labor crops they could—maize and cassava. These results suggest that the food insecurity problems of modern times arose only recently. The Banda that existed beforehand was able to withstand a severe, centuries-long drought with little impact on food practices and daily life.