[HN Gopher] The Njahi Wars: Behind Kenya's Controversial Black Bean
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The Njahi Wars: Behind Kenya's Controversial Black Bean
Author : Thevet
Score : 26 points
Date : 2021-05-15 02:35 UTC (20 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.seriouseats.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.seriouseats.com)
| desktopninja wrote:
| If we weren't all properly primed (Florida Effect) by all the
| hyper sensualized media pollution, this would be nice read.
|
| As kids, my parents fed us black beans with sugar sprinkled on it
| for breakfast. They called it "bush cereal". Stuff was great!
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > But at the real heart of these wars, as with a lot of other
| wars, is the violence of British colonialism.
|
| Oh, for Christ's sake.
|
| Some people like the taste of these beans. Some don't. So what? I
| detest Lima beans. That has nothing whatsoever to do with Spanish
| colonialism in Peru. Not everything has to be a jumping-off point
| for a dullwitted "woke" lecture.
| Klinky wrote:
| If you read the article you'd understand that colonial policies
| marginalized the bean, and the marginalization of the bean
| recently evolved into a form of political commentary/protest.
| The author then gives their own take on the bean.
|
| The author is also a Kenyan, so you probably shouldn't write it
| off as a dullwitted attempt at wokeism.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I did read the article. "Colonial policies" have nothing to
| do with how the bean tastes. Nor does the taste of the bean
| have anything to do with "violence".
| bigbillheck wrote:
| There's way more to a person's and a culture's view of food
| than just 'taste'!
|
| You appear to be a fellow American, and as such I would
| have expected you to understand how and food and food
| choices can be political and have racial and gendered
| connotations.
|
| I mean, just for starters it seems like every couple years
| we have someone famous making a regrettable statement about
| watermelon and fried chicken and you know the rest. (For
| non-US readers, take a guess and you'll probably be right).
| 'Real Men Don't Eat Quiche' is a thing of the past, but
| "Real Men Don't Diet" isn't any older than this website,
| and anybody reasonably plumbed into the culture will know
| to what 'man food' refers.
|
| On the class side, here in America we've certainly got food
| that's 'for poor people', think meatloaf and rice&beans and
| all the other ways that cheap calories get stretched. (And
| we have food 'for rich people', remember Obama and
| arugula?)
|
| These things can get reinforced over time, I know as a
| child I certainly inferred facts about 'what we eat' and
| 'what we do not eat' from my parents and grandparents and
| the society around me, and I don't think many people here
| can say otherwise.
|
| And then one of the things about the British, they were
| good at playing one side off against the other and
| heightening existing divisions, and another thing about the
| British is they didn't leave Kenya until 1963. My parents
| were alive then, and even if the parents of you the reader
| were not, it's likely your grandparents were.
|
| And yet another thing about the British, they were trying
| to turn Kenya into a farm for export, and you can guess to
| whom they wanted Kenya to export, and that meant 'no' to
| njahi and 'yes' to exportable varieties.
|
| The seriouseats article references an article of Robertson
| ("Black, White, and Red All over: Beans, Women, and
| Agricultural Imperialism in Twentieth-Century Kenya",
| https://www.jstor.org/stable/3744315?seq=1), which is on
| sci-hub, and from which I could quote at length but I'll
| limit myself to: "However, the growing of beans in the
| Nairobi area has been most severely affected by two
| factors: the colonial presence forcing the growth and sale
| of cash crops (or wage labor) to pay taxes and, after
| independence, continued similar taxation policies along
| with the need to pay school fees." (p287)
|
| In conclusion, people and food and their interactions are
| complicated, and it's not 'woke' to point this out or talk
| about it, nor is it wrong to use 'violence' to describe the
| British legacy in Kenya (and if you're getting hung up on
| that particular word, substitute 'cruelty').
| finnh wrote:
| Hah! I stopped reading at the sentence immediately prior to the
| one you cite:
|
| > At the heart of the njahi wars is the question of who gets to
| determine which foods are tasty.
|
| No actual real person argues about this. Everyone past six
| years of age gets that different people like different things.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| > a dullwitted "woke" lecture
|
| What did feel was a "lecture"? You read an article about the
| cultural history of a type of bean. That cultural history
| includes the fact that colonialism happened. Do you feel that
| every mention of colonialism is somehow propaganda? Don't you
| think that omitting the fact that colonialism happened, and
| that it influenced the cultural history of this bean, would be
| much more manipulative?
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| I think that tying the very real facts of colonialism to the
| taste of a motherfucking bean trivializes those facts.
| tom_mellior wrote:
| _That_ is a possibly valid argument. A woke one, in fact.
| It 's unfortunate that you started the discussion on a very
| wrong foot.
|
| For whatever it's worth, I think the sentence you quoted
| from the article was a very clumsy segue, and the argument
| it hinted at wasn't supported by the rest of the article.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| For whatever it's worth, no one put you in charge of
| deciding whether my arguments are "valid".
|
| The article isn't even consistent with itself. It starts
| out with "Oh, the evil British forced us to stop growing
| our delicious native beans", then, at the end, the author
| admits that he doesn't like them much himself.
|
| Kenya has been independent from the UK since 1963. The
| British haven't been telling them what beans to grow for
| nearly 60 years now.
|
| If they still haven't switched back, it's because they
| like the new beans better, even if the new beans were
| introduced by "colonialism".
|
| Typo correction: 1964 -> 1963
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Now I want some. Maybe this was a really, really subtle and
| clever way to get an extremely white (not especially woke) dude
| in Austin, Texas, USA to go buy some njahi beans, but if so, I'm
| just gonna say it worked, and I want to buy some (but have no
| idea where in this town I would find it).
| yumraj wrote:
| One things that surprised me in the article is that the author
| uses the word _dhania_ for cilantro.
|
| _dhania_ is what cilantro is called in Hindi and maybe in other
| Indian languages. Is that what is called in other languages
| /countries also, if so am curious which ones..
| aorth wrote:
| There are lots of Hindi and Arabic words in Swahili! I'm more
| familiar with the Arabic ones, but a few from Hindi off the top
| of my head are: pesa (money), embe (mango), and of course
| chapati. :)
| bigbillheck wrote:
| The British brought a lot of people from India into their
| colonies in Africa and elsewhere :
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indians_in_Kenya#Kenya_Colony and
| it's not implausible that this would be an origin for the term.
| rcpt wrote:
| I'm a bit interested in trying this bean now. Since getting an
| instant pot and discovering rancho gordo I've learned that
| different varieties of dry beans completely change a meal.
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