Oryza Glaberrima – and the decline of Indigenous African Foods

The loss of a peoples’ traditional food, is an erasure of their heritage. The decline of a peoples’ ancestral food, is an eradication of their lineage. 

The alarming rate at which we are losing our indigenous foods, I wonder, if our farmers will still  have the power to feed us?

The African continent has its own species of rice that has been cultivated over the past 3,500 year. Oryza Glaberrima, is the native African rice, and its ancestor was the Oryza Barthii. Oryza is the genus of plants in the grass family that includes rice crops. There are several Oryza in the world, however, only two have been domesticated. The Oryza Sativa, which is the native Asian rice from China, and the African native one, Glaberrima.

In the delta Niger region, now known as Mali, is where Oryza Glaberrima was domesticated and cultivated. The plants of this indigenous rice have wide leaves which sheds out weeds, the Glaberrima is resistant to diseases, and pests; it tolerates any water depth, soil condition, and severe climates.

The bran of the glaberrima, depending on the variety, can range from red to purple to black. All grains are not the same, some grains are short, others are long, and most are breakable, this depends on the variety. 

African native rice was brought to the Americas through the transatlantic slave trade, arriving in Brazil probably by the 1550s and in the U.S. in the 1784. The seed was carried as provisions on slave ships, and the technology and skills needed to grow it were the rice farmers captured as slaves to the New World. 

The indigenous African rice was initially cultivated in South Carolina, throughout the Carolina plantations, until the Oryza Sativa, the native Asian rice, took over.  

The Oryza Sativa is more popular than the Glaberrima, and preferred because the Sativa is said to be easier to mill, its seeds scatter less, and it's less breakable than the Glaberrima.On the other hand, less attention has been given to the Glaberrima while the seeds of the Sativa have been genetically modified to produce higher yields. 

In Senegal, the Jola women whom I call ancestral rice masters, can name and recognize all the varieties of the indigenous African rice. They can recognize numerous rice varieties based on the size and number of grains in each spikelet. By observing the color of the bran, the stem, and the shape of the panicles, they can tell which variety of rice it is. 

Traditionally, women are the seed keepers, seed savers, and seed protectors. Women have created numerous local, and communal seed networks to ensure a variety of seeds, even ones that are no longer grown, are preserved and shared.

Due to lack of investment in research and post harvest equipment on Oryza Glaberrima, the native African rice is declining.

This speaks to a much larger conversation on, who decides what food we eat? 

The foods that make it to the global market are determined by a number of factors, but mainly by investments, trade policies, research, marketing, crop yield, and largely politics. Our native foods have been devalued to the capilistic language of yield, commercialization, agrochemicals, and imperialism. 

We know that indigenous foods are pest resistant, drought resistant, and climate resilient foods because they have lived this long to feed all humans that came before us. But when we start to prioritize nourishing the world with ancestral foods, our metrics have to shift from shareholders to biodiversity, seed exchange, nutrition, crop rotation, agroecology, and this way of farming leaves the power into the hands of the farmers, and less so in banks of corporations.

With years of growing the Oryza Glaberrima, the Jola women know the characteristics of the African indigenous rice intimately. How is this knowledge being passed on? What is the significance of scientists modifying ancestral foods in labs to the meaning and connections food has always carried?

But, foods like Oryza Glaberrima have fed people, since the beginning of humankind, before Europeans ever made any contact, before imperialism, before colonization, before slavery, Africans ate, preserved, and survived on their own foods for thousands of years.