4 ms·

The Njahi Wars: Behind Kenya's Controversial Black Bean

34 points by Thevet 5y ago

Turing_Machine 5y ago
> 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.
- finnh 5y ago
  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 5y ago
  > 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 5y ago
    I think that tying the very real facts of colonialism to the taste of a motherfucking bean trivializes those facts.
    - tom_mellior 5y ago
      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 5y ago
        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
- Klinky 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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 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').
desktopninja 5y ago
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!
yumraj 5y ago
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..
- bigbillheck 5y ago
  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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indians_in_Kenya#Kenya_Colony and it's not implausible that this would be an origin for the term.
  - M_bara 5y ago
    Prior to the brits, there was trade along the East African coast; past the Middle East, all the way to India. The main language along the coast became a fusion of Arabic, Indian and Bantu languages. Swahili adopts Arabic arithmetic & language structures e.g 15 is said as ten and five, 7 is Saba. A minister is wazir etc. Many Old Bantu words such as mti for tree are in Swahili. similarly sounding words are used in languages from west Africa to South Africa (muti, miti). From India, we have Pilau, chapati, dhania... http://www.rahmahmuslimhomeschool.co.uk/index/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/My-Arabic-Numbers-Workbook-1-10.pdf http://www.rahmahmuslimhomeschool.co.uk/index/wp-content/upl... http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Bantu.html http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Bantu.html https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swahili_terms_derived_from_Hindi https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swahili_terms_deri...
- aorth 5y ago
  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. :)
rcpt 5y ago
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.
rossdavidh 5y ago
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).
mxcrossr 5y ago
Interesting read. I like rice and beans, but I go absolutely crazy with the seasoning. In that sense, the bean being bland may be no trouble for me!

34 points by Thevet 5y ago

> 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.

finnh 5y ago
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 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  I think that tying the very real facts of colonialism to the taste of a motherfucking bean trivializes those facts.
  - tom_mellior 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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
Klinky 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 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').

desktopninja 5y ago

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!

yumraj 5y ago

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..

bigbillheck 5y ago
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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indians_in_Kenya#Kenya_Colony and it's not implausible that this would be an origin for the term.
- M_bara 5y ago
  Prior to the brits, there was trade along the East African coast; past the Middle East, all the way to India. The main language along the coast became a fusion of Arabic, Indian and Bantu languages. Swahili adopts Arabic arithmetic & language structures e.g 15 is said as ten and five, 7 is Saba. A minister is wazir etc. Many Old Bantu words such as mti for tree are in Swahili. similarly sounding words are used in languages from west Africa to South Africa (muti, miti). From India, we have Pilau, chapati, dhania... http://www.rahmahmuslimhomeschool.co.uk/index/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/My-Arabic-Numbers-Workbook-1-10.pdf http://www.rahmahmuslimhomeschool.co.uk/index/wp-content/upl... http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Bantu.html http://www.languagesgulper.com/eng/Bantu.html https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swahili_terms_derived_from_Hindi https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Swahili_terms_deri...
aorth 5y ago
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. :)

rcpt 5y ago

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.

rossdavidh 5y ago

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).

mxcrossr 5y ago

Interesting read. I like rice and beans, but I go absolutely crazy with the seasoning. In that sense, the bean being bland may be no trouble for me!