Book Review

Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500–2000. By James C. McCann. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiv + 289. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. Cloth $27.95.
James McCann, one of the pioneers of environmental history as a field in African studies, has turned to the history of Africa's most important food crop for his most recent work. The accession of maize to the position of pre-eminent food and crop in Africa contains a marvelous opportunity to examine the transformations of African agricultural practices throughout the modern era. The history of maize is both the history of the adoption and transformation of a new crop gradually by African farmers in the centuries since 1500 and more recently of the rise of racially casted industrial agriculture in parts of the continent in the twentieth century. As McCann notes toward the end of the book, the dominance of maize can be seen as a dire threat to sustainable agriculture and human populations in Africa or as a providential grace that married a crop domesticated in a different part of the world with an ideal set of environments for humans to develop new productive breeds.	1
McCann's work is not the first to examine the history of maize in Africa; Marvin Miracle's Maize in Tropical Africa was published forty years ago. McCann builds on that sound piece of scholarship. He expands his analysis into areas not covered by Miracle, for whom "tropical" excluded the commercial, white-owned farms of southern Africa. McCann also reviews the continuing expansion and transformation of maize cultivation in the last forty years.	2
McCann organizes the volume chronologically. He discusses the four main varieties of maize, highlighting the characteristics of each that suited them for different environments or made them attractive to farm households. He revisits the introduction of maize to Africa. He does not add much to the documentary record of the spread of maize, relying on many of the same Portuguese sources as Miracle. However, he does use linguistic evidence to hint at the routes of the spread of maize in Africa. While West African coastal regions seem clearly to have adopted maize from Portuguese trading posts, the Sudan seems to have adopted the crop from North African sources. McCann argues that different naming patterns and different types of maize (early maturing flints dominating the drier regions, and more productive floury maizes the southern regions) indicating these different routes. He notes that maize became a main staple in parts of West Africa by the seventeenth century while in eastern, central, and southern Africa it remained a secondary crop in most areas until the nineteenth century.	3
McCann describes the process of the adoption of maize by African farmers as a result of an artesian process. Farmers blended different varieties of maize into productive systems based on the need for crops with different characteristics such as maturation time and drought resistance as well as on the basis of different needs and preferences for foods such as green maize consumed as a vegetable or dried maize ground into flour. Women played a critical role in this process of selection. Where women ground grain using mortar and pestle, they often showed a preference for floury maize. Where long-term storage was a necessity, flint maize often played a larger role. African farmers also showed a great appreciation for the variety of colors of maize, keeping a variety of combinations alive.	. . .