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.	4
In the twentieth century, McCann concentrates on the development of commercial and industrial agriculture. The rise of white-owned industrial farms in South Africa and later the Rhodesias (today Zambia and Zimbabwe) and Kenya, relied on North American types imported and then rebred for African conditions. This process included a selection for white dent maize because of the ease with which it withstood milling by mechanical means. In the second half of the twentieth century, colonial institutions, international agencies, and commercial seed producers began to produce hybrid maize that dramatically increased yields. African farmers' variety of maizes retreated to garden crops while improved—and, by the last few years of the century, hybrid seed—dominated fields on both large-scale and small-scale farms. The Sasakawa 2000 program, a Japanese philanthropy backed by Nobel Laureate Norman Borlaug and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, has taken the lead in promoting the use of hybrid maize together with inorganic fertilizer by small holders. The results have been dramatic increases in yields in countries like Ghana, Uganda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania during years of good rainfall. As McCann notes, the increasing "industrialization" of production does have costs in terms of dependence on foreign imports of seed and fertilizer, growing mechanization, and the potential for land consolidation and growing landlessness.	5
McCann's history of maize is masterful. His examples are well chosen, and his discussion insightful. There are a few themes to which he gives relatively little space. Geographically, McCann focuses on Ethiopia (where he has long conducted field research), coastal West Africa, and southern Africa. He provides a more limited discussion of the expansion of maize as a small holder crop in eastern and central Africa over the course of the twentieth century. The interplay of state action (colonial and postcolonial), market, and environmental condition in these areas is as much a part of the spread of maize as a dominant crop as its commercialization in southern Africa. Likewise little of his evidence comes from former French, Belgian, or Portuguese colonies. For example, toward the end of the book, McCann describes a malaria epidemic in one region in Ethiopia that he conclusively links to the spread of hybrid maize production. The example demonstrates the way that markets, technology, and climate change have come together to create novel and in this case deadly conditions. Presented in isolation, though, the example begs for comparative analysis. The addition of such evidence probably would not change the broad picture McCann develops, but would present a fuller account of the complexity of the production and consumption of maize.	6
McCann's conclusions are, as always, judicious. He notes the threats posed by dependence on high technology agriculture in potentially unstable areas both politically and environmentally. He points out the uncertain effects of both the rapid urbanization occurring in much of Africa and of global climate change. He concludes, however, with cautious optimism. In his view maize does seem to have brought a kind of grace to Africa.	7
Gregory H. Maddox is professor of history and associate dean of the Graduate School at Texas Southern University. He is a specialist in Tanzanian and East African environmental history.

Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.