Happy Voodoo or Happy Food

Religion is a very personal matter. The most that it should extend to is a cultural matter. There are hundreds of thousands of religions throughout the world as there should be. But one person one day woke up and looked to the opposite ridge and thought that he was far much better off than the people living over the next ridge on many accounts. Maybe it was on account of their dressing, the way they farmed, the way they married and much later the way they worshiped. The last point of discrimination has been a major curse on mankind.

But unlike other major wars, the wars based on the differences of opinions were actually proxy wars over other tangible resources and less about what one person's style of worship was. Racism has and will always be aimed at appropriating labor and resources from one group to another. I know that being an African living in the American South. I have been practicing the religion of truth, power and honesty. It has kept me from a lot of traps or boxes that would cloud my view of reality. I certainly don't want to live in a perpetual eclipse between light and darkness.

It was a bit out of the ordinary that the topic of my last keynote was about Voodoom and food. It was an experiment that went rather well. The focus of my lecture was to set the record straight and shed some light on some seriously misunderstood concepts. I had in mind a phrase that I once heard on TV way back in 1990. The U.S president at that time was George Walker Bush. The U.S had just invaded Panama and its then president was captured and extradited to the U.S. While the president was giving an interview about the U.S economy, he used the world voodoo economics. I was still relatively new in the U.S and obviously didn't have a good command of the local terms. I however took offense as I got the sense that the term had not been used in a positive light. The audience laughed and the president looked least surprised from the reaction of the audience.

I relived that memory on a podium and set the record straight. I will summarize what I said by simply stating that it is unfair to have some religions holding special status regardless of how many adherents it may hold in a secular country. Religious countries are exactly that, countries based on certain regions. So if we are going to wish every religious group some warm wishes, we should do it for all. It is also worth noting that the reason that certain religions enjoy certain privileges is partly because of their decimation of other religions. Christianity and Islam have had a long history of war that has seen enough blood shed to form a river. It actually reminds me of the first river in Greek mythology to speak during the Trojan War when so many Trojan soldiers died and thereby flooding river Xanthus with blood. The river complained to the most powerful Greek soldier and expressed its displeasure with all the blood shed. And what were the Greeks and Trojans fighting over? It was a fight for justice for the most beautiful woman named Helen. Who started the war? Eris, the Greek goddess of strife and discord started the whole thing and the other gods and goodness jumped in on each side of the war. It is interesting just how things stay the same, to this day, men are fighting wars that have nothing to do with them but fighting for some more powerful beings that can't fight for themselves.

It is for that reason that I am more interested in those whose spirits are like that of the river Xanthus, who cry out to those with power to stop the bloodshed. I am therefore not one who sees value in wishing even the Voodoom adherents a great and happier worship. We have a lot of unfinished business that we have to handle that is within our realms that we have become too comfortable to sweep under the rug. I wish you a happy everyday, one filled with light and a desire to pull your own weight to make this world a better place for all, regardless of what they decide to believe or not believe. We have to act as though we all have one river and we have to keep it clean. Where one chooses to go after life on this plane is their business and not the river's or the rest of the world. Should I expect to hear Happy Voodoom from anyone from across the isle? Not too quickly, those who are on the other side wouldn’t be honest if they did so as they have too much blood on their hand that they have to atone for. You can wish me well when you are still delinquent on your moral debt. I would therefore prefer nothing if no recompense is on the table. It’s on that account that I say happy food to everyone on everyday!

As they say in my neck of the wood, we Move Regardless, and we move most majestically when we move in justice.

PASSION FOR JUSTICE: THE DARK HISTORY OF THE PASSION FRUIT

They say that not all that glitters is gold. But I say that gold, just like beauty, is in the eyes of the beholder. And in my conviction that justice begins with nourishment, I find traces of gold in the most unexpected corners.

During this season which coincides with Spring in certain areas and Easter in others, I have my own Afro futuristic reasons for celebrations. I have been taking cues from my surroundings too. This time, I was nudged by a subtle jewel in the world of justice, but one whose shine has been greatly compromised by its bloody history. This season has been one of resurrection of the kinds of passion fruit blooms that used to drive my older brother nuts whenever I would pick two blooms and then wrap them with the banana bark beside my ears.

I am talking about the passion fruit-a fruit which I have always had a passion for growing in my ancestral farm in Gathíngíra,in Mùrang Country for as long as I can remember. Back then, I used to pick up these flowers and admire their intricate design to the chagrin of Mùkono,,my older brother, whose value of the flower was a future passion fruit that I was jeopardizing. Nevertheless, his scolding did not kill my fascination with this plant, its flower as well as its fruit.

What I didn’t know then was that the story of the passion fruit held so much potential in the defense of food justice. The story of passion fruit is highly underrated as it is in the sameleague as the apple as an instrument of obliterating indigenous cultures and especially their food ways.

The apple is the fruit the devil used as the first junk food or first food sin in Judeo-Christian worldview. So while an apple a day keeps the doctor away, it has a history that even doctors cannot solve. One apple on offered by the snake resulted in the proverbial mother and father of Christian world being kicked out of the garden of Eden. Wherever that incident or story was told, it would have an impact on thousands of miles across the globe and for thousands of years to come.

When the Romans embraced Christianity as a state religion to save the declining empire by creating the Holy Roman Empire, the story of the apple and the snake followed the empire wherever their agents went. Similarly, that is how the story of the passion fruit would be dragged into the list of terrorist fruits. This is how it all happened. During the 1700s, the Catholic sect of the Jesuits were in Brazil vehemently trying to convert the indigenous people. That wasn’t obviously a simple act, though. It occurred to the missionaries that a beautiful berry with a color associated with royalty could be a useful ally in the spreading of the rule of the Roman(Catholicism?) over other peoples of the World.

So the Jesuit missionaries started associating the various parts of the fruit that were strange to them to the aspects of Jesus Christ’s passion. The five parts of the flower were associated with the various stages that Jesus Christ went through to demonstrated his passion for those he died for. From that point, a fruit that was locally known as The Flower of the Five Wounds by the Spaniards was later shortened to Passion fruit.

We know that the Spaniards in the Americas left Spain in search of gold and spices. The loyal family of Castile, investors and the church contributed to the first three ships of the Nina, Pinta and religiously named Santa Maria or Saint Mary. Even the naming of the ships demonstrated that the whole affair was a business. Following the various voyages, Columbus realized that land would be the greatest return on the original investment. That is how Spain acquired so much land and the Catholic Church acquired so many passionate followers in South America.

While plenty of gold was stolen from the Americans under the pain of genocide, food was also conquered. Those indigenous communities that survived still bear the mark of being colonized by bearing the names of the Spanish conquistadors. It is difficult to fathom for example how members of the ongoing genocide in Gaza would willingly carry names of the same people who are perpetrating the genocide. Yet that is what we have continued to do by failing to understand the power of history and its connection to food justice.

It is on that basis that we have decided to liberate this great fruit we growing on my ancestral land. We have always boycotted the food genocide that has been going on even in the best of times going back to the age of exploration and probably beyond. Some may think it as trivial to be so concerned with the name. Yet names are the first casualties of colonization and slavery. The first thing the western explorers did whenever they arrived in any area that had not previously been visited by any of the various conquerers was to name it and then lay claim to it. I have therefore proposed that we name the fruit Fobo or Ichure. Fobo is an Afro Brazilian character that appears in the Mardi Gras celebration which actually punishes mean rich people by whipping them along the procession of the Madi Gras. It also marks our connection with Afro Brazilians through class presentations I have done previously and the visit of professor Paulino to our farm last year. In other words, we are looking forward to creating egalitarian relationships around food, based on transparency and acknowledgement of the painful history of the genocide of indigenous people and their food ways. .

Alternatively, the localized name would be Dachua, from the words ichua and dare. Ichua is the Gíkùyù(my African language)word for hell and dare is our word for berry. That way, we pay homage to the science of the fruit and also the bloody history of the acquisition of the fruit as it made its way from the indigenous people of Brazil or other South American regions to our farm. The local team will vote on the best option for the liberated name.

I keep hearing that this year is the year of truth. In my books, no freedom will ever come any other way besides the way of truth. We can’t just be addressing the current wars while eating in a way that keeps the truth of previous genocides hidden in plain sight. We support freedom all over the world, especially in the way in which we eat and speak about food. It hurts and those who eat but are lazy to correct small things that demonize others are less likely to speak up whenever bigger wars are waged.

In Christianity, it started with the apple that condemned everyone who would be born hence. It made no difference whether you like apples or not, you were a prime candidate for being colonized by those who had authorized themselves as agents and doctors for treating the sin that had projected everyone in the world. Our food philosophy is clearly based on just principles and we are therefore not bound by such original sins but rather by the current sins of poisoning our heritage, corrupting the names of our foods and poisoning our environment and the future generations. Notably, this process has been made much easier by the declining literacy around food and the abrogating responsibility of our actions as we expect that someone else has our fate in their hands. The bloodbath has been going on for far too long and the level of pain has not always been equally visible. I am inspired by the increased level of resistance but I am still waiting for the protests and boycott against the massive genocide driven by poor food.

Whenever I say the words thayù thayù (an oath for peace) as a form of greetings and goodbye of our people, I literally mean peace in the way I live, the way I farm, cook, eat, study, treat history and spread that knowledge and seeds to future generations. In spite of its painful history this fruit can bring about a great lesson during a time of great crisis. Truly, that is my passion for food justice and the passion fruit holds great favor and promise in that pursuit.

My indigenous sensibilities regarding Easter

I have very fond memories of my early days in a small village known as Gathíngíra. The village has been so important that even after permanently moving from there at a tender age of 9 years and having lived in countless addresses, my deepest heart desires as well as my moral compass has been tethered to this small village in a manner that none else can ever hope to compete. 

When I think about the reading of my social audiometer that indicates the miles I have traveled and all the various people I have met, I think it would be sufficient enough to make a credible sample upon which I can base my assertion that Gathíngíra was a legendary village with vibes that are worthy of preservation or resurrection. It was so integral to the development of analytical thinking that has helped me survive to this day. It is the last place I lived a semblance of a sustainable living that was least corrupted by vampire culture that drives the empire of the day. By that, I mean that the major crisis we face in an age often labeled as Anthropocene or Capitalocene, has been largely brought about by means of changing the values of majority of the world’s population to adopt unsustainable concepts that temporarily benefit the architects of the empire but ultimately leads to our demise.

One of the main reasons I left the village for the city was precisely as a result of falling to the fallacy that all that glittered in the city was gold. There was all manner of well oiled propaganda that I was inundated with that I couldn’t have possibly seen the lies. So I left for the city and it has taken me a better part of 40 years of wandering in the urban wilderness. I have been working to return to the most sane place I have ever lived. While I have had the opportunity to travel to places I never even knew existed, I have grown more fascinated with my home village. It almost seems that all my travels and learning serves only one major purpose: understanding my first nine years of my life. 

Forty years ago on this day was the day I vividly remember entertaining the idea of attending university. I was in the first year of secondary and hadn’t really thought about university education as nobody in my family had graduated. But then my sister in law at that time was in her second year or so. One evening, my cousin Kapep came to visit us for the long holiday. That evening Njeri, my sister-in-law,  was making preparations for dinner, and a deep debate ensued between them. I was glued to the radio, the only electronic gadget we owned at the time. It was around dusk and I had just wrapped my evening chores of milking Kamore, our lovely and ever faithful cow. I was now free and was keen to follow the ongoing Safari Rally car race aptly planned to coincide with the rain season. I was a big fan of Victor Preston Junior and his Datsun 120Y. 

I was a naughty boy and never really made toy cars like many other boys but I negotiated with one of my childhood friends to get one such toy made out of a wire and I was keen to name it Datsun even without caring that it had been designed as a totally different model. As I outgrew the age of having wire toys of a car, cars continued to fascinate me. I can probably attribute this fascination witht he fact that there were very few cars in the village during my young days. We would hear cows driving on the road towards the direction of our home from miles away and run from the fields where we were either working or grazing animals and run to the road just to see a vehicle pass by. We would ensure to read the number plates and memorize them. It is ironic that I knew the number plates of some of those vehicles from those days to this day, yet I often have to check my number plates whenever I have to pay for the digital parking meters that require me to enter the plate number of my car.  Maybe the love of cars and advancements are deeply rooted in my DNA. I would later  be very surprised after I met someone with my uncommon name on social media.  We became friends and there is a chance, however small, that we could be distant relatives. The distant relative who shares my name shared an interesting story of  his uncle who was a popular driver around that time named Njathi.  In short, my interests couldn’t have been further away from matters of college and food. 

While I was listening to the radio commentary on the Safari Rally, I could simultaneously vaguely follow the conversation between the only two adults in the house even though it was a bit philosophical. It was during that time that Kapep used a word I could have sworn and bet with my life couldn’t have been an English word. The word was paraphernalia. I turned the radio down and asked Kapep to repeat the word. I expected Njeri to ask what the meaning of the word was. I was wrong. She did not seem to care about coming to my rescue. She seemed to have understood the word quite well and continued with the debate without any indication that I had interrupted the conversation. I immediately started designing a formula in my head to remember the word. I used the word paraffin, the only foreign source of energy we used in our house and gonorrhea to make sure that I would not forget the mesmerizing word.   I repeated the word as many times as I could silently to make sure that I could later find a dictionary and confirm that there actually was such a word. I have no idea why but the word sounded so strange that I could not get my mind off of it.

 I later managed to get a dictionary and looked up the word. To my surprise there it was and what did it mean? It meant  miscellaneous things necessary for an activity. I had lost that bet. Kapep was right and so was Njeri. But what I gained was a desire to be so learned that I would be able to engage in such conversations and make wrong betts thinking that words that were being thrown around were a mistake or from a different language. It also fascinated me that a person could keep what appeared to me as a very complex word in their head and actually use it so casually. I was hooked. I embarked on a totally different race. Safari Rally and Victor Preston Junior no longer held any sway over me. My new focus from then was the death of ignorance and the birth of knowledge. Just like the Safari Rally, it has been a long journey with twists and turns, but one of great adventure. I travel many miles and talk to many people, not about paraphernalia but about something that was so mundane at the time but yet more fascinating. I speak mostly about the kind of people I grew up around during my time in the village and the great lessons I carry to this day. 

Now that I managed to finally attend the highly coveted institution of learning during my early days and to achieve not one but several degrees, I thought that it would be nice to repay the debt of being being inspired by a word which I thought could probably never have existed by celebrating the people I owe everything I have done in life to. These people are like no other people I have lived among in many ways. But I will pick the one thing that was so different about these people. The group of people in my village were masters of astroprojection. They understood the simple idea of living like stars and the importance of shining and keeping its orbit. It is the only logical explanation I can come up with for having designed such a sustainable culture that projected them into the future. I celebrate the birth of a vibrant consciousness among my ancestors and the vigilant members of my village. But I also wail for those who fell for the lies of the empire that continue to push a holiday of celebrating a resurrection of a white person and concepts that continue to wreck our once functional community. 

More and more people are claiming a new form of resurrection while in actuality practicing death worship by living a life that is contrary to the values they claim.  That is what I celebrate and I commit to making a reality both in my village but also everywhere I go. My message is simple, build your heaven right here on earth. I saw a semblance of it and I know it can be done by human beings. What we can break we can fix, at least if you don’t wait for too long. We are all on a Safari Rally of life, some are speeding towards death worship and others towards life worship. Our food is like the paraphernalia for our craft, except that it is the cardinal tool that one needs to reach the two possible goals of either life or death. Just food resurrects life and junk and unjust food resurrect death. While I was watching My modern fascination is no longer with Datsun 120Y. I now know that such fascination is just for a while. Such ephemeral paraphernalia are dangerous to bet on in your life. Easter there is a time to resurrect my sustainable indigenous sensibilities with a bit of nostalgia and homage to those who lit my personal Safari Rally away from death and towards life in the stars but grounded in my ancestral village.

My Meditation on International Women's Day

By Njathi Kabui

There is no greater area where Western thought differs from my indigenous culture than on the issue of women. It would not be an overstatement to say that we should not celebrate International Women's Day without first acknowledging these differences. I am culturally in tune with both my culture and Western culture to know that women in these two traditions carry very different weight. Yet, there are fewer areas that the blatant obliteration of my indigenous culture wrecked more havoc than in womanhood. That doesn't mean that my Gìkùyù culture was perfect or should be the global standard. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. There are however great lessons worth noting and meditating on.

For brevity, let me point three distinct aspects I greatly admire and would gladly recommend today for their practical benefits.

The first and most amazing cultural practice was the ability of a barren woman whose husband died before the family having bore a single child to have a right to marry another woman. The second woman would have children on behalf of the barren woman. The barren woman would take the status of the late husband and the two women would raise their family without any prejudice. White women in America were being burned at the stakes for being witches around the same time. To this day, women's issues are deeply biased by sensless decrees that benefits neither women, children or men.

Secondly, women in my culture had their own hut which they shared with their daughters. The idea of a man and woman permanently sharing the same house had everything to do with colonial taxation on huts as a way of forcing locals into being laborers on British plantations in order that they may earn fiat currency for their tax dues. That practice caused many families to reduce the number of huts and thereby the annual tax bill. Having different houses or rooms for men and women might help the souring divorce rate.

Lastly, a woman was never married by a man but rather by the whole family. Marriage works better when the two families are closely connected. There two families entered into a blood alliance with each other. Such bonds were more supportive of the newly weds and harder to break. This is starkly different from the modern western marriages based on legal bonds that are based on a government certificate or a preacher's prayer. The history of the government and religious authority in the West have a checkered history of fiat culture and generally working against the interest of the common global citizens.

If I can use the oldest writings in Western tradition, the Iliad and Odyssey by Homer, we can learn a ton. The Odyssey, interestingly enough, starts with a wedding. All the gods and goddesses had been invited to that wedding except the Aris, the goddess of chaos. In retaliation, Aris threw an apple into the wedding premises that ultimately started a war and eventual destruction of the city of Troy. The whole book is about Trojan war. Well, an apple one day did not keep the doctor away, instead it caused the death of so many Greeks and destruction of the city of Troy. Aris, true to her nature, wrote that the apple she threw inside the wedding compound belonged to the most beautiful goddess at the wedding. The three major goddesses got into a contest with each other. Each goddess tried to bribe Paris, the judge, seeking his favor in the contest. Many deaths happened because of a spiteful goddess who offered another married woman to Paris as a gift for the vanity of being selected as the most beautiful goddess.

Amonst another Greek city of Sparta, the women fared worse. Married couples did not live together and the bride had to wear male clothes. It shouldn’t then surprise us that a culture that fences itself as being based on that of the Greeks would be so violent. That violence is bound to ultimately reach women. Such violence ultimately leads to a violent culture, country and globe. Like the Greeks, my village was divided by a different type of apple but nonetheless had a male deity. Our region was divided based on the church that was the first to camp in the area.

My oldest sister had to walk several miles to attend school at another village because the local village school was closed to her and my brother due to the fact that the Church of England discriminated against those families who were involved in the struggle for independence. The catholic church was more dominant in the next village and therefore accepted anyone that the Church of England did not accept. In other words, there was only one white way to learn and each had a religious gatekeeper. It is therefore no wonder that as Emperor Haile Selasi in a speech before the International League of Nations once said “ Everywhere is war”.

That is why as an indigenous man, I know that violence to women is violence to the whole world. The Greeks had a war that was started by the desire of the three goddesses' vanity of being the most beautiful and my village suffered violence due to the failure to follow the deity of the British who shed blood for the salvation of all. Yet few have seen that peace, especially the indigenous people. It is therefore hypocritical for the same people who have caused so much violence leading the call for peace, especially to those who have been on the receiving end of the violence and exploitation of the empire builders.

clarify that there is a great difference in how we look at this big day. That does not change the fact that many of the problems that indigenious people the world over are facing regarding women have roots in the injustices perpetrated on them by the biased western tradition. Like all traditions, there are some positive aspects and there are negative aspects.

I ought to clarify that there is a great difference in how we look at this big day. That does not change the fact that many of the problems that indigenious people the world over are facing regarding women have roots in the injustices perpetrated on them by the biased western tradition. Like all traditions, there are some positive aspects and there are negative aspects. Indigenious cultures the world over have their own adjustments to make as they remove any biases based on sex. Those gender biases, it has to be emphasized, are often and mostly if not always two ways. 

International Women's Day should actually last 9 days, 6 hours and 3 seconds. 9 days for every month that we  all spent in the womb, 6 for the average number of parents(including grandparents) and 3 for the three meals we have in a day. Each and every aspect mentioned above all has the testament of the power of women and the magic that takes place when it is complimented by the male power. 

The magic is also in the resulting balance, what we may call sustainability.  That we have major crises in the world is a sign of the imbalance of the relationship between the two sexes, but more of the women's energy. 

I am therefore in mood of meditation than that of celebration.  That meditation has allowed me to realize that we are fast moving towards extinction and the easiest way to get there is by causing inflation of womanhood, in other words by creating fiat womanhood.  In other words, by lowering the health and vitality of women, you lower the quality of everything about life exponentially.

One hundred uneducated and hungry women have a far more damaging impact on society than 1000 uneducated and starving men. Ironically, the Greek have one interesting story that can remind us that women can rise even in the face of the most severe bias. Antigone’s story is a great example. Her name gives away the whole tale. Her name literally means one of opposite opinion. Anti- opposed and gnom- opinion. Antigone refused to obey the king’s decree that her brother, Polyneces,  had aligned himself with a hostile neighboring city in a bid to overthrow the despotic ruler of Athens. The botched efforts led to the death of the brother of Antigone. The King decreed that the treasonous brother of Antigone should not be accorded a proper burial Antigone however disregarded the decree by the despotic ruler and accorded his brother the burial he deserved. 

Indigenious cultures have their own Antigone in their folklore. I know of numerous such stories in my culture. Today is a great day to meditate on each and every Antigone in our communities and support an environment that would nurture our women in a bid to restore sanity in our relationships, through justice. Nothing good will come out of any efforts that are not based on justice, equality and honesty. Any other way will lead us on the path of Polyneices, which literally means many troubles. One of those troubles is certainly our food. Having food trouble is itself many troubles in one. The unconscionable fact that those Polyneices food troubles are not experienced equally but have a both a gender, genetic, geographic and geopolitical bias. Those bias need to be antagonized just like Antigone did over 3 millenias ago. The Agikuyù have only to mditate on a bias going back about a century. It's therefore a huge bias to put all the women in one basket, pot or guard. Can you digest that?

My Quantum Calender of Poetic Flavors

In my indigenous Agikuyu culture, the Rights of Passage is such an important mark in a young man’s life that it really has no equivalent in modern Western tradition. I am tempted to compare it to the Jewish Bar Mitzvah ceremony which is an initiation of boys who have attained the age of 13 and are considered ready to partake in religious worship. But that temptation is quickly thwarted by the religious nature of Bar Mitzvah and the fact that the young men in my culture who go through the Right of Passage are still decades away from being qualified to participate in religious worship in any significant role. But I am not one of those Gikuyu folks who seem to think that it is such an honor to be connected to the Middle East as a sign of validation. The story of the Bible is quite problematic to me as it has a lot of baggage that those who are inside the faith are comfortably willing to overlook. That baggage has to do with the assumption of cultural superiority that is so close to the colonization of many indigenous people and also to the building of the Western empire. 

My interest in the indigenous Rights of Passage is that it is a way of marking time. In other words,  I am giving credence to the concept of having multiple calendars as a sign of tolerance and sophistication. That would allow me to stretch the concept of time to the rim of quantum combined with flavors. I am finding out that as I grow older, I have more time to reflect and to digest information and experiences in very different ways from the past. 

I am saying this as one who went through my own rights of passage myself . I was so excited about leaving boyhood and qualifying as an initiate such as having the privilege of dating and simply being respected.  But then I quickly realized that that right I had been so anxious to  achieve had its own set of challenges. I therefore quickly learned that in this life, not everybody is going to like you, be your friend, appreciate your kindness and leave alone reciprocating acts of sacrifice. My conclusion was to seek out those who were genuinely interested in being in your team and having you in their team. As it turns out, one develops a greater ability to access those one can get along with and the power to suppress the all common demon in all of such that promises convince and pleasure for short term fun while tarnishing delayed gratification as a curse. I love aging, if for nothing else,  for its ability to wear out that primordial demon. In its place I have a deep sense of gratitude for those who have equally overcome their own demons and develop an inner beauty only visible by the heart and spirit of those who have also initiated themselves into the same state through practice and discipline.

All the cells of my being celebrate whenever I run into such an initiate. They really don’t need to come out and verbally pronounce their accolades. Just by their conduct and sometimes just by looks, I can pick them. I will be the first one to admit that such occurrences are few and far apart for comfort. Yet I stay hopeful that the next such person is a call away, a flight of stairs up or down away or just a virtual introduction away. Thanks to technology, I can now add a WhatsApp group to the list of possibilities of places where initiates can be found. I am so happy to have met Namatsi through Kwetu Tahmeri. She is like a kitchen poet in my kitchen cabinet of my life, no pun intended. Humans are truly a microcosm of a government that, like cells, make up the whole country and ultimately the whole of humanity. It is clear that we will collaborate on some good work. It might be one or it might be many. The number or amount is not all that important, what is important is that the work will be important. It is on that account I perceived our relationship in quantum terms. Quantum particles defy general principles of physics in interesting was such as being in two different places at the same time. Having a quantum calendar of poetic flavors is similar to being ideological twin of sorts even though physically and biologically, we are connected in any tangible way whatsoever.

Since we both have deep appreciation of our culture and for African American culture of resistance, Namatsi reminded me of the closing of a poem of of of my favorite African American poet, Sterling Brown who is sometimes referred to as the Dean of African American Poetry, In the poem Odyssey of Big Boy, the reference of big boy reminds me of the fact that we are always children or that our childhood is ubiquitous throughout our lives regardless of what Rights of Passage we go through.  On the other hand, the Odyssey part of the title reminds me that a journey can cover a lifetime. Looked from that angle, the Rights of Passage might actually be longer than we typically expect it to last. Yet more importantly, it is not a one man or woman journey. It would make sense that we all need very solid accomplices along that journey. In the poem Odyssey of a Big Boy, Sterling Brown ends the playful poem with the wish that should the Big boy’s life come to an end, his only wish was that would want to be with ole Jazbo. I find the poem to be quite appreciated as the protagonist had a lot of fun with work and being promiscuous, including one married woman, who desired to be with his friend the most. That kind of relationship between friends is what I call quantum. It is a wonderful feeling to know that someone feels what you feel even without a word of communication. It makes my own odyssey across this rugged terrain bearable, especially in my own internal journey from boyhood to manhood. 

Odyssey of Big Boy

By Sterling Brown

Lemme be wid Casey Jones,
    Lemme be wid Stagolee,
Lemme be wid such like men
    When Death takes hol’ on me,
  When Death takes hol’ on me. . . .

Done skinned as a boy in Kentucky hills,
    Druv steel dere as a man,
Done stripped tobacco in Virginia fiel’s
    Alongst de River Dan,
  Alongst de River Dan;

Done mined de coal in West Virginia
    Liked dat job jes’ fine
Till a load o’ slate curved roun’ my head
    Won’t work in no mo’ mine,
  Won’t work in no mo’ mine;

Done shocked de corn in Marylan’,
    In Georgia done cut cane,
Done planted rice in South Caline,
    But won’t do dat again
  Do dat no mo’ again.

Been roustabout in Memphis,
    Dockhand in Baltimore,
Done smashed up freight on Norfolk wharves
    A fust class stevedore,
  A fust class stevedore. . . . 

Done slung hash yonder in de North
    On de ole Fall River Line
Done busted suds in li’l New Yawk
    Which ain’t no work o’ mine—
  Lawd, ain’t no work o’ mine.

Done worked and loafed on such like jobs
    Seen what dey is to see
Done had my time with a pint on my hip
    An’ a sweet gal on my knee
  Sweet mommer on my knee:

Had stovepipe blonde in Macon
    Yaller gal in Marylan’
In Richmond had a choklit brown
    Called me huh monkey man—
  Huh big fool monkey man.

Had two fair browns in Arkansaw
    And three in Tennessee
Had Creole gal in New Orleans
    Sho Gawd did two time me—
  Lawd two time, fo’ time me—

But best gal what I evah had
    Done put it over dem
A gal in Southwest Washington
    At Four’n half and M—
  Four’n half and M. . . .

Done took my livin’ as it came
    Done grabbed my joy, done risked my life
Train done caught me on de trestle
    Man done caught me wid his wife
  His doggone purty wife. . . .

I done had my women,
    I done had my fun
Cain’t do much complainin’
    When my jag is done,
  Lawd, Lawd, my jag is done.

An’ all dat Big Boy axes
    When time comes fo’ to go
Lemme be wid John Henry, steel drivin’ man
  Lemme be wid ole Jazzbo;
  Lemme be wid ole Jazzbo. .

Living in exile, we all need our own Jazbo as we are far from family but also quite different from our family. Namatsi the poet sounds and feels like Ole Jazzbo. Those in activism will most likely know the value of such a soul in our life. I was so touched that I made a recipe to mark that connection.Since I can write poetry to mark the connection, I marked the connection in the quantum calendar of poetic flavors. It is a great feeling to be mature enough to know that my Odyssey involves having quantum rights of passage across gender and culture. Who knows when Ole Jazzbo will come knocking into our lives. I will keep making flavors and hope that many of them will mark time and encourage friendships that are quantum and meaningful enough like that of Ole Jazzbo. In the same light, I hope to have a similar relationship with food too. In other words, I have a mission to cultivate and consume food that treats me so well that I feel like I am with Ole Jazzbo. In doing so, I will be creating the best worlds both inside and outside of my body. What a jazzy life that would be. A life of friendship and food justice has to be a life of true spirituality, or another way of saying flavorful, poetic , quantum existence. With such a life, time is no longer marked by the revolution of the earth around the sun but by the heart beats and vibrations that beat in unison as a form of singularity. 

Decolonization of Greasy Tastebuds

Decolonization of your Greasy Tastebuds

Here is a perfect example of how a village was killed through oil and the potential it has to resurrect itself.

This is a summary of an essay I am working on. It started as an idea many years back when I learned about the Proctor and Gamble scientist who came up with the idea of hydrogenation. That complex process resulted in making liquid oils solid at room temperature by adding an extra hydrogen atom to the molecule. For a while, the white lard made from cottonseed oil was used for making soap. But in 1911, P&G introduced Crisco as a so-called vegetable oil alternative to butter and lard, common kitchen ingredients in cooking and baking. Doctors and rabbis were hired to promote the hydrogenated lard as kosher and healthier.

That story took me back to a night when my brother took me to a free monthly movie event popularly known as “Cinema Leo” which is Swahili for “Movie Today”. In my neighborhood, the young people knew the monthly treat by another name: “Watoto Kaeni Chini” which means “Children sit down” in Swahili. Those were the actual first words right before the movie would start. The movie show was held outside at a dusty soccer field where a white screen was set up and the movie emitted from a projector atop a VW kombi.

It was at that movie that I saw an advertisement of our local Crisco known as “Wakenya Kaeni Chini”. I am obviously stretching the truth. But I could also be telling the truth about the name which the local Crisco brand was hiding. The local Kenyan brand was called “Kimbo” and it was a rival to the yellowish Crisco competitor, “Cow Boy ‘cooking fat’”. Those two brands were king. They were both owned by the same company.

What I didn’t know then is that cotton, a dirty word in the lexicon of African American history, continued to colonize people in my village without a clue about what was happening.

To make the long story short, Crisco and other hydrogenated oils were later found to cause all manner of health problems including infertility and liver problems. In fact, the brand was sold by P&G, ostensibly to avoid all the baggage of liability.

For me, with a firm grasp of how problematic cotton has been in the history of exploitation of the southern Black community, as well as the role that cheap Southern cotton played in building the British Industrial Revolution, including the destruction of the Indian textile industry and the colonization of Kenya and many other countries, I couldn’t miss the connection between that exploitive history and the consumption of toxic oil, first in my Kenyan village, and again in Mississippi and Tennessee where I would later learn about the greasy truth.

Here is a story of an advertisement I remember from over 4 decades ago that convinced my young mind that these oils, loaded with toxic chemicals, were superior to our local animal lard. Many years down the road, many people are paying a hefty price for being ignorant of the political subterfuge that major food companies play on the masses just to make profit. The advert I first saw at the first movie night I attended featured a couple in the kitchen all happy around the hearth. The wife was busy preparing to cook while being entertained by the jovial husband seated comfortably across the wife. But things changed abruptly once the wife added some lard into a cooking pan that was being heated on the fire. The lard started bubbling everywhere and burning the husband who didn’t look amused at all. The next clip show the mother being advised to use Kimbo cooking oil and the happy mood in the kitchen returned. The message was clear even in my young mind.: animal lard was for loosers.

If eating the apple made Adam realize that he was naked, eating hydrogenated oils in my village and the American south made me aware that my food was colonized by a greasy lie. That was then. Now the pizza and foreign chicken joints like KFC craze is the new version of hydrogenated oil. Few with the means to patronize these foreign joints dare miss out on a visit to these restaurants during an outing or a special occasion. Like the parade of the many happy customers who wear cotton clothes, stained by the blood and sweat of Southern slavery in the old South, or those modern sartorial masters donning garb from problematic cotton grown in India through exorbitantly priced GMO seeds which have caused the suicide of hundreds of thousands of farmers facing the loss of their family land on account of debts tied to those seeds, the facade around cotton continues to this day. Many in the highfalutin West know that the word Crisco actually stands for crystallized cottonseed oil. This oil from cottonseeds that are heavily reliant on chemicals, is sold as a vegetable oil. When has anyone heard of cabbage oil or spinach oil? Yet the oil acts like a food bikini, hiding the most important things while showing what few would care to see.

But not all are being fooled. No more taking the old orders of “Children, Sit Down”, as I dutifully did in my youth at the free monthly movie. I therefore made a sumptuous alternative that satisfies my appetite in a way that commercial chemical pizza and chicken, cooked in chemical oil that had been heated beyond its smoke point many times over. I called the recipe Wakubwa, Swahili word for grownups and the opposite of “watoto” or children. I am no longer a child to believe everything I hear without examining it. Just for fun, i used the oxtail, cooked black eyed peas,, pastured eggs, fresh oregano, parsley, greens, shiitake mushrooms, cumin, cloves and black pepper. All the ingredients were carefully chosen and then cooked in shape of thick bread or pizza. It was cooked slowly on top of the stove within fifteen minutes. The recipe will be available to anyone who requests it by email. I tested it on my children and they gave me a thumbs up. I now say it loud that it is possible to decolonize your ideas about food. But it has to start with recognizing the snake and the apple that will tempt you. Then you can arm yourself with the skills to understand and attend to your taste buds.

Stop Picking Your Poison

Chef Njathi Kabui’s Thesis in One Lesson

It’s been very close to two years since I became a student of Chef Njathi Kabui. In that time I’ve not only been trying to swallow his Afro Futuristic Cuisine, but also the key element of his 30-year thesis. The first part is the easy one. I love his unique cuisine. If I were to compare it to Bud Light’s catch phrase, I’d say “Tastes great, more filling.”

A few months ago, he introduced me to a new word. It’s a word for which we’ve lost the concept, many decades ago, but I think it perfectly describes his cuisine. The word is batian. See? Even Google doesn’t recognize the word. It’s a verb that combines concepts which, for us today, don’t go together. It seems like a contradiction. Batian means to fatten or to get fatter, but in a specific way. It means to fatten, but in a way that also improves, lets its subject get better, and heal. Chef’s food batians. To say that it feeds is only part of the story. To describe his cuisine fully, we need to resurrect a word like batian.

While his cuisine is very easy to swallow, the second thing he teaches is, strangely, much, much more difficult. His thesis, which he’s had well developed for over thirty years now, is that our food is lacking nutrition and in most, if not all cases, is actually toxic to human health. He’s like all of the California cancer warnings concentrated into one person. In short, he’s teaching anyone who will listen, to “stop picking your poison”.

We use that phrase about poison blithely, and almost a century of tradition. I’m 53 years old, and I think I’ve heard it for as long as I can remember, in reference to alcoholic drinks. Apparently it goes back a few decades before that. Around that time, Australians exercised brutal honesty and renamed their pubs “poison shops”. But Chef Kabui isn’t just trying to help alcoholics. He uses this concept for not just hazardous drinks, but he argues that our food is just as bad, or even more insidious, than the toxic stuff we happily chug in poison shops.

I love the word insidious. It means “sneaky evil”.

Chef teaches that our food is insidious, having become both sneaky and evil. Through a long chain of events over the last two centuries or so, the human diet has evolved to depend on a globally centralized production and distribution system which is built on many values, none of which include nutrition. Remember, batian is to feed in the way that fattens, strengthens, and heals. Our food system today values convenience, price, flavor, texture, dependence, well-established supply chains, popularity, etc. Batian is not in the equation.

This situation has created a world of alcoholics and food junkies. We are so lost to the concept of batian that we know and even embrace the fact that our food and our drinks are killing us. We take mental pills to cope with the situation. We tell ourselves that this world is a “lone and dreary wilderness” we are fated to wander, until we finally escape into the paradise of the grave. We convince ourselves that we’d rather die than change our diet, which so many of us do with full commitment.

As I’ve been explaining to my friends, family, customers, and acquaintances about my adventure in food with my Kenyan Chef friend, they seem to have as much trouble swallowing this core element of his thesis as I have done. They ask me if it’s okay to have french fries occasionally. They ask if the toxicity of our food can’t really be managed through eating less and exercising more. They suggest that “organic”, or non-poisonous food, is just a scam in order to sell food ingredients at higher prices. They look for the FDA to explain the benefit of Chef’s cuisine through a nutrition label, in effect asking me to point to the government’s recognition of Chef’s thesis. In short, I’ve rarely met a person who, learning about Chef’s thesis, smoothly absorbs the information and really thinks about it. Instead, I run into a mental immune system which has evolved to make us okay with poisoning ourselves every day with our food and drink.

The things that our global food system values aren’t theirs alone. The resistance to Chef’s thesis, mine and everyone else’s, isn't a symptom of a centrally imposed set of values which are authoritatively forced upon the world. Remember the word insidious? Sneaky evil. The food system we have is our “friend”. It’s like the snake in the garden of eden. Over the centuries, it has adapted to the values we all hold, but which our ancestors couldn’t afford to pursue, when food was much more difficult to obtain. Our global food system is like a bartender, offering comfort and advice, while serving dose after dose of poison to his or her willing victims. Like a bad psychiatrist, it gives advice which keeps the client coming back, not what will cure and heal. In doing so, it has helped foster and reinforce the toxic food values we all hold today.

For example, I love canned food. It’s convenient. It’s reliable. It’s got so many cool flavors and textures. I love my frozen meals. Same reasoning. I love the microwave. So convenient and quick. I love fast food. It’s fast, and I pretend that it’s food. I love sauces and sandwiches. Pastas and meat patties. The list goes on. Fizzy drinks in a bottle or a can. Hot dogs and potato chips. And when I want to “eat better”, I grab a bag of “salad” and throw on some “dressing”. In none of these values is the concern for nutrition. Convenience, texture, flavor, and the joy of sharing a meal with friends and family are the values I was taught to swallow along with my fiat food (food only by decree). Besides, don’t we know that the government takes care of all that detailed stuff? They’ve got our back, don’t they?

This leads us to the biggest mental obstacle to swallowing Chef’s thesis, along with his food. It’s something I think most of us have said at one time or another. If we haven’t said it, we’ve definitely heard it. It’s the phrase: “If it was that bad, someone would have told us.” Or another variant, “How can millions (or billions) of people be wrong?”

It’s taken me a full two years to choke down Chef Kabui’s pill, his thesis about our global food system. I think I’m just now really starting to believe it. His message is a horror story of betrayal and doom. He’s like the prophets of the Bible, declaring a disaster which nobody wants to hear. But, like them, he also offers a cure, or a way to repent.

Silently and consistently, Chef has been building a set of farms in Kenya. I call him a druid sometimes, because he holds his land sacred, and fights like a warrior to protect it from any toxic influences. The foods he grows there are magical in their purity and in their ability to batian. He has identified other suppliers around the world who are doing what he does, if not quite as religiously. “Organic” is the label most use to accomplish the same thing he’s doing on his farms, but many are pure in name only, which has led him to do what he’s doing in Kenya.

The horrible truth I’m trying to swallow along with the delicious meals I eat off of his cuisine is that I live in a world of addicts. Like the videos of homeless drug junkies in the streets of San Francisco, and other major US cities, who have embarked on their various projects to “help” the homeless, we are wandering our own streets with vacant minds and hollows where our bump of nutrition should be. As fat as we are, we are starving for nutrition and purity in our food, which, for our ancestors of more than 200 years ago, was the primary requirement for the food they produced and consumed. You and I have been born into a world where we’ve inherited a global addiction, where the entire human race, with very few exceptions, has lost the common knowledge of farming, having traded it for dependence on a centralized food authority.

Chef’s message is simple. Stop picking, and eating, poison. Through his cuisine he attempts to compete with marshmallows, soda, and saltine crackers. He can’t offer poisonous apples which outcompete our poisonous apples, so he offers oranges instead. All we have to do is work slowly, consistently, and happily, to re-train our taste buds and our pallets. Oh, and we have to learn how to cook. And, we have to completely switch our supply chains and the contents of our pantries. And maybe re-learn how to farm. See? Simple.

Okay, maybe Chef Kabui is asking a lot. I know he is, because while he’s been preaching for over three decades, he’s found very few addicts willing to begin the recovery process. I’m starting to truly understand why. It’s like being in a religious bubble where everyone around you tells you that the invisible, the contradictory, and the impossible is the truth. When your barber, your teacher, your family, your government representatives and clerks, your realtor and your plumber all agree that what seems nonsense to others is actually the truth. It’s very tough to go against such a tide of opinion.

We live in a world where we’re all each other’s bartenders and therapists. We all belong to the same fiat food and fiat drink religion. We are the opposite of alcoholics anonymous. Imagine an A.A. meeting where alcoholics meet to drink more, not less, with drinking games for everyone to play, and sporting contests streaming on the walls. Oh, I guess that’s just the local poison shop. Well, our cities, our grocery stores, and our restaurants are all poison shops, according to Chef.

That’s his message. It really is hard to swallow, because he’s accusing the governments of every nation, the suppliers of nearly all of our food and drinks, and nearly all of the chefs of the world, of a massive global conspiracy to value flavor, convenience, abundance, etc. over, and in place of, nutrition. He’s accusing the global supply chain of serving junk for us to eat, and of destroying the concept of a healthy form of the verb “to feed”, like batian. It’s a major accusation he delivers to a multi-trillion dollar global business model. Not only that, he’s accusing the global medical system, including the health insurance industry, of complicity in these crimes, profiting from an ever-expanding customer base of poisoned humanity.

Is it any wonder that his message is hard to swallow?

The biggest problem I’ve found is that his thesis gets stuck in my throat, so to speak. Yes, it’s hard to swallow, but I can’t spit it out, either. The reason why so many people find his message so appealing is that he’s right. The evidence is everywhere.

I remember going on a quest, shortly before I met Chef Kabui, to discover what the best human diet really was. I watched five different T.E.D. talks on the subject, and they all had wildly different theories. I read so many articles with contradictory advice that I had to give up. Chef’s thesis explains the difficulty of my attempt. He claims that humanity lost its dietary brain almost two centuries ago, in exchange for modern food convenience, abundance, and all the rest. He tells me that there are, even today, a few people around the globe, like himself, who grew up with an uninterrupted indigenous connection to those ancestors. Some humans never forgot how to eat. These relics of a lost civilization have been slowly and nutritiously chewing their way through time for generations. But they are becoming more and more an endangered species.

Isn’t that a weird concept? Humanity, those of us who still know how to eat, is becoming an endangered species. We’ve had a kind of evolutionary split. I keep telling Chef that he’s an alien. But the truth is much more frightening. He’s one of the last representatives of a nearly lost humanity. We’re the aliens. When he first came to the U.S. to get “the best that the first world had to offer”, he was handed a hot dog and a Coke from 7-11. That was the birth of his thesis. He knew something was very wrong, when the cafeteria food from his university made him sick, and the convenient and fast food offered everywhere was like that first hot dog and soda, being sold as food. He was one of the last of his tribe who had grown their own food, eating nothing but the freshest farm-to-table cuisine, where nutrition was still the standard.

For my alien, human, Chef teacher, the message is so simple. Stop picking your poison. He never has voluntarily chosen what most of us so easily choose every day. He’s eaten only the best food he could find his whole life, first from the hands of his parents, and then, as a foreign student in the United States, deliberately, out of a strong survival instinct. He’s raised his two children on his tailor-made cuisine, in an attempt to batian, in an otherwise toxic food environment.

But for the rest of us, man what a job we have in front of us! Here in my 50’s, my youthful health tickets have nearly all expired. I have nothing left of my free health-lunch. All the health I have, moving forward, has to be earned and deliberately maintained. If Chef is right, then I have nowhere to eat but my own kitchen. There aren’t even any restaurants. I’ve checked! Some say “raw”, and others “organic”, but the ones I’ve found so far offer real food in name only, “having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof.” There’s my religious background coming through.

We human mutants of today have the job of rediscovering the ideal human diet. Fortunately, we have access to Chef Njathi Kabui and a few others who are still human, as alien as they seem to us modern people. Speaking from personal experience, his cuisine is very accessible and very delicious. The ideal would be for us to produce the ingredients ourselves, but that’s the Master Class level of learning. In the meantime, there are suppliers of mostly pure food ingredients we can tap into.

They say the first step to recovery is to admit that there is a problem. I believe Chef is right, and that we all have a major problem. We may be slightly better off than the drugged out zombie homeless of San Francisco, but we’re not nearly as unrelated to them as we think. I’m getting better at implementing Chef’s curriculum, but it’s so hard. The best, like any recovering junkie, is to join a community of one other person who thinks like you do. With just a little support, we can do it. With a lot of support, it will be easy.

I wish you all the best. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Let’s do our best to stop picking our poison. Instead, let’s rediscover the joy of eating well. May we all batian.

Triple Crown Banana Dance

This must be the month of bananas and for good reason. January is the beginning of the dry seasons and the end of the two growing seasons. The two seasons in our traditional calendar was that of Mbura ya Njahí and Mbura ya Mwere. Mbura ya Njahi was the reasonably longer and heavier rains named after the most prominent bean known as Njahi, while Mbura ya Mwere was much lighter and shorter and was most ideal for millet, the grain it is named after. Those two types of food very very important to the food security of the community as well to the culture of my people.

It is sometimes easy to underestimate the value of food in driving and sustaining the healthy culture of my community. In other words, foods that were grown in my community feed more than bodies or stomachs. The security and the health of the community went beyond caloric intake. Having a healthy culture meant that there were certain community activities that kept the functioning of the community as smooth as possible.

There was no better time to understand the role food played in the creation of a functional culture than the month of January and the two crops of bananas, millet and Njahi. Millet for example was a grain that was pound with a grind stones or in a big wooden mortar and pestle in a colorful team event that involved singing and interesting conversations between women relatives or mothers and daughters. The pounded millet flower wound make porridge for breakfast or regular snack. The fermented millet porridge was also the default drink consumed during the work gangs by young men and women known as Ngwatio( a word with the connotation of borrowing). These Ngwatio was a group of local villagers coming together to tackle heavy duties such as breaking new ground or digging previously farrowed land and preparing it for the next season. No money changed hands and all one had to do is answer a similar call from the participants. This events were fun and mostly finished with a dance in after work. It was one of the happiest farming events full of great fun and productivity.

The month of January was typically dry and one of the lightest in terms of work. There was a much needed break for our farming community and therefore equally ideal for dances too regardless of any Ngwatio or not.

Bananas are too important of a food to cover it in this post and I will save that for the last post this month. Suffice it to say that bananas would be consumed both as food and as fruit in the form of ripe bananas.

It is therefore a great joy to have an award winning banana in our short growing history in our ancestral home. Right next to our compost pile, this banana of Kíganda has a record of 16 suckers and mature banana with 80+ count that are perfectly healthy and ready for harvest. The banana must either have sent roots into the compost or the compost piles sends some of its nutrients with the rain water that flow downward during the rain season that supposed to have ended last month. Whatever the case we are all together delighted. This is a reason good enough to remember and celebrate the sustainable practices that our culture has designed but have since been neglected at a terrible cost to the food security and sovereignty of the community and the general mental and overall wellness of the community. Progress might be doing the same old things better and not necessarily 🦍 aping ideas whose application might not be tried and tested. At least for now, we are dancing of our big win in the race towards a sense of self.

Thayù