Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 [Hardcover]

James C. McCann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 28, 2005

Sometime around 1500 A.D., an African farmer planted a maize seed imported from the New World. That act set in motion the remarkable saga of one of the world's most influential crops--one that would transform the future of Africa and of the Atlantic world. Africa's experience with maize is distinctive but also instructive from a global perspective: experts predict that by 2020 maize will become the world's most cultivated crop.

James McCann moves easily from the village level to the continental scale, from the medieval to the modern, as he explains the science of maize production and explores how the crop has imprinted itself on Africa's agrarian and urban landscapes. Today, maize accounts for more than half the calories people consume in many African countries. During the twentieth century, a tidal wave of maize engulfed the continent, and supplanted Africa's own historical grain crops--sorghum, millet, and rice. In the metamorphosis of maize from an exotic visitor into a quintessentially African crop, in its transformation from vegetable to grain, and from curiosity to staple, lies a revealing story of cultural adaptation. As it unfolds, we see how this sixteenth-century stranger has become indispensable to Africa's fields, storehouses, and diets, and has embedded itself in Africa's political, economic, and social relations.

The recent spread of maize has been alarmingly fast, with implications largely overlooked by the media and policymakers. McCann's compelling history offers insight into the profound influence of a single crop on African culture, health, technological innovation, and the future of the world's food supply.

(20050901)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Maize and Grace shows how a New World crop contributed to the emergence of modern-day Africa. Some parts of Africa now have higher maize consumption per capita than Mexico and Guatemala, where the crop originated...Rather than describing sweeping historical currents, the book offers the reader a series of vignettes that provide opportunities to appreciate the paradoxes of maize development policy and to contemplate some enduring themes in agricultural history. (Robert Tripp Nature )

McCann has written a fascinating social history of the propagation of maize throughout sub-Saharan Africa since it was first brought there from the New World, probably in the cargo of a slave ship, around 1500. He chronicles the ways in which maize has adapted itself to African conditions, slowly becoming a major African food staple. Since World War II, in fact, the emergence of hybrid maize has resulted in a sharp rise in maize cultivation in Africa, displacing traditional indigenous crops. McCann celebrates the ingenuity of African farmers as they adapted the crop to local customs and climactic conditions, but he argues that the policy world has largely ignored the socioeconomic and environmental implications of the emergence of maize as a staple. In the book's most fascinating chapter, he convincingly links a major malaria epidemic in the highlands of Ethiopia in 1998 to the widespread adoption of maize in the area over the preceding decade. (Nicholas Van De Walle Foreign Affairs )

The author's botanical descriptions and explanations...help us comprehend the long history of maize in Africa. It arrived during the sixteenth century from all directions-north and south, east and west, Christian and Muslim--to become a major food source during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. McCann provides thoughtful histories of its early decades in northern Italy and Ethiopia, demonstrating how politics affects agriculture profoundly--and vice versa as well. (Alfred W. Crosby Technology and Culture )

With a captivating title, Maize and Grace, James McCann considers the ambiguities of African development through a handful of creatively researched maize stories that demonstrate his well-honed investigatory and interpretative skills as a distinguished Africanist environmental historian...From an informed use of oral tradition, little-used agronomic research records, statistical analysis, and artistic and photographic evidence--shared through almost forty illustrations--McCann reveals how an environmental history of maize in Africa illustrates both the triumphs and tripwires of development science and politics. (James Bingen African Studies Review )

As a field crop produced primarily to feed livestock and chicken, maize may appear to be a far cry from being considered a "grace" to humanity as the title of the book, Maize and Grace might suggest. However, considering the distinctive character it plays in human diets, it is not difficult to perceive maize as a blessing or grace. James McCann has chosen an ambitious task and has done it well. He set out to tell the remarkable saga of maize's ascension as a major dramatis persona in Africa's food supply over the past half millennium. As a historian, McCann has brought a different perspective to the importance of maize in the evolution of African agricultural systems...Maize and Grace is a fascinating book, and a joy to read. The book, based on painstaking research and historical data, provides a comprehensive account of how maize and humans have interacted since it was first introduced in Africa over half a millennium ago. It is eloquently written and loaded with a wealth of historical, social, cultural, botanical, ecological, and agricultural information and knowledge, as well as fresh, ingenious, and original insights. Professor McCann is to be commended and congratulated for his valuable scholarly contribution to agricultural literature. Can maize be Africa's "saving grace?" It is a question left for the reader to decide. (Chung L. Huang American Journal of Agricultural Economics )

In this concise yet comprehensive monograph, James McCann deploys his considerable skills as a synthesizer to explain how maize, despite its nutritional and environmental constraints, has come to be the dominant food crop in Africa...In the end, what makes this book impressive is the way that it combines original fieldwork with a deep understanding of a by now formidable interdisciplinary literature...His approach allows this important book to make a significant contribution to the new literature on the history of African crop cultivation...It will become a must-read for students of agricultural and environmental history, geography and African history more generally. (Jamie Monson African History )

A fascinating tour of five centuries of African history...[It] should attract some general readers as well as students of African agriculture. (Danny Yee’s Book Reviews )

Review

McCann's book is as amazing as its title - the botanical properties of the cultigen itself (clearly delineated for the botanically challenged), the continent's unique modern dependence on the crop, the complicated and varied political and economic histories of how it came to be that way, how his Ethiopian research partner's local knowledge connected maize with malaria, and more. Maize and Grace is a readable, highly original, penetrating and comprehensive study of exemplary quality. (Joseph Miller, University of Virginia 20061101)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (March 28, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674017188
• ISBN-13: 978-0674017184
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,812,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Plant it white, February 17, 2006

By 

Reader from Yellow River - See all my reviews

This review is from: Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (Hardcover)

Merchants, missionaries, and slave traders probably brought maize, from the New World, to Africa around 1500. Maize has the vegetable vitamins A, C, E. It doesn't have the lower B vitamins of the true grains millet, sorghum, and wheat. Yet it became Africa's most important cereal crop. For it's easy to grow. It needs one plowing, as opposed to 3-4 for true grains. It gives two big harvests a year. Its grains, leaves, roots, stalks, and tassels can be eaten. It's roasted on the cob or made into soup, porridge, gruel, and couscous. Its lighter work load frees farmers for money-making activities; military service; government work projects; and food-for-work projects.

But is it a good choice? It gets lower harvest prices than wheat, teff, and sorghum. It needs nitrogen, sunlight, and water. All three are problems with phosphorous-poor acidic and red porous laterite soils. Acidic soils also have little calcium and magnesium and too much aluminum. Laterite's also low in nutrients. So they're not right soils, right vegetable. African soils only grow maize with fertilizers, herbicides/pesticides, and irrigation. The rest of the world grows maize for chicken and livestock fodder, fuel, paint, penicillin, and plastic. But Africa grows maize to feed Africans. And maize diets are short on proteins and vitamins. So maize-eaters get the diseases kwashiorkor and pellagra.

Maize is behind two modern disasters. One's the crop failures of 1949-52. New World maize got along with two fungal parasites, puccinia sorghi and polysora. Maize and sorghi went to Africa together. It was a rare case of non-native plant and parasite naturalizing beautifully on new soil. Maize and polysora went with American food shipments to Sierra Leone, for re-shipment to America's allies. Polysora calmed down as suddenly as it'd flared up. Was it because local farmers planted from maizes they saw to be polysora-busters?

The other's Ethiopia's malaria epidemic summer 1998. It spread from the expected low-lying lands to the unexpected highlands. Both areas had been irrigated to grow maize. Malaria's historically linked with water. And it may not be the last disaster. Africa grows white maize. But money's not going into white maize research. It's going into hybrid seeds, such as SR-52 for Rhodesia's large commercial farms.

MAIZE AND GRACE reaches a wide readership with its clear organization and writing. The chapters have persuasive examples and illustrations. The conclusion's followed by helpful appendix tables, notes and bibliography. Author James C McCann reaches into history as background for today's problem questions. But he's planted in the present, and facing into the future, with his answers.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Corny title but more than just a kernel of interest, November 13, 2010

By 

Robert S. Newman "Bob Newman" (Marblehead, Massachusetts USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (Paperback)

Before 1492 "and all that", African farmers grew a variety of crops, but certainly not maize or corn, as it is often called in North America. Very early on, during the Columbian exchange, maize came to Africa. It arrived from several different directions, as is evident in the names given by Africans to their new `wonder' crop. It came overland from Egypt and Arabia, it was brought by Portuguese traders early on, or later by other Europeans. At first, maize would have been used as an additional vegetable in forest plots along with many others. Later, though, it became a basic food, a monocrop plant, which formed the basis of the diet in many areas. Today, of 22 countries in the world where maize forms the highest percent of the diet, 16 are in Africa (p.9). In Lesotho and Malawi over 50% of the caloric intake is from maize and Zambia, Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Kenya are not far behind. Maize farming in southern Africa is often done by women to support families while men are off in the South African mines----the maize may also be sent to the men as flour, or turned into beer for their daily consumption.

McCann tells some interesting tales. Though the title seems to promise a religious aspect to corn, there is nothing of the kind. You can read an interesting comparison of the influence of maize in the Venetian Empire and in Ethiopia. Corn radically changed both but in different ways. You'll find a blow-by-blow story of the so-called American rust disease that hit corn and the battle against it. Breeding SR-52, the most important hybrid maize variety developed for African conditions in what is today Zimbabwe, provides an interesting story of science and racial politics. Then there is a very interesting story of maize's relationship to malaria in modern highland Ethiopia and how this was traced. For those, like me, who have never been involved in the scientific process, it draws connections between public health and agriculture very clearly. All in all, MAIZE AND GRACE is well-worth reading. If you are a specialist in African agriculture, the history of how crops spread and evolve, or in corn breeding, you can't avoid the book. If you are a general reader like me, you will find a lot of information you've never thought about, you can learn a lot. Give it a try. It's clearly written with a number of illustrations, good footnotes (at the back !) and tables in the appendix.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Maize and Grace is generally worth reading and is mostly accurate, January 12, 2010

By 

Catherine H. Chase Peters "cicichasep" (Mexico) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter with a New World Crop, 1500-2000 (Paperback)

REVIEW FOR AMAZON OF TWO BOOKS ON CORN PURCHASED THIS PAST
DECEMBER, 2009AS GIFTS FOR MY FATHER, A RESEARCH HYBRID CORN BREEDER, GENETICIST, AND PROFESSOR OF GENETICS AND BOTANY

I ordered two books for my father at Christmas. He is a PhD geneticist specializing in hybrid corn, so the announcement of two new books related to corn crop production was exciting news!

I purchased both books below:
1. Maize and Grace - Africa's Encounter with New World Crop 1500-2000
By James C. McCann

2. Corn Crop Production - Growth, Fertilization and Yield
Edited by Arn T. Danforth

The first book: Maize and Grace is a paperback and reasonably priced at $18.00. At the beginning it goes back to the 3 parent origin of corn which has been proven to be incorrect and out-of-date, is a tri-partite hypothesis (teosinte/tripsacum/primitive) pushed by Harvard Professor Mangelsdorf.

Corn in fact is a descendent of "teosinte" of Mezo America (Southern Mexico and Northern Guatemala) and teosinte is the sole ancestor of corn. This defendable hypothesis came from a graduate student at Cornell named George Beadle. Dr. Beadle went on to earn the Nobel Prize for the recognition that one gene = one enzyme (one gene directs the formation of one enzyme).

Maize and Grace begins with correct information..."Maize comes in five phenotypes...all its forms derive from a single ancestor domesticated in Central Mexico..." - this is all fine, though actually it was geographically Southern Mexico not Central Mexico. However, on page 3 there is an incorrect statement made: "Plant geneticists have focused attention primarily on the Mexican plant teosinte, perhaps a cousin of maize but probably not its progenitor." This is not a correct statement as mentioned above. Teosinte is the sole parent of corn.

This book gets 3 stars, possibly 4 for being generally accurate, well written, and of interest.

The second book: Corn Crop Production, a hard back, is not as scholarly as it could have been and is overpriced at $145.00. It was clearly edited by a non-English speaker. A book claiming to be scholarly which misspells scientific words such as "inbred" (a term crucial to plant breeding and corn) as "inbreed" leads the reader to assume the book will be lacking, and it is. It is somewhat superficial for what it promises to be - for the scientist it is not complete and is not sound enough, for the lay person it is way beyond them. This is a book about corn - yet Chapter 3 is about rice, and Chapter 4 is about millet. There is a degree of dishonesty in this book - a book on corn production with 3 chapters on other grains and those other grains unannounced in the title, is an editorial dishonesty. In terms of what would is needed - editing for logic and English usage would have been a help. It is vastly too expensive a book for what it is.

The book receives one star for looking intriguing - so sorry it was so lacking and unscholarly!



Most sincerely,
Catherine H. Chase Peters (with the help of her father)