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Maize and Grace: History, Corn, and Africa's New Landscapes, 1500–1999

The old man's complaint about maize as “European” food in Audrey Richards' now classic 1939 field study reflected his obvious disdain for the new food of the mines and cities of colonial Northern Rhodesia (Zambia). His perception of maize as “European” food was, however, anachronistic even in 1939, reflecting a landscape of memory rather than the creep of agrarian modernism and the maize-based diet of an urban wage-labor economy. In fact, by the 1930s diets and farm plots all over twentieth-century Africa were rapidly changing their seasonal tastes, textures and colors to reflect the inexorable spread of a food crop with origins in the New World, but with an increasingly African personality. These dramatic changes over the past three decades have now superceded the analysis and speculative data of Marvin Miracle's classic work Maize in Tropical Africa, and call for a reinterpretation of maize's historical trajectory in Africa.Marvin Miracle, Maize in Tropical Africa (Madison, 1966). The chronology and meaning of maize's expansion in Africa are the subjects of this article.