A History of Food Culture and Agricultural Innovations in the Congo Basin

Abstract

This article reviews the history of agri-food culture in the Congo Basin in the light of recent advances in linguistic and archaeobiological studies, including new findings from genome and isotope analyses of humans and cultivated plants. In particular, it focuses on dietary and agricultural innovations made during the 20th century by using the example of the Songola, a Bantu-speaking people in the Maniema Region of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Between 10200 and 8400 years ago, people in the humid green Sahara were involved in hunting, fishing and gathering, using ceramic pots to cook their food. The desertification of the Sahara might have been a compelling factor for the inhabitants to commence in the domestication of pearl millet, African rice, and Guinea yam along the Niger River. Later, Bantu-speaking people penetrated into the Central African forest with their iron tools and domesticated plants, living side by side with the hunter-gatherers who had already lived in the forest long before the “Bantu expansion.” The major crops of these early Bantu migrants included oil palm and other plants of vegetative reproduction such as Guinea yam. When they accepted banana/plantains from Asia, and later cassava from South America, their capacity for cooking food and brewing alcoholic beverages developed significantly both in terms of diversity and quantity. When the authors carried out their fieldwork between 1978 and 1990 among the Songola people in the eastern part of the Congo Basin, the traditional food culture created as a result of the three-stage “vegecultural revolution,” that is the introduction of Guinea yam, plantain, and cassava, was still in place. The introduction of rice, cassava flour, and mold-fermented liquor in the early 20th century were other major innovations which led to creating new trade items. These recent innovations, as well as those implemented in the past, are the result of continuous improvements carried out by villagers, which might be viewed as an embodiment of their “food sovereignty.”