Maize and Grace: Africa's Encounter With a New World Crop, 1500-2000 [Anglais] [Broché]

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.

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.

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)