#850 James McCann - Maize and Grace: A History of Africa’s Encounter with a New World Crop

00:00 Ricardo Lopes: Hello everybody. Welcome to a new episode of the Center. I'm your host as always Ricardo Loops. And today I'm joined by Doctor James mccann. He's Professor Emeritus of History at Boston University. His research and teaching interests include agricultural and ecological history of Africa, Ethiopia, and the Horn of Africa field research methods in African studies, the Agroecology of tropical disease and the history of food slash cuisine in Africa and the Atlantic world. And today we are going to focus mostly on his book, Maize and Grace, a History of Africa's Encounter with the new world crop. So, Doctor mccann, welcome to the show. It's a huge pleasure to everyone.

00:47 James McCann: Thank you for your invitation.

00:49 Ricardo Lopes: So, uh let's start, I guess at the beginning. So uh we're going to talk about maize here today. Where did maize originate from?

01:01 James McCann: Maize is a new world crop that was um domesticated by peoples in Mesoamerica. And it's difficult, we don't know the exact the first example of something we would call maize in the common term. But there are examples of, of um archaeological evidence of forgive the bat cave where they found something that looks a bit like maize that has is on a, on the ear with a, with a cob. Um And the evolution is the experimentation by local farmers. We don't know men and women both were involved probably. But we don't really know that in Mesoamerica, but the characteristics that were evolved over time was farmer selection of certain characteristics they wanted to have available in their own diets and their own food. And maize is remarkable and it's spread internationally. That's why my interest in the arrival of maize and its propagation in Africa. It it's about farmer household, local knowledge only to some degree about elite a applications. So it's the earliest history we don't really know for sure. The spread me America into North America and as far as New England. And for example, this is an exa example of a New England flint and eight rows and it's not something commercially viable, but it represents the kind of movement of, of, of Mays into new environments. This other example here you see this looks like what Columbus would have brought with him. He brought Mays back from the Caribbean, a Caribbean red flint, which is this one to Europe and he sent it to his friends in different places in Germany and Italy and Spain. And it began to be experimented with and eventually was taken over by farmers themselves who were the key innovators both in Africa and in Europe. When May spread as this popular crop that had certain characteristics that were overwhelmingly popular with farmers as they sought to both be commercial but also to feed their local populations.

03:19 Ricardo Lopes: And what are some of those characteristics? What are the most distinct traits of mace

03:27 James McCann: maize is one, it is wind pollinated in another. It's not pollinated by insects or by um by other means. And on the maize plant, you have both male and female parts of the plant plant. So it can self pollinate. But for the most part, the wind moves the pollen between fields and between plants. So you get automatically a mix, genetic mixing that gives you a final result of texture color and the characters characteristics of the plant itself. So it has this characteristic that farmers have, have, have the ability to control it by by hand moving the column. Um SO that they have characteristics that they favor whether it's color or texture or for example, how long it stores? Uh SOME varieties of maize do not store very long at all, you have to consume them or they go bad, other ones will last longer. So farmers are making these choices over generations. What the end result is? You find the difference between these two. I would say it's all about the farmer choices. Another lead scientist, the farmer choices at the early level and the popularity of it as it spread around the world was because it was controllable along with other new world. Um ADDITIONS like capsicum pepper. We can't recognize world cuisines without recognizing the contribution of pepper capsicum. Uh In Indian, Indian Ethiopia, all varieties of taste that we value coming from those new world exchanges with new world. Yeah.

05:09 Ricardo Lopes: And uh what are some of the ways maize differs from other uh common crops?

05:18 James McCann: Well, as I said, the wind pollination factor is something that farmers have to learn to control all the way to Monsanto. Suing farmers for the pollen being carried by the wind across fields in Iowa um or or elsewhere where the control of the pollen is the key issue about how do you make it commercially viable. Um But the the difference when something like wheat, wheat is wheat is self pollinating, it doesn't, the pollen does not move more than a few microns from different parts of the plant. Rice is is self pollinating. Uh So maize dis distinctive and it is wind pollinated, not insect pollinated and that makes a huge difference. But farmers understood this pretty quickly when any place where we see where maize has become adapted as a ma a major crop, you see that farmers are adjusting their own knowledge systems to the characteristics of maize. Maize is hermaphrodite. It represents both genders on the same club, but it also is uh I guess morally and and unquestionably about sharing sexual engagements,

06:31 Ricardo Lopes: right? And so, I mean, we're also going to talk about how maize spread across the globe and specifically uh in Africa. Uh BUT what are, are there specific ecological conditions where maize produces high higher yields, where it grows, it grows and is farmed the best?

06:55 James McCann: Well, of course, that's a key characteristic. And when maize came from, you know, directly, for example, from, from the Atlantic trade with Brazil and the trade, the Atlantic trade of course has is a complex interaction of sugar and human labor, forced labor, you know, slaves um going across and carrying maize as a potential crop brought into the African case into West Africa, later into Southern Africa. But also up the Nile and into the Indian Ocean world where the word the the Kiswahili word for maize is Muindi. It's from India. It doesn't come, didn't come from India. But the the understanding, the popular understanding of where this thing came from became the name. If we look at the name for maize in different cultures, different languages. We learned a lot about people's perceptions of that crop. Um In, in Malawi, for example, the word the word for, for maize, it means um from our ancestors, even though it came fairly late into place like Malawi, we replaced sorghum. Sorghum is not as productive as maize and, and farmers at each location, whether it's tropical, subtropical um or somewhat um affected by the amount of moisture available by rainfall by, by climate farmers adjusted to that. So you see the varieties of maize in all over the world ad adapted and again, not so much like recent times by corporations who are, who are attempting to make maize science. And that's the sort of dominant the farmers made this choice every year when they selected their seeds, they would, they would choose some of the, some of the Mazier for seed and some for consumption. And the seed represented their sense of what they identified is the characteristics they wanted. And that includes the maize plant as forage, for animals. So for example, in Italy, the the the the the fact that the farm that the peasant farmers were able to use the maize plant, not just the the the ear, but the plant itself to feed their cattle meant that they could keep the cattle in the barns on their farm and not send them into the mountains in the winter. And what they get from that is distinctive kinds of products of the animals were eating the maize such as Parmesan, such as Gorgonzola, the cheeses, Italians, Italy is so well known for is part of the product of maize is at the core feeding of the animals. So they can be kept in the barns and fed over the course of the winter. And thus ST storing the the milk in the form of cheese.

09:53 Ricardo Lopes: So it's not that uh maize uh only uh I mean grows well or produces a good yield, good yields in specific climates. I mean different kinds of maize have been adapted to different sorts of uh climates and environments. Yeah. With

10:15 James McCann: the restrictions on maize, within the constraints that farmers would respect would would um develop is maize is is vulnerable to drought moisture sensitive. So if you, if you have a drought prone area, either seasonally or within a year, you have to realize that maize is vulnerable to, to moisture, to moisture uh availability. The other way, maize tends does not store as long as other crops, millets store for a very long time. Ethiopian crop tiff will, will store for years. Maze, you get four months, maybe maximum six months but unlikely. So you've got to eat it, move it, preserve it somehow. So it has those constraints on maze. And so that's why you don't see maze as a domino c everywhere.

11:09 Ricardo Lopes: OK. Uh And when it comes, uh we've, you've already mentioned some of that but when it comes how and why it spread across the globe apart from the trades you've already mentioned, were there any specific, for example, political or economic reasons for it to become so widespread?

11:34 James McCann: Uh uh Well, yes, one, it's, here's an example and this is not from the Africa work I did, but the work I've done in Italy where the key crop for the veto. Venice was an empire, an empire of trade. But they, the, the, the Venetian patricians, the rich folks in Venice itself told the farmers on the terra firma of who they controlled that. You will pay your taxes and wheat. And the farmer said wheat doesn't work well here in northern northern Italy, wheat works in southern Italy and elsewhere. So we want to start paying our taxes in maize. And at first, the patricians in Venice said, no, we want wheat and we control you. So the battle eventually was won by the peasants in the terra firma. And because of the, the, the the plague and other kinds of situations, they won the day and were allowed to pay their taxes in maize. And of course, maize then becomes the basis for the diet in northern Italy of polenta rather than pasta is an importation from Southern Italy. And the same thing happens where maize is introduced in uh in Africa where fa farmers find it help help important to adapt maize as their fundamental crop. But one of the liabilities of maize is it has insufficient amino acids. So you have the pro from palabra is disease that you find especially in agricultural societies in Southern the American South, in Italy and any and in southern Africa, any place you have a dominance of maize in the diet that came as part of, of maize being a really popular crop for farmers to grow is Pella is a skin disease and you find it places where the diet becomes too dependent on maize. But you don't find that in Mid America because in Mesoamerica, they process maize using lies and change the chemistry so that you get a complete uh amino acid and complete protein by having a maize based diet. It has to do with processing. How do you process the maze? But they didn't do that in um in other places, Italy, Africa, the southern us where Pella becomes a serious problem until it's understood that you have to complete the proteins by, by research in the early 20th century.

14:03 Ricardo Lopes: And when exactly did maize get to Africa?

14:09 James McCann: Well, we don't, of course, completely know, but we can look at um places early on, we begin to get adaptation. For example, a na uh the names given to maize you find in places in Nigeria or West Africa that the the words for maize tell us something. The the um the Akan in Ghana, uh the word for, for, for maize means something from the foreigners in Ethiopia. Then one of the words for a maze was Yar Maila. In other words, the sor go from across the ocean, it looks maize looks like. So, so sorghum or Sorghum looks like maize when it's growing early on. But that the factor of people recognizing saying it's the so them from across the sea. And now when you go to to the place of within Ethiopia, I work, it's just called Mahila, which just means Sorghum, it's not Sorghum. But people understand that the word tells you people's perceptions of when this arrived. Uh So exact dates by the time the Portuguese arrive in Ethiopia, they're finding some maize there and they tell us what they're growing. And you can see the maize has already arrived. But we don't have a clear historical record because that's something takes place in the basic level of human subsistence and doesn't make it into the historical sources quite as clearly as it does later on.

15:39 Ricardo Lopes: And how does maize tie to Africa's Green Revolution?

15:46 James McCann: Well, the Green Revolution originally was done with rice for South Asia. So, so for India, South Asia and so that revolution was about doing short, short that you have to have, you have to have water and you have to have fertilizer and you get a huge growth in food production in South Asia for Africa. The the the attempt has been to say yes, maize is going to be for Africa like rice was for South Asia and that's done by has been done by corporations by USA ID International Organizations. Um The key center for research on maize is in Mexico City when I visited there. Uh I was taken to uh there was Ethiopian there who I got, I work in Ethiopia. So we became friends. He took me to a rural site outside of Mexico City. Uh AND they were growing their maize seed for which was going to be introduced to Ethiopia. Uh So the international nature of the research going on now the Green Revolution, the idea was maize can be the center point of that for Africa, but with the problems that maze has about stability and about incomplete proteins. And so what he this Ethiopian scientist was doing, I'm developing a new variety with complete um proteins. So it would have to be identified having a market value, you pay more for those seeds to have complete proteins. And this this uh type of maize though was also introduced elsewhere in Africa is part of what people hoped would be a green rev kind of green revolution. And it has done that the improvement in the the yield of the maize, you improve maize is substantial to um 68 tons per hectare compared to two tons per hectare in local varieties. So that is Africa was has been seen as the key to that in many ways. It is although for example, Ethiopian restaurants are very popular in around the world but in in the US and in in Europe and you will not find maize even though it's the number one crop in Ethiopia, you will not find maize on the diet of Ethiopia, the menu of Ethiopian restaurants because it's not traditionally their ideal food, the food of poverty. Um YOU can buy ears of maize on the street, roasted maize on the street, very inexpensive. But as a as a fund fundamental part of diet problematic.

18:31 Ricardo Lopes: And why is it that uh when it comes to Africa, people decided on maize? I mean, why wasn't it some other crop.

18:43 James McCann: Well, they have, you can, you can look at each individual situation. The place I work in Ethiopia, they had a full maize came very late. It was there as a garden crop, early yielding. It's the first crop of the year. You have it in your, your household garden. Um, YOU get the first milky stage, you can eat milky stage maize or wait, wait till it dries and then process it. But it's the first crop you're going to get. Um But there, there they had other crops, they had death in wheat and barley. And it was a very, very diversified cropping system. The farmers understood well in other places, places in Southern Africa, for example, it arrived, it replaced Sorghum because it was much more productive. And the African farmers all over Southern Africa said this thing will give us a yield quickly and it is a food that we can adapt into our diet. So sorghum has almost disappeared. And maize is the crop that has many different varieties in all the countries of Southern Africa. All different names. Basically, it's what Americans would call, call grits or Italians would call polenta. Uh So maze in its various forms, ref reflects the the choice of farmers to say this thing gives an early yield. But the new varieties, the green revolution varieties yield much later and you don't eat them at the m milky stage. At the green stage. You have, you have to wait and dry them and then process them. So it feeds into the industrialization of of mills that began to change the way that the market affected. What kind of maize farmers were growing. And the government would say, ok, you may, may grow only this kind of maize because we cannot sell colored maize. B maize drops out of the market because the international market say we want white maize. And if yellow maize is grown, yellow maize is useful for poultry who likes white yolks and their eggs, the yellow comes from the beta carotene in the yellow maize. Hm So you have these adaptations where the Millers are saying we want this kind of maize because that's the one we can sell into international markets. And so you have it for Africa. Virtually all of the African maize is white in the US, maize is for livestock and you want your, your the fat of your livestock to be kind of a little bit yellow. So the the yellow maize is dominant in North America and in Europe too, white maize is still there. You can buy polenta, either white or red, depending on your taste. What you're eating the polenta with, with, with fish or with uh with, with the tomato sauce, et cetera. So these are consumer preferences that reflect the larger market preferences of the kind of maize that farmers are going to be growing to produce commercially for the market.

21:45 Ricardo Lopes: So uh politics and economics also certainly play a big role in the adoption and spread of maize across Africa.

21:56 James McCann: Right? Yes. So if you look at a place like Zimbabwe, which did fantastic research on maize development, the law system eventually through the 20th century said, OK, you may not grow maize which is not white. Uh BECAUSE white is the international market and we're producing some of the best hybrid maize developed through research came out not out of the North America, out of Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe. Because the the, the, the maize, the scientists there, the white, the white Rhodesian scientists developed a incredibly productive uh variety. But for that variety of, of really um productive maze in terms of, of the of the economic perspective that you had to have just the right soils, just the right moisture, just the right seasonal conditions. And of course, the white population in Southern Rhodesia controlled those things. And the the black farmers were not given access to this new variety. These new varieties incredibly productive is from a scientific point of view, economic point of view. But you also founded. This is a story I got when I was doing work, work in Zimbabwe, one of those scientists showed me a chart he made, he said, chart showed, wait a second. Why is suddenly this this production going up? But we're not, we're not charting. He said in his own handwriting, he wrote in this little chart from the 19 sixties. He showed me this chart when I interviewed him, he wrote African farmers. In other words, African farmers had found the, the, the new crop, the new variety and were using it and adapting it in their own terms. Even though the government was trying to suppress their, their role in production of, of, of maize. Very, very, very political economic, in a fascinating way, which is what led me into and what led me into you didn't ask this question, but I'll answer it anyway. How did I begin to understand and, and want to explore more of the role of maize because I grew up with maize fields all around me as a kid. I grew up in Illinois and Illinois is a big maize producing area. But when I was interviewing farmers in Ethiopia after the famine, uh there was a socialist government in place that was trying to control farmer activities and farmers were growing their different varieties of crops. And then suddenly when I said, OK, what did you go last year, the year before that? It's a year before that. They were saying, well, this is the maize, maize, maize, maize. Really? I said maize is drought is drought um affected. Um IT, it it is not the best nutrition in the world, it doesn't fit your normal diet. Why are you doing this? And so I began to understand it's because the government is saying we don't care what you grow as long as you pay in these other crops. And they said that maize was safe because the government wouldn't take it from him. It was a political decision that, that affected what farmers did,

25:12 Ricardo Lopes: right? Uh And uh I mean, uh going along the uh that line of what uh I would also like to ask you a little bit about the particular case of South Africa, which you have done some work on. Uh YOU mentioned science there for example. And I asked you about politics, but in the particular case of South Africa, uh in what ways did politics, science and race intermingle there?

25:40 James McCann: Well, for Southern Africa, we you know the politics, we know of the the arrival of Europeans in the 17th century and then spread from the cape into colonial settings that were originally the the arrival of uh Dutch later on the the the British Empire incorporated that but the basic population still was agricultural. Um And they of course had needs for the mines. So the Southern African economies were about gold first, sorry, diamonds first, then gold and that became the diamond. So what do you need? You need labor? Mhm And when the labor is the black population which needs to be fed and the the mine owners were having to determine what do we feed our mine workers to keep them healthy enough to work and maize became the key crop for them. Uh And the the word Milly. Milly pop is a South African word for polenta or for the basic maize, which comes from the Portuguese Mili. So merely was not maize, but word came to include maize from the original Portuguese. And so you have this phenomenon of the mind economy, creating a sense of what is what is good food. Um And eventually the population came to define their full bellies is the feeling you get when you've eaten a big batch of maize. And when that becomes a kind of a cultural norm of what feeling full is um maize becomes that key ingredient. So the the miners also went back to their family farms when they worked, headed out of the mines and they began to grow maize as down the crop. And that was women doing the work back home where men were the miners earning wages. And therefore the the core diet became maze because it was low labor, lower labor. Somebody I did mention maze takes less labor, you can broadcast it. Um You don't have to do it by role, et cetera. Uh So its characteristics meant it could be adapted on small farms in which women's labor was the key issue. So Southern Africa, it was about mining, the economy and eventually became the accepted um diet was maize was the core of any meal. Yes, there was sorghum a little bit here and there. You can still buy some Sorghum in South African. Uh GRO groceries. But for the most part, the basic diet is maize, white maze. Mhm.

28:29 Ricardo Lopes: Right. And do we know if uh maize has had uh any impact on the biodiversity of Africa?

28:40 James McCann: Well, in some ways, it's a negative effect because the farmer incentives with political context in many cases is maize is the crop that's really yielding. It gives a very good yield for small farmers and you go to, you know, 6 to 8 tons per hectare of the new varieties. So farmers are seeking both the commercial value of that to to send to the the cities but also it is very, very attractive is the local diet. Um So the biodiversity pushing maize as as USA ID does with the Agra, the the this big development program based upon maize is the primary crop. Uh So you have corporations Mon Monsanto and of course May's production, Monsanto is now owned by by year. So the big maize producers are all owned by drug companies by chemical companies. Dupont owned all of those, those early developers of of maize in North America in Europe are all owned by now. Chemical drug companies, Dupont Bayer um go down the line. So it it becomes a corporate crop and farmers are are dealing with markets and their own food supply depending on where you are in Africa. Maize is not the dominant crop in every part of Africa. It is in, it is in southern Africa. It is in Kenya, Tanzania. Ugali is essentially grits polenta. But for, for East Africa and that's I had a friend, a Ugandan friend who came to Ethiopia and she was dying to have ugali in her diet because she's from Uganda and for her food, met maize. At that point, Ethiopian restaurant, Ethiopian national diet did not really include maize for the middle and upper class. So, Mays has his fun role, role. It's not a friend of biodiversity. Mhm

30:46 Ricardo Lopes: And uh a related question, do we know what impact uh the introduction of maize had on African people's nutrition and health.

30:59 James McCann: Well, I mentioned pra too much dependent on maize but maize has its place because it yields early depending on the variety you're growing. You can be can be the first thing that comes as the first crop you have. We have often Af African cultures have celebrations of the first crop. The the new year begins. The first thing you can get is maize because you can eat it the milky stage as we eat with with uh we haven't mentioned there are five varieties of maize, one of which is sweet corn, uh which is the one you eat at the milky stage. It's wonderful, delicious. Um Something in the fall when the first maze comes in, you wanna have um sweet corn. There's also popcorn, also dent corn, also flint corn. These are both flint corns which has the characters are scoring longer uh which is a good thing, but they may take longer to mature and you're not, you're not consuming them at the early stage. So the the the role of maize in the diet differs on which kind of cuisines you're talking about which parts of Africa, Africa, of course, is a wonderfully diverse place, linguistically, culturally, in terms of diet and maize plays an important part in a number of different African diets. Mhm.

32:21 Ricardo Lopes: So for the second part of the interview, let's say, I would like to ask you a few more general questions not specifically related to maize itself. So uh particularly when I asked you about Southern Africa and also earlier in the interview, you mentioned a little bit of it, uh we talked about colonialism. So uh what would you say was the role played by colonialism when it comes to spreading crops across the globe? And uh how was the adoption of different crops influenced by it?

33:03 James McCann: Well, it depends on the situation. We have an example of Ethiopia where there was not formal colonialism. The Italian period was only a few years. So the adaptation was done essentially by farmers themselves, taking advantage of what is available to them in terms of their own strategies of cropping across a year and feeding their community with a little bit of commercials, selling of, of grains. But also the household level. When you go to a place like Southern Africa or or so Southern Africa, you have a large arrival of the European population who are originally Dutch and then English and then some Portuguese and different, different groups arrive there. Europeans who control things who are interested in feeding their labor and feeding themselves. So you have in South Africa. So a wonderful um tradition now of wine because some of the early migrants out of Europe were Huguenots. The huguenots were escaping France because they were oppressed by the Cat Catholic majority there. And they began importing uh vineyards and that became now today, some of the best places to go and on wine tours in the world. In my experience, South Africa is fantastic. Um And that links to the minefields needed labor. The certain minefield, the vineyards needed labor and those laborers were eating increasingly maize getting back to maze but it was and some places there was not a European population in East Africa, Kenya a little bit Tanzania. You had European populations that were affecting what farmers were doing because they're expected that farmers would grow crops consumed by Europeans. Uh West Africa, the conditions of malaria, something else I work on malaria meant that Europeans and large populations did not populate West Africa, they would tend to populate as in, in um in India hill stations that were fear from malaria. So Europeans would con control those spaces and so the population was allowed to keep um local varieties of foodstuffs. So for example, in West Africa, you had the possibility of, of uh maize could be there as a first crop if you're clearing your forest. But the, the crops you really want to have in there are yam cassava, another manio, another new world crop. Uh If you, you know bubble tea. Uh YES, the bubbles are maniac. A casa. We were OK. Uh So you have these mixes sometimes called the Colombian exchange of crops coming from the old new world to the old world. I call it the I call it not the exchange, but the circulation because the food crops along with peoples are circulating and bringing their preferred foods with them. So in West Africa, you have forest crops, yams, they're, they're grown in the, in the, in the, in the forest floor. Uh Maize is there for the first crop but then people want to get into yams and, and cassava and other kinds of crops taken from the forest, the biodiversity of the forest. So all that's changing, of course as cities grow. But the colonial effect is greatest in some places where there could be new neo Europe such as southern Africa, Kenya. But where there's factions of disease, the African population had resistance to uh the Europeans would tend to avoid those areas, control them for pro production of food and for mining, et cetera. But uh maize there was, it's, it's it's interest came from farmers themselves. But also because Europeans were happy to have those workers under, under colonial rule fed and the maze then became a key part of that process of nutrition. Mhm.

37:16 Ricardo Lopes: So uh in historical scholarship, one approach that people have is to look at the causal relationship between climate and history. Uh What do you think of it?

37:32 James McCann: Climate is fundamental to history, climate about seasonality. What is the annual cycle of, of availability of moisture? Uh Disease is also sea seasonal affected by climate by issues of climate. It's the thing I'm working on now is sort of the more fundamental issue about water, water, its presence, its absence, its movement, it's movement through the seasons. And this is deeply within the issue of climate change, climate change, velvet of water. But of course, just look at today's stuff in, in Ukraine. But what do you do when you want to defeat your enemy? This is what the Germans did in Italy in World War Two. They said we're gonna stop the allied invasion in Italy by flooding the farmers' fields because then that will encourage malaria which will affect the invading army. In this case, the British American uh invasion of Italy. And that was a specific military plan, what's going on now, even though we're not quite identifying the source of it. This is what the Russians are doing. They said we're going to blow up this dam and we're gonna flood this entire area to impede the movement of, of, of military activity and this gets back to the seasons in which empires within Africa, within Ethiopia. For example, the the the armies moved only during the dry season. If you move during the wet season, then the areas with malarial. Uh SO the seasonality of wind moisture is available is a big deal militarily in terms of the production of food. In terms of, you know, if you, if you look at people who are traveling, describing events in Africa or the conditions in Africa, Europeans writing down what they're, what they're encountering, they only traveled in the dry season. They're only giving a partial view of what they're seeing because they wouldn't go during the wet season because it's one, it's muddy two, it's malarial and the local merchants and, and uh moving around are only doing their movement during that seasonality. The seasons change, different parts of Africa, but it's that seasonal change and the, the issue of climate change, which is now having major effects, right?

39:53 Ricardo Lopes: Uh So I would like to ask you one last question slash topic. So, uh of course, when it comes to history, um I would like to ask you, what do you think of approaches by people like Jared Diamond when it comes to explaining why certain societies became more successful than others and what we could call or at least some people call uh geographical determinism.

40:25 James McCann: Well, that's always been a factor of how much is, are the conditions deterministic and Jared Diamond lays out an argument. That's interesting. To challenge and it's good that it's there. And it's, it's, it's an attempt at universal explanation of human movement, human political economic domination based around on environmental issues to some degree. That's true. Um And I think that that any consideration of politics or of economic change or of interaction between different kinds of political systems um has its foundations, environmental issue in environmental issues. The fact that Europeans coming to Africa or even to North America or to, to the new world. It's about the movement of knowledge. Part of that Colombian circulation I mentioned was the arrival in Latin America of people who knew how to deal with couple of climates. The people, the the the selection of who is that most valued as labor out of the slave trade, going to the to the Carolinas in the US because the ones who are most valued came from Santa Gambia. They knew how to grow rice and the the plantation owners. And so in, in um in the Carolinas were stayed in their, their uplands and in areas that were not so much so affected by malaria or other diseases and their, their African slaves were allowed to move into swampy areas because they knew how to grow. Um LOVE rima rice. They were adapting the environment, they knew, they knew how to deal with health, knew how to deal with production. And so the knowledge that moved into the new world also was a key part of this whole exchange and politics got into who controlled who but also adaptation to environmental issues. If you want to understand the geography of Ethiopia is a, is a place that's a place I work. Most, you know, look at climate seasonality and you see that people would move in and out of areas that were affected by malaria or where they could grow one crop or another crop and then harvest it and get back to a safer area. Big factor and you a diamond is helpful to have that, that um that perspective that is environmental determinism, but they will have nuance by local areas. And that's the beautiful part of doing the, doing the work and working with different people in different places.

43:06 Ricardo Lopes: Mhm. So, yeah. Uh I mean, I've also asked you about that because of course, a big part of Jared Diamond's argument is based on uh crops also, of course domesticated animals in certain specific latitudes in the world. Uh And uh since of course, our interview has been focused so much on maize and we touched on some other crops as well. Uh I was wondering, I mean, to what extent you would think um the factors that Jared Diamond points to uh I, I mean, what uh how much of a role do you think they would play in human history?

43:52 James McCann: Well, I would add to Jared Diamond as, as a um kind of marker of environmental determinism with a reasonable coherent and somewhat persuasive argument. But look at Alfred Crosby who coined the term the Columbian exchange that I modified to publicly of the interaction. Um It is is that uh Alfred Crosby talks about the the biological imperialism because the the arrival in the new world of cattle and pigs, right? And chickens and part of this global circulation transforms the the physical environment. When you release hogs into the environment, they are extremely good at going feral and they, they, they change the physical world they live in and humans are both either hunting them or trying to domesticate them or the the animals and the plants, of course, maize being a big one of globalization, but this is also true of other, other crops and other kinds of animals. Um YOU know, goats, sheep, cattle, horses, all of these things that transform the worlds they they move to and the adaptation of local populations quickly to the horse. For example, you know, native Americans in North America adaptations of the horse, suddenly they become mobile, suddenly they, they're able to hunt in different ways. Suddenly they're able to, to to expand their own local local control over different com competing groups in new, in new ways. So the the Alfred Crosby approach to this, which has been adapted by people, scholars from, from all over the world are incorporating these ideas and and playing them out in local areas that makes sense for them. But Jared Diamond more popular is, is something to read. Uh It's kind of New York Times best seller list. But the Alfred Crosby stuff is also uh to me uh very good. And the colleagues I work with who are specialists when I, when I go someplace, it's not that I know things others don't know. But I absorb as his historian, I'm absorbing the knowledge and interacting with my colleagues, whether it's in Ghana, we were talking about the introduction of maize or in Ethiopia where we're driving through the countryside and I'm saying, what's going on there? We're walking through the countryside. And I'm always asking questions because they have the knowledge that I've been trying to interpret for a larger uh audience as an academic, as a historian. So these things are very, very global, it helps to have people kind of tweaking the narrative by publishing books like Jared Diamond. But it's not that we say gee he's got it. Right. Um He's after all, you know, his original background, he's a gastroenterologist. Mhm. Right. And we trust doctors to a degree. Yes.

46:55 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. Right. So uh Doctor mccann, uh I'm leaving a link to your book Maze And Grace, a History of Africa's encounter with the new World Cup crop in the description box of the interview. Uh Would you like to mention any places on the internet where people can find your work?

47:17 James McCann: Well, I think the internet being what it is, you can, you can do that. Um What I'm getting now, I just was at Oxford University Press asked me to write a chapter on malaria in Africa. And malaria in Africa came from my own work with, again, with colleagues um who work on malaria in Africa and elsewhere. But um people I got malaria when I was doing field work in Africa uh in, in Ethiopia, you know, an area where the maize stuff was going on. And I didn't ask go malaria. But suddenly I had 100 and five degree fever and had to go back out of my my rural area five hours by mule to get to the nearest road to the nearest light bulb. Oh my God. And so malaria became an interest and the maze. Malaria connection is one chapter of of um maize and grace. And so male malaria is where I I appear on the internet. I'm constantly getting notes saying you've been cited by these 100 times. I said really I'm not doing and it's, it's mainly now about the medical malaria stuff that links to the maze. All these things are linked. Um And now back to the North Fundament of water in which I'm doing a plenary panel for a international meeting in Finland next year. And that is to draw people together around what is the meaning of water? Meanings of water as something physical is something psychological is something cultural and water takes us to all kinds of ways that people signify their sainthood if they're in a, in a, uh religious religious setting. Um, AND for example, in the 88, the 18 fifties, this short story, the British traveler in Ethiopia came down with fever and it's called eu, he understood this as I have a fever. What do I do? He's riding around the countryside with people and they said, what you need to do is stand in this tree and we're gonna dump water on your head and this will deal with your fever. He said, well, first of all, it knocked him off, his horse, knocked him senseless and he felt slightly better at the end of this ordeal. At the same time, there's someone in Malvern England who's going through a water therapy treatment, somewhat, somewhat similar and that person was Charles Darwin. So water is this, this, this universal, of course, it's universal, but the nuances and local cultures and local material versus belief systems is the thing that I'm working on now. And you find examples of that all over the world where suddenly cli that links to climate change.

50:02 Ricardo Lopes: Very interesting. So, Doctor mccann, uh thank you so much for taking the time to come on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk to you

50:12 James McCann: too. Say no or the equivalent of the Italian.

50:17 Ricardo Lopes: Yeah. In this case, uh it would be bo part here. It's still the afternoons. OK?

50:25 James McCann: Time change, time change. So thank you very much Ricardo. Very interesting. You're, you're uh you're a good, you're a good interviewer.

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