Healing Grounds Chapter 2: African Indigenous Agriculture and What it Teaches Us

African Indigenous agriculture not only teaches lessons of the land, but also of humanity and the nature of the world. These strategies also provided a route of perseverance against the societal discrimination in the agricultural sector. The agricultural practices were accessible to economically struggling black farmers and provided food security, economic foothold, and sustainable self sustenance. The parallels between people and nature/land are so prominent, and that was really displayed in this chapter of Healing Grounds. Diverse forest plant life was destroyed, land stripped of biodiversity, for the sake of farming cash crops and rapid urbanization. Black farmers faced oppression and systemic racism through the seizing of their land, increased taxes, declining of loans, discriminatory laws and acts, and being forced into contract labor. Families who acquired land were targets of lynching and violence, which were further efforts to completely displace black farmers from their land and impoverish the black farming community as a whole. Through this extreme hardship, refuge was found within, what this chapter called, then “hidden Black subsistence economy,” saving them from borrowing money from their landlords or going hungry. This system was based on black agroforestry, resisting chemical agriculture, and drawing on strategies originating in Africa that supports biodiversity and the health of ecosystems, while also providing farmers with a huge variety of crops. The principle of this type of farming is to plant crops around trees, and to build up and sustain the existing, or one existing, ecosystem. I love how this strategy of sustainable agriculture was described, in a mutual thriving of the farmer and “farm,” of the oppressed ecosystem and oppressed peoples. The mutual benefit of mindful farm practices, providing freedom and self-sustenance, through collaboration and the unifying relationship between people and forest. Mutual flourishing learned from the land, and implemented, historically, by African Indigenous peoples and black farmers.