fonio

The savannas of West Africa between latitudes 8 and 14 north, from Senegal to Lake Chad; Digitaria exilis, probably the oldest African cereal, cultivated across the dry savannas for thousands of years, and first recorded as food in the fourteenth century, when Ibn Battuta, crossing to Mali in 1352, found village women selling it beside millet and rice, a grain like mustard seed made into couscous and a thick porridge

Grown from Cape Verde to Lake Chad and still the staple or a major part of the diet in parts of Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Nigeria; Guinea grows about three quarters of the crop and it is a staple of the Fouta Djallon highlands, where Guinea's agricultural research institute keeps a fonio programme at Bareng; in Senegal the principal grain of Kedougou and Tambacounda, grown also in Casamance; husked by machine since 1993, when the Senegalese engineer Sanoussi Diakité built a huller; and authorised for the European market in 2018

Europeans named it hungry rice, a misleading term from people who knew little of the crop, while those who grew it harvested it because they liked the taste, reserved it in places for chiefs, royalty and special occasions and paid it in bride price; in 1352 a jurist in Mali sent Ibn Battuta two great sacks of it as a gift. Under colonial rule, Pierre Thiam writes, a myth was fabricated that Africa's native crops were less nutritious than imported ones, and fonio, with millet and Diola rice, came to be seen as peasant food, though a Bambara proverb says that fonio never embarrasses the cook, and in Kedougou it is still the treat served to royalty and special guests. What colonial rule took from fonio was its standing, not its fields: in 1996 the National Research Council found it not in serious decline, and CIRAD's figures show production falling in the 1970s, recovering from 1980 and rising sharply since the 2000s. What threatened it in the field was the husking: women pound the grain in mortars, sift it three or four times and pound it again, one or two kilos an hour each, then wash it over and over to get the sand out, and CIRAD records that the labour has led some populations to give the crop up, at the risk of its disappearing in many regions. Sanoussi Diakité, a Senegalese engineer and teacher, built a machine in 1993 that husks five kilos in eight minutes, where hand work took two hours for two and a half, because, as he put it, fonio is extremely prized but people are more and more reluctant to prepare it, and took the Rolex Award for it in 1996. The project CIRAD led with the national institutes of Mali, Guinea and Burkina Faso designed its own huller from 1999, and in 1996 the National Research Council in Washington still wrote that few people outside West Africa had ever heard of fonio. When it reached the European market, in 2018, it came in as a novel food, a traditional food from a third country whose history of safe use in Guinea, Nigeria and Mali the company selling it had to document. The constraint was a labour burden, and a Senegalese engineer lifted it before the grain had a public in the North. There is one more thing worth saying carefully. Fonio is often introduced through Dogon cosmology, as po, the germ of the world in which every cultivated plant is contained: CIRAD's page on its origin tells it that way, and the National Research Council has the whole universe emerging from a fonio seed. That account belongs to Le Renard pâle, which Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen published in 1965, a creation built on the seeds of cultivation with po the most important of them, and when Walter van Beek restudied the Dogon from 1979, the picture proved impossible to replicate in the field, even as the shadowy remnant of a largely forgotten past, and neither creation story was recognisable to the people he asked. Griaule has his defenders: in the same issue R. M. A. Bedaux replied that failing to find what Griaule was told fifty years earlier does not mean it was not so then. Van Beek's own verdict is that these revelations stand as intercultural fiction, tributes to the convictions of a European and to the creativity of an African people, and an archive that asks whose account gets to stand has to ask it of the passage it likes best. Fonio does not need the myth: its fastest kinds are ready six or eight weeks after planting, before any other grain, and carry West Africa through the hungry season, and what has kept it on the table is the work of West African women and a Senegalese engineer's machine.