Becoming Underutilised: Indigenous Crops and Foodways in Colonial Kenya

The material properties of ‘underutilised’ indigenous African crops have gained increasing attention in efforts to combat food insecurity. Understanding the opportunities and barriers to reviving indigenous crops today must begin by making sense of how such foodstuffs became underutilised in the first place. This article traces the transformation of foodways centred around indigenous crops in colonial Kenya (1890s–1963). Drawing on archival evidence and 79 oral histories from Baringo and Bomet counties, it explores how crop materialities, colonial state-making and local resistance shaped patterns of agrarian change that marginalised, but by no means eradicated, indigenous crops and foodways. Although key drivers of change stemmed from interactions between crop materialities and political-economic forces central to settler colonial domination in Kenya, we argue that nutritional knowledges, extreme weather events and pest outbreaks were important contributors to government interventions and local defence of foodways. We conclude by reflecting on the resurgence of indigenous crops.