High on the Hog_ A Culinary Journey From Africa to America - Jessica B. Harris [101]
Fights for basic civil rights in the United States paralleled those in the Caribbean and on the African continent, where the battle for autonomy and the ability to govern their own countries continued through the 1960s. The dates of independence for African and Caribbean nations resonate alongside the dates of gains in the march toward full equality for African Americans. The litany of independence days began with the 1957 independence for Ghana, the former British colony along the Gold Coast, and the turbulent 1958 independence of Guinea from France. The year 1960 marked a raft of independences for former French colonies, as Senegal, Ivory Coast, Chad, Gabon, Mali, Madagascar, Niger, Togo, Benin, and Upper Volta hauled down the tricolor and proudly hoisted their own flags. The same year, Nigeria gained independence from Britain. The map was gradually transformed from British imperial pink and French imperial turquoise into a raft of new nations. Africans, Caribbean peoples, and African Americans looked at one another across political divides and cultural contradictions and recognized that an international community was being born.
One of the ways that they all connected across cultural divide was food. As a growing number of cultural nationalists began to travel and visit other countries where people of African descent lived, they brought back recipes for dishes that were added to menus and to festivities. While the Harlem of the 1920s saw street vendors selling plantains and the root vegetables that are traditional in the foods of Africa and the Caribbean, in the intervening years they had largely disappeared from African American markets. By the 1960s, true yams, eddoes, tania, and dasheen had been relegated to neighborhoods around the country with predominantly West Indian and African populations—neighborhoods that existed because the 1965 Immigration Act had relaxed quotas, opened the American borders to a wider number of immigrants, and allowed for greater immigration from far-reaching areas of the African world.
The mid-1960s were a time of increasing internationalism and growing awareness of self in the African American community. The creation of the holiday Kwanzaa by cultural nationalist and black studies advocate Ron “Maulana” Karenga in 1966 marked another turning point. Using a traditional East African harvest festival as inspiration, Karenga created a nonreligious seven-day celebration rich in ritual that’s designed to uplift and unify African Americans. The year-end holiday is rooted in the nguzu saba, or seven principles, Karenga created to extol the virtues of unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith. In keeping with its Pan-African inspiration, Kwanzaa uses Swahili (the language of African unity) as its official language. There are no culinary expectations for the holiday, like the Thanksgiving turkey or the Christmas goose, but Kwanzaa’s seven nights of ritual make symbolic use of food throughout: ears of Native American corn are placed on Kwanzaa tables to represent the children in each household, and a basket of fruit symbolizing abundance is an integral part of the traditional centerpiece.
The final day of Kwanzaa, which falls on New Year’s Day, is given over to the Karamu festival and designed to celebrate African American communities past and present by honoring African American elders and community leaders as well as African and African American ancestors. The day is traditionally capped by a communal meal with people bringing dishes created from family recipes or foods from around the African Diaspora. Karenga’s writings do not offer recipes, but dishes such as Kawaida rice, a vegetable-rich brown rice, became traditional to those who celebrated with him in the holiday’s early years. Kwanzaa celebrations around the country include dishes