The “Lost Crops of Africa”
In my last blog post extolling durian, I asked where all the Afrikan varieties of “superfoods” were at. In exploring the raw vegan/ fruitarian world, one hears much about “superfoods“/ “superfruits” from the tropics, but they mostly seem to emerge from South America and tropical Asia. I hardly found varieties indigenous to or widely propagated in Afrika discussed in the common literature on “superfoods” by the raw vegan popularizers and commercializers of these plants. But in searching for more info on potential “superfoods” growing in Afrika right now, I have discovered a series of books available online: Lost Crops of Africa. You can read it online for free!
The above link is to Volume III: Fruits. Click here for Volume I: Grains and here for Volume II: Vegetables. These as well can be read online for free.
This encyclopedic series of books is answering many of my questions and is shaping how I want to practice agroforestry (and what I’m gonna chew on) in Afrika when I return. Some of these varieties I now want to look into for local availability (in the NYC region). There are Afrikan markets in Newark (Brick City) and the Bronx I’ll definitely want to peak into now to see if they have any of these curious and promising varieties (I’m most interested in what I’m finding in Volume III, followed by Volume II).
So I’m passing on the knowledge. Hope you find this as useful as I do. We need to plant more trees in Afrika – trees like the ones they’re talking about in Lost Crops of Africa. We gotta get extremely serious about land and return as Afrikans living outside the continent. There is absolutely TOO MUCH OPPORTUNITY in all spheres, too much we need to do to revive Afrika, and too little time in our brief-ass human lives.
Let’s study the trees, take a deep breath of the fresh air, pause for the cause in the soaring Sun, and get to work in the soil of our motherland, folks! Where the black botanists and agronomists at?
Tropical agroforestry rocks!
Towards a sustainable Afrikan agricultural revolution and massive reforestation!
Towards the further greening and fruiting of Afrika!
Uhuru!
Enter the Durian
Yesterday I had durian for only the second or third time in my life – the first time being in 2003 or 2004 during a college spring break hanging out with my uncle in Toronto, Ontario. He’s the one who predicted I would become a raw vegan/ fruitarian long before I had even known much about that whole practice, though I had been a conventional vegan for four or five years by then, just emerging out of my teenage years at that time.
I’d been thinking about it for a while. Many weeks ago a friend of mine and myself had a little chow at Bonobos, the raw vegan hole in the wall on 23rd St and Madison Ave right in front of Madison Square Park. My friend sampled their durian “ice cream” and then I followed. Not being into “raw gourmet” much at all anymore, I nonetheless entertain daydreams of eating tropical fruits like durian and such all the time, and most days I realize those dreams by at least eating bushels of bananas and oranges each day and a daily avocado, and some papaya and/or mango at least a couple times a week. I eat many apples as well, grown mostly in Washington State on the opposite side of this continent. Greens I eat – “spring mixes” of various lettuces, chard, cabbage, etc., as well as celery – are often grown in Mexico or California; I eat raw okra too, imported sometimes from the US South, though more often from Asia or Afrika. I’m not a great locovore as you can surmise. But nothing much is growing in NJ or NY during these arctic dog days of winter. In any case, back to the story: I fantasize about, and eat, foods mostly “exotic” to where I live. (Hence my recent refrain – time for me to get very, very serious about resettling in Afrika and the tropics more broadly and as soon as I’m ready.)
The durian was bound to enter my realm at some point. Hearing raves about it from raw vegans and fruitarians on these here internets, and following initial exposure by my uncle some years back as a younger man, it was only a matter of time and commitment before I would start getting my hands on those things more often.
So after my “soft tissue conditions” class yesterday, I headed into Chinatown before making my way back home. I had some leads that good durian were to be scored on the corner of Grand St and Bowery. Not finding some there, I headed towards Mott St and walked down a bit, and sure enough the spiky punks were staring at me outside in the frigid air like gunslingers challenging me to a duel. Well, it wasn’t that dramatic.
Anyway I bought two of them, at $1.25 a pound (but each one is pretty damn heavy). I threw them in my army duffel bag and headed back towards Herald Square on the Canal St N, from where I entered Penn Station to get on home.
To make a long story short, the verdict is that durians are now among my favorite fruits. And these were just the imported-frozen-from-Thailand variety! How much more succulent, fleshy, filling, sweet, creamy, and all manner of nice could a fresh-from-the-grove one be? Seriously, these fruits are fiercely tasty – durian is no joke, son! Reading about durian culture and activity in Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, I understand that there are varieties that are very expensive, that won’t or can’t even necessarily be exported far off to the wilds of Manhattan and environs, and that there are many flavors and so I’m left thinking this “durian mornthong” I picked up near the corner of Mott and Grand is just a starter brand.
I am quite pleased indeed to have initiated myself into this fruitarian culture of durian connoisseurs. These spiky guys aren’t that cheap. I don’t imagine I’ll be after them all the time. But so long as I’m here in NYC where I can have them from time to time, why not do just that?
Further down the line, when I’m setting up land for an agroforestry preserve in the Congo Basin or Niger Delta wet equatorial rainforest regions, I might plant some durian, jackfruit, and mangosteen trees, varieties from identical climes and soil conditions in Borneo, for my Afrikan fruitarian arboretum. Of course the many rare and advanced fruits with supreme phytonutrient content growing deep in places like the Ituri and Kivu rainforests, as yet only at best lightly explored with intent to find “superfoods”/ “superfruits” and medicines because of all the wars there, may occupy too much of my time to get around to bringing strong seedlings from Borneo to Central Afrika. South America and Southeast Asia surely aren’t the only places growing these “superfoods,” y’all self-styled raw-vegan superfood gurus! Where are the Afrikan varieties? If not y’all, at least I’ll be on the lookout for them. There are fruits I couldn’t even name right now that I had in Ghana, and many others yet to be explored and, well, popularized.
Anyway, the future is bright and tasty one way or the other. Fruitarianism in Afrika! Wet tropical regions grow the tastiest things for humans to munch on and grow big and strong with. Wet tropical regions are where I intend on spending most of my life once I’m done with my obligations and studies in Gotham.
A note about the scent of the durian: it is not a “bad” smell at all! I don’t know how folks came up with that one. It must surely have been sensory-deprived Europeans overwhelmed by the power of such a botanical powerhouse as the durian. It’s a sweet and succulent smell that tells you, once it hits you, that durian-related activities are occurring nearby. Yes, the scent is strong, getting through my army duffel bag from behind newspaper and plastic wrapping, and on a 20 degree day! But those who think it smells bad must be alarmist, sense-inhibited, orientalist tourists and passersby to the durian world. Because durian absolutely has a signature smell, and it is GOOD!
I’ll be eating some durian in my afternoon meals tomorrow and perhaps even Saturday if my stash lasts that long. Long live fruitarian adventurism!
To Make Vegan=Fitness
Part of the curriculum of things I’m studying these days is exercise physiology. So how is physical fitness defined in my notes? It is
“the ability to carry out daily tasks with vigor and alertness, without undue fatigue, and with ample energy to enjoy leisure-time pursuits and meet unforeseen emergencies. It is the ability to withstand stress and persevere under difficult circumstances in which an unfit person would quit. Implied in this is more than a lack of illness; it is a positive quality that everyone has to some degree. Physical fitness is minimal in the severely ill and maximal in the highly trained athlete. Persons who maintain high levels of fitness may have increased longevity as compared to those who are sedentary. In addition, the quality of life is enhanced in those who are fit.
Taber’s Cyclopedic Medical Dictionary, 19th Edition
The above definition of physical fitness suggests the centrality it should have as an achievement and practice for those who wish to live life to the fullest, which should include all Afrikans. The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, or social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmary.” Again, this means optimal function as human beings, not merely the adequate or the tolerable. In health, we have no serious, scientific, honest, or honorable reason to strive for other than our most optimal condition, because due to the brevity of a human life, it only makes sense to do those things that both lengthen lifespan and improve life’s quality.
Vegans, in my opinion, should never stop in their quest for health at the composition of their diet only. Vegan should also come to mean athlete, or physically fit person who does not exploit animals. Check out how widespread sedentary life is: did you know that here in America there is now a pathology for it, called “Sedentary Death Syndrome (SeDS)“? Because the biggest killer in this country, coronary heart disease, is largely attributable to sitting on our ass too much, it is argued that SeDS is actually the number two cause of premature death here, after tobacco. Now dig these statistics:
- Only about 15% of adults in America engage in vigorous physical activity during leisure time, 3 times a week for at least 30 minutes
- More than 60% do not engage in physical activity regularly
- 25% lead sedentary lives
- Physical inactivity occurs more among women than men, Afrikans and Latin@s than whites, older than younger adults, and less-affluent than wealthier persons
- SeDS will cause 2.5 million Americans to die prematurely in the next decade.
- “Racial differences in food and exercise habits and cultural attitudes towards body weight help to explain the greater prevalence of obesity among black women (nearly 50%) than white women (33%).”
-Katch, Katch and McArdle: Exercise Physiology, Sixth Edition (2007)
In regards to SeDS, Afrikans suffer the most. As stated above, half of Afrikan women in the United Snakes are now obese. This means so many sisters, mothers, aunts, daughters, and so on are at grave risk for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, stroke, cancers, and the like. Brothers, fathers, uncles, sons, and so on, suffer from various cancers and diseases at exponential rates, also related to, among other things, sedentary life.
All this said, the benefits of exercise are numerous! I’m talking about serious exercise – and there is little excuse for humans to live in any other way but that they give themselves at least an hour or two a day to exercise vigorously, in manners touching upon all the main arenas of fitness – cardiovascular, muscular strength, and flexibility. I won’t rattle the benefits off here as they are quite obvious, but should not only be enjoyed by the world’s elite athletes. All Afrikans, especially those that combine a highly active life with a seriously vegan one, should be able to enjoy increased muscle strength, bone density, cardiovascular endurance and heart strength, reduced heart rate during work and rest, improved stress tolerance and psychological well-being, low body fat content especially of non-essential, useless and dangerous fat, proven substantially increased longevity, and proven increased quality of life.
What’s stopping Afrikans from reaching and exceeding high, wise ages, such as now enjoyed by people in Japan or Sweden? Underdevelopment is indeed severely and brutally holding back access to health care in many of our communities around the world. But those of us without further excuses, especially those who are overeating for no good reason and not getting off their asses, including vegans, very much need to step up their game.
The rhetoric of the vegan word needs desperately to be infused with simultaneous pronouncements of the need to exercise well. The vegan and raw vegan athletes – and many of them are black! – are out there all over, so there is no lack of inspiration, nor any grounds for excuse. Again, I reiterate my appeal to discipline, the highest and hardest brand of it, which Afrikans will need to overcome oppression including self-destructive tendencies, of which, yes, sedentary living is very much one of them.
Sedentary living is a sad, indeed a cowardly resignation to fate, to the seemingly overwhelming circumstances, to oppression without taking initiative to change the picture. How can oppressed people afford to sit their ass down? They are the most in need to stand and run and get strong!
Imagine lots of strong, hardy, fit, lean, healthy, fierce, beautiful, athletic Afrikan vegans and raw vegans outliving and outfighting and outshining their enemies, including the enemies within – the typical African dictator, with his usual fat ass. Look at the average corrupt corpulent African head of state – he or she is a miserable ugly fatass! Do you all want to be like them, look like them, big overfed piles of feces not worth the food and expensive banquets lavished on them on the international neocolonial circuit? Do you want to be fat like the fascists, or fit like the fighters and the fire starters?
Revolutionaries have to be beyond physically fit. Fitness needs to be taken very seriously by Afrikans who say they are also vegan or raw vegan/ fruitarian. Fitness is a science and can and should be applied to any and all of us. We need to be doing something that makes us sweat at least thirty minutes a day. If not then at least thirty minutes every other day. We should try to push ourselves – when a given level of exertion no longer stresses us significantly, we must raise the level of the challenge – add more weight, add more miles, push further in the stretches, add more variety. Exercise is for getting stronger.
There shouldn’t be no flabby vegans, shouldn’t be no fruitarian dough-boys or girls. We should cease to separate in our minds vegan and physical fitness. Afrikan forces that practice veganity and athleticism can potentially be among the most revolutionary and sophisticated cats walking the Earth.
As for me, I know I want to do more work in the cardio department. My resting heart rate is only slightly below the average, and I’d like to bring it far below the average and get into marathon-running territory, for real. I’m putting this out there so I am forced to challenge myself. I’ve always relied on my own body for transportation – walking, biking. When I was in college I did much much more jogging than I now do, and was on the track team for a minute way back in high school. And I’ve been doing Kung Fu twice per week for over a year and a half now. I also do plenty of calisthenics. But all that hasn’t translated into an extremely high level of cardiovascular endurance – territory I’d like to march into in order to near the level of the great Afrikan dieties of marathon running. Why not? Cardiovascular health is perhaps the most important in the realm of increased longevity, oxygen utilization, disease prevention, and so on. The elite athlete should be joined by the masses in enjoying the pinnacle of heart health. I’m going for it. Why don’t y’all consider similar moves?
Exercise has to be targeted and specific. Want to work the cardiovascular system and strengthen the heart? Do extremely vigorous, sweaty, hard, rhythmic, sustained activities that involve a lot of running, cycling, rowing, or other such movements. Want to increase muscle strength? Do plenty of weight-bearing activities wherein you periodically, incrementally increase the amount of weight you lift and move. Want to get more limber and flexible? Go for the yoga or yoga-like exercises, and make sure that during each session, you push yourself further than you did last time. And make exercise comprehensive – so your sessions and sports make you stronger, more flexible, and increase endurance.
Physical fitness, including at the highest levels we should attain, is only a good thing. ONLY A GOOD THING. AND AN ESPECIALLY EXCELLENT THING FOR AFRIKAN VEGANS. We need to be as strong and healthy as possible in order to struggle long and successfully for our people.
I am increasingly convinced that the discourse of veganism is empty without the language of physical fitness.
Let athleticism, sport, and regular hardcore SWEATY exercise grace our black vegan lives, so we reap the benefits and roll through the world beautiful, strong, healthy, and ready to pull down the walls of oppression and disease with our bare hands!
Towards a veganism of physical fitness and sport!
Towards the Afrikan vegan fitness revolution!
It’s never too soon or too late to start making the right moves.
UHURU!
A Straight-Edge Screed
An advanced revolutionary raw vegan sista recently wrote this outstanding polemic against alcohol and the destruction it beholds for our people. I had the following to say in response:
This is 1000% heroically true, besides being academically sound and passionately convincing. Thus the most dedicated raw vegan/ fruitarian, which I think can be a way of life approaching the highest form of humanism if done conscientiously and diligently, HAS TO BE COMPLETELY STRAIGHT-EDGE:
Alcohol free
Drug Free
Pharmaceutical Free
Meat Free
Sloth and Laziness Free
Consumerism Free
Materialism Free
Addiction Free
Greed Free
Ignorance Free
Mindlessness Free
Egoism Free
Meaningless Fornication Free
Intolerance Free
And in my hard-honest opinion, Religion Free, Dogma Free, Fatalism Free, etc.Fruitarianism has to be combined with a will for serious discipline no matter the social consequences. I occasionally associate with those who drink, even smoke marijuana, but I never participate in the usage of intoxicants, to the extent that after years of my friends seeing this, it has had a moderating effect on them; I have even been quoted by a friend as saying “not a drop” when offered alcohol once, but so be it. I agree that the revolution in human society, the Afrikan revolution, the redemption of indigenous peoples and oppressed peoples in the third world, cannot proceed without the removal of alcohol and other intoxicants from our diets.
I have seen videos on Al-Jazeera of the obscene destruction of Australian aboriginal societies by the drink. It is well known that indigenous peoples here in Turtle Island, forcibly circumscribed to concentration camps euphemistically called “reservations,” live terribly short lives and suffer from alcoholism and resultant liver failure en masse. Afrikan and Latin@ communities in the urban quarters of the United Snakes are similarly dispossessed by the infiltration and invasion of alcohol, drugs, and addiction into our lives.
It’s no mystery why among the first concerns of the Cuban Revolution and that of Vietnam were getting rid of brothels in the former and opium dens in the latter. The drug economy and the war on drugs, from the jungles of Columbia and Peru, or the poppy fields of Afghanistan, to the ghettos of America, is a war on oppressed and colonized peoples, based on the perverse addictions of the colonizers and the induced addictions on the colonized as a false escape from the malaise and affliction of colonization itself.
It is so true that alcohol’s appeal and importance is based on capitalism and perpetuated by the marketers which create all manner of psychological enticements for people to drink. Appealing to the low self-esteem of folks, they plaster Budweiser posters all over the subways in my city (NYC) so folks will think drinking that poison will make them super-sexy and glamorous. It is beyond odious to attack human frailties, especially the vulnerabilities of the oppressed, in such a manner as to get people to pay for poison, to put a cash investment into their own demise! Thus is the case for every other useless commodity offered to us in the world of Times Square, the world of Madison Ave and Hollywood, which drives this fragile and false and destructive and immensely wasteful consumer economy on which America’s financial life is now based. What an unsustainable and violent and bleak future awaits us, is indeed enfolding now and has been for ages, if human civilization is permitted to proceed along these anti-human, sicker than sick, empty lines, the road to the proverbial wasteland. Human liberation must jettison such addiction and the very capacity in us to allow ourselves to be taken for a ride by these marketing professionals who are the henchmen of capitalism and the arch-enemies of human wholeness and human freedom. What Karl Marx described as “commodity fetishism” is very real indeed and it has to be demolished. Doing away with alcohol is just the beginning but would make for a very profound one in the content of the message of such a rejection.
The mystery of tagging myself “Precision Afrikan” is actually an homage to the vision of precision straight-edge in the punk movement, which is very strongly opposed to drink, drugs, mindlessness, perversion, irresponsibility and excess in relationships, and so on. I think that a vision of the most serious discipline is the foundation of a model for human liberation that can sustainably meet the needs of communities, pursue pro-human instead of anti-human interests, and protect and humble itself to the planet Earth.
Massive thanks to you for this vigorous opus against alcohol. I am known to be a hardliner, a zealot. But I’m not the only one. Uhuru Sista! The oppressed of Afrika, Asia and Latin America will win (with less beer and more brawn)!
Discipline is greatness. Let the white man drown in his liquor poison if he wants, but he can keep it to himself. Let’s stay disease free, including from the disease of alcholism or even the mere normalization of the state of intoxication, dizziness, and resultant blindness to truth, logic, and will to struggle and persevere.
STRAIGHT EDGE ALL THE WAY. VEGANISM=SOBRIETY-ONLY LIVING. CLARITY TO THE SOBER!!! SOBRIETY TO THOSE WITH EYES TO SEE THE TRUTH BEHIND THE VEIL OF THE MATRIX!
What do you think? Is my stance too brash, inflexible, impractical, or righteous? Well, look at it this way: we only live once, exactly. Not being a religious person and thus not interested in afterlife talk or any other comforting metaphysical fantasies, I must assert with confidence that none of us are getting out of this place alive. With this limited-time appointment with the universe, why poison the temple? For that is what our bodies are, luminous temples, rare to achieve, altars of our every ounce and iota of experience, knowledge and sensation. We didn’t ask to be born, yet here we are, breathing, blinking, sitting, thinking, reading this blog post.
That said, I find it hard to justify intoxication of any kind, to put us out of touch with reality and reduce our quality of this already fleeting life. Drink and drugs poison the brain, weaken the body, whither our resolve, and demolish our courage. Some say that, for an atheist, I can sound far more religious than those who fear a god, with this sort of talk. But I say that the only sort of life in which we can maximize self-actualization of all of the goals we wish to realize, given the existential plight we are faced with in taking full responsibility for what happens to us in this open, naked universe, is the sort of life characterized by the highest levels of discipline and sobriety. A discerning person needs the clearest eyes. The eyesight of the drunk is dull. Debauchery – an archaic word, perhaps loaded with moralizing or religious connotations – is a no-no for the most serious Afrikans, no matter what they eat. Afrikan vegans need to be hardcore in their disposition, because vegan is not just about what we put in our bodies, but also about the content of our resolve, our politic, our very demeanor. It is a life stance, especially significant to take up as peoples who endure national oppression and underdevelopment almost everywhere we are.
A woman in Ghana, an economics professor returning to Afrika after generations removed in Jamaica and then London, told me that one of the biggest problems amongst Afrikans was a lack of discipline. Discipline is the opposite of corruption, is it not? I’m not an angel. I’m not an ascetic or a monk. I’m not beyond criticism. I’m a complete nobody. And I don’t write this to front like I’m better than anyone. But I don’t care for mediocrity in my life and so try my level best to live a clean life. Clean living is the way to avoid scandals and live long and productive lives.
All in all, when it comes to drink, drugs or smoking, don’t do it. It’s not worth it. It is to me the opposite of veganism, indeed the opposite of human liberation and the humanizing trend in civilization, to choose intoxication and poison over sobriety and health. And to support economies based on exploitation through intoxication, and the related narcotics trade and war on drugs which destroy life for third-world peoples, just because we want to “party,” is hypocritical, cynical, and perverse. Please folks, let us no longer be softies and liberals about these points. Dump the drink and drugs FOREVER.
Doubts about Being in the North
I am increasingly of the thought for some reason that I ought to head south, urgently. Obviously I expect down the line to be living in Afrika, and possibly Latin America too, for at least a few years, probably when I’m in my thirties. For now I am a student in NYC, where I’ve mostly been all my life except for half a year in West Afrika, including a semester at U of Ghana and time in my ancestral, embattled, yet beautiful homeland, the Niger Delta. My line of thought of late has been one of general concern that winters truly aren’t for me. And if I could I wouldn’t deal with one more of them in this life.
Interestingly, I don’t do bad in cold weather per se. I actually do much better than most people of any skin color. And I’m a very lean and very very dark skinned Afrikan brotha. Dark like any of the most deeply West Afrikan indigenes which is what I am, 100% Kalabari-Ijaw, supremely black and natively equatorial. I like humid weather which I get here in the region of NY Harbor, a characteristic which is climatically very similar to southern and especially southeast (AKA “south-south”) Nigeria. If not for massive urbanization these climes support a historic dense woodland, a tiny fragment of which is preserved in a little forest down my Jersey street. Even Manhattan (Manahatta) was once all woods, not just parts of Central or Inwood Hill Parks. So I am happy with regular precipitation throughout the year.
But I wonder if I’m built for this latitude. Obviously I can withstand it, 40 degrees and change North of the equator, that wonderful band near where all dark skinned peoples evolved to deflect excess UV radiation and enjoy proper sunlight levels to stimulate vitamin D production and stay functional and beautiful. But as I move into an even more intense and dedicated level of raw veganism/ fruitarianism (I’ve been 100% vegan since summer 1999, 80% raw since Oct. ‘07, and 100% raw for a year now, and at this point I’m ditching nuts, strictly eating fresh organic fruits and green vegetables only, and I take no supplements whatsoever for anything) I worry of not getting enough sun in these NYC winters.
When I went to Ghana in ‘07, I completely skipped winter for that year. I came back to NYC in the summer and went almost a year with mild to hot weather and plenty of sunshine. I now realize that I REALLY LIKED THAT. My body liked that move supremely. I was outdoors all the time in Ghana, even more than some Ghanaians who thought I was a little strange for insistently walking everywhere, even under equatorial noon sun. That equatorial hot 90 degree F noon sun, I increasingly am accepting truly, must be correct for me.
Last winter I didn’t think about this issue that much, but now it’s really on my mind. Almost half of Afrikans living in North America are Vitamin D deficient. Vitamin D is responsible for proper bone growth, immune function, metabolism, mineral utilization, and so much more. A recent resurgence in rickets in the US struck Afrikan children almost exclusively. The colon cancer epidemic among Afrikan males in the US is at least partly related to vitamin D deficiency. And I know that, although I do not and never have suffered from seasonal affective disorder, my direct experience of almost a year of summer was awesome – on a physiological level and possibly even on a psychological one.
Our melanin across indigenous human populations has adapted over tens of millennia to the amount of UV radiation exposure based on distance from the equator, where all the most deeply pigmented populations are indigenous. I am beginning to intuit in my innermost consciousness that the truth is, I am up to 40 degrees from home. I am really thinking about moving to the tropics ASAP – Florida? – at least until I’m ready, after completing certain studies and preparing myself economically, to dwell south of the border long-term. In the meantime, I am also putting myself on the lookout for serious UV sunlamps/ full spectrum vitamin D-stimulating lamps which, at their expense, will be costly for this young student of modest means.
Ideally though, I ought to be spending mad time outdoors in the tropics in the sun exercising and sunbathing and doing other activities on a daily basis, as nature intended, away from the trappings of these computers and other pulls of indoor life, including winters and cold springs and autumns which I am not physiologically indigenous to. I am way too black for winters. And NYC’s winters are admittedly rather mild compared to the icy lunacy Afrikans go through in Chicago or Detroit.
But I still would prefer at least to be on the tropical edge of North America, if not right up in an equator-straddling country. I hear really ridiculous things about Florida though. For intellectual and sensitive people in North America, it seems the Northeast, from Washington to Boston, is king. And NYC is right in the heart of that. And the history of amazing Afrikan struggles and accomplishments in this part of the continent is astounding. And Afrikan communities here are of immense potential to be organized in a revolutionary fashion (my MA thesis was on New York as a Pan-Afrikan City, after all).
Yet I think I will easily leave this behind once I am ready. I know I almost surely never want to visit Europe again – even summers are barely mild in some spots there. Same goes increasingly for the northern latitudes of the United Snakes. I want that hot sun! Humid, sticky, boiling, searing! It’s good for my jet-black skin and my brown eyes. And to get out of the urban jungle would be a much appreciated bonus, as important perhaps for psychological well-being as going where it’s sunnier.
To think that, where I currently live, amidst a large South Asian/ desi population, all these folks are now in this northern latitude – it’s no wonder that diabetes and cancer are exploding among Asian populations in NYC – it’s not just the adoption of sad American diets and sedentary lifestyles – perhaps it’s distance from the climes of tropical India too!
Meanwhile, let me find an expensive full-spectrum UVB sunlamp to prop up in my corner. But one day soon, I will be ready to settle down in the tropics for good and live seriously naturally – access to big tropical fruits all the time, touching the land and planting trees, outdoors ALL THE TIME, getting hot and staying black.
Don’t get me wrong – one may leave the NJ/NYC, but the NJ/NYC never leaves the person. If/ when I do leave there will be many places and faces missed, like my Kung Fu temple and family, my elders from Newark to Brooklyn, my young comrades across the urban jungle. Gotham forever!
These have been some thoughts about the Sun. To the mighty mighty Sun I bow.
Food Security and the Last Billion
Yesterday, Jacques Diouf, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Administration, complained that this year, due to the global food crisis, an additional 40 million humans are joining the ranks of the chronically food insecure around the world, and the total for the seriously at-risk is now at least about 963 million. About 1 billion around the world are now at dire imminent risk of starvation and debilitating malnutrition. Needless to say, Afrikan countries, most run by anti-Afrikan, indeed anti-human kleptocrats and neo-colonialists, serve up some of the highest numbers. Likewise for India, China, and elsewhere in the third world.
Perhaps in the wake of the urgency with which Mr. Diouf testified to the UN’s food agency, now may be a time to muse about the implications of our individual eating habits on global ecology and food security. In what I’ve learned of agronomy, it seems vegetarianism is the most ecologically sustainable diet that human populations can pursue. Even in rural settings, runaway grazing eats up land and depletes its moisture carrying capacity far more quickly than even conventional mono-crop rearing. Eating fruits and using herbs from the forest – minimally invasive in practice – seems like the total opposite of grazing, factory farming, and other practices that have led to extreme deforestation and desertification, including the misguided steps being taken in Indonesia, Malaysia, and elsewhere to convert old-growth broad-leaf rainforest into vast groves of palm oil for bio-fuel export.
I think the Afrikan that moves away from meat is making a profound move. Not only is it in pursuit of the primal health colored folks will need to fight imperialism and neo-colonialism and establish a united Afrika serving and enriching the lives of Afrikans, but it is also an engagement with the carrying capacity of the Earth, and an acknowledgment of the delicate balance needed for the planet to replenish itself. It suggests we are willing to share and allow what the Earth can bountifully give to us, so long as we don’t take in excess and destroy the ecosystem in the process. It is well documented how much more water, land, food and fuel inputs are needed for even modest styles of animal husbandry to feed one individual, compared to inputs needed to feed one person through plant-based means only. At one extreme is factory farming and agribusiness that rapes the Earth without recourse to the least iota of moral restraint, and on the other, I think, the Afrikan moving towards serious raw veganism.
It is a move for the zealots, most will probably conclude. So be it. It tastes good and at least we know we are on Earth’s side, custodians of ecological sustainability and food security, because of our dietary choices. Already there is enough food to feed the world’s population, just that it’s concentrated in granaries in the West, and its potential to be utilized sensibly in Afrika is thwarted by cash-crop export economies, political instability, pollution, war, runaway urbanization, land privatization and land misuse. How much more could the ability to feed the world be expanded if less of us opt for the most wasteful land-use patterns by going for the meat, especially the factory-farmed meat?
Not that the millennium development goals are worth a damn beyond their pretty letters on conscience-appeasing paper, but if we want to take Mr. Diouff’s grievances seriously and consider how we can contribute to food security, even if rather indirectly, perhaps more of us should consider putting the meat down. This is just a microscopic baby-step into being a bit more mindful of the planet and all its resources we usurp to feed us, given the choices we make, even in diet. We haven’t even begun to discuss the fundamental problem of parasitic capitalism and its imposition of hunger, ignorance, land theft, and wretchedness on the “developing” world.
Don’t you get tired of it being the 21st century and black folks (and Asians, Indigenous folk and Latin Americans too) are still starving, still part of the last billion?
Hands-on Avocados
Rushing around Gotham in the mornings, between classes and martial arts sessions and trying to be home for a minute to do less than something, I find a produce vendor on the street – and this man, somewhere on 7th Ave in the 20s, sells the ripest avocados I can find. $1.50 a piece. I pick one up. I buy a few bananas, an apple, a Haitian mango. And a couple big navel oranges. Then I turn up the corner back to school. All the bananas are already eaten by the end of the two minute walk from the vendor to the door of the building.
Yellow peels in hand, I notice our slow-ass elevator lingering up at the seventh floor, so I just walk up to the fifth floor where I can eat and get dirty in that otherwise clinically sterilized environment. Impatient with the slow mechanical lift I rely on my own legs for the flight. I make it up to the fifth floor in no time, and barely winded.
I duck into the men’s room to wash my goodies really quickly. Others look at me curiously, but I don’t care. I haven’t eaten yet, and this morning I was working on Spring Leg No. 4 at the WuSu temple, and I only have twenty minutes during anatomy lecture break to eat all this shit. And I want that avocado the most. I need that filling fatty green fleshy goodness to lubricate and fuel my systems.
All I have is a bunch of napkins from the bathroom. How will I access the cream in this avocado with no silverware or bowl?
I look around. I retreat back into my own mind and see if there are any ingenuity neurons firing around in there. Ahah! I notice one in there, telling me to just use the tools I was born with…
So I start from the narrow top of the pear-shaped avocado with my thumb. I peel off the skin, letting my right thumb part the alligator-like covering from the fresh green flesh – and I get it all off in one piece in about 45 seconds or less.
Others be observing. I’m happy. I got green stuff on my hands and I’m biting into the creamy dreamy avocado flesh. Having consumed the meat, I suck the pit, lick some flesh off my fingers, and move on to the next fruity victim. I’m getting a good breakfast here, y’all.Whatchu care ’bout this young strange Afrikan peeling the skin off avocados like he was born with them in his lap, while y’all is eating unhealthy biscuits and sheeit?
And I eats my Haitian mango like an apple, consuming the skin and everything, and yellow mango juice going everywhere. I can get down with my fruits, and ain’t nothing anyone can do about it, son.
I thank my now advanced avocado-peeling skills to a week of practice. Everyone should try peeling avocados like that, and then just bite into the green fatty goodness like they were meant to.
Word up to my fruits and my wild raw vegans and fruitarians! We savor our healthy fruits like meatheads savor cruel artery-clogging steaks.
Afrikans – GREEN! Afrikans Must Become Zealous Environmentalists
To expand upon my latest entry at my political blog Project New Palmares, I’ve decided to stress the importance of Afrikan peoples to take global ecological and environmental issues very seriously. Especially in this the month of April, the month of Earth Day. Will we as Afrikans continue to allow others to speak for us when it comes to the fact that climate change will harm the Afrikan continent the most, or regarding the health and ecological disasters faced by Afrikan communities in the ghettos of America and elsewhere due to environmental racism?
Climate change will further expand the Sahara and Kalahari deserts on the one hand, while increasing flooding and torrential rain all across tropical Afrika and coastal Afrika on the other. Environmental racism means France and other European and Northern countries use Afrika as a dumping ground for nuclear and toxic waste, as happened in Cote D’Ivoire in 2006. The situation is similar in the Harlems and Newarks of the world, where asthma rates soar due to the location of waste processing sites, bus depots, and other unhealthy facilities in or near Afrikan communities in America, not in or around white and wealthy communities.
Pictured above is Wangari Maathai, leader of the Green Belt Movement of Kenya. In a nutshell, her legacy to Kenya and all of the developing world, as an environmentalist and political activist, has been the planting of 30 million trees to prevent soil erosion and improve rural woman’s lives by providing shelter, firewood, and access to clean water, among other things. The first Afrikan woman to become a Nobel laureate, I, as an Afrikan who deeply respects the virtues of planting trees and protecting the land, the watershed, the soil, and the whole ecosystem, hereby honor Queen Mother Maathai as a fantastic example for other Afrikans who should and must come to take the state of the natural environment extremely seriously.
I bring up the example of Wangari Maathai – the woman of the month here at Afrikan Raw Vegan Talk – to assert that Afrikans can address our ecological challenges autonomously and in simple ways. Planting trees is one of the most effective and beautiful methods. In Niger, the planting of trees is reversing desertification, as the linked 2007 NY Times article demonstrates. And these fruit trees also provide extra produce while fixing nitrogen in the soil for it to grow other crops. And as I have discussed in other blog entries here at Afrikan Raw Vegan Talk, the example of Yebua Danso at the Ahyiresu Naturalist Centre in Aburi, Ghana shows how effective and beautiful agroforestry can be – in which, to grow food, trees are actually planted, rather than chopped down in the old habit of “clearing the land.”
Afrika and countries and communities predominated by Afrikans – our abodes are not immune to calls to consume less and waste less. Living in Afrika I saw some of the worst pollution on Earth – creations mainly of our own habits and a lack of education on proper, sanitary waste disposal. In urban Ghana or Nigeria or elsewhere, one will notice plastic bags everywhere, clogging up the gutters, floating around even in the woods, all over the grimier areas of the open markets. By just eliminating plastic bag usage altogether and using reusable canvas or other sorts of bags and baskets, how much cleaner would our cities and towns and villages in Afrika and in the Afrikan world be? Even Bed-Stuy and Newark are polluted with this sort of waste and litter.
Solutions and ways to live by example as an ecologically responsible Afrikan – these are not to be found or expounded upon by white hippies on our behalf. We have to own this problem as much as, if not more than, anyone else in the world, no matter who created it. We often do little things and fall into socially engineered habits which reinforce the ecological crisis we all face, especially we Afrikans. So I hope others also contribute to simple practices and organizing tools for Afrikans to respond effectively to the environmental, ecological, and resultant economic crises of the day, which will also boost our food security, land arability, and water availability and quality.
What can we do? Some things that immediately come to my mind:
- Drive less; rely on ones own body and on public transport more for transportation
- Do not use disposable plastic bags; rather use reusable bags or baskets
- Use reusable bottles for water
- Go Vegan! Meat production is one of the greatest usurpers of natural resources, produces immense waste, is viciously cruel, and pastoralism in Afrika is fast expanding the Sahara as browsers chew away the greenery acre by acre
- Reuse ones goods as much as possible
- Consume less, shop less for non-essential things
- Eat more produce and natural foods, rather than heavily processed and therefore packaged foods whose containers cannot be discarded to decompose or compost organically
- Make the most of ones locale in terms of recreation, travel, etc. so as to not tax the environment too often by the heavy pollution spewed by current commercial air traffic
- Eat more locally-grown foods so as to reduce the carbon footprint of food transport over long distances
- Take the lights and other appliances off when not using them
- Live an overall more modest and simple life
Any other suggestions? Feel free to contribute. I only want the world to be cleaner and more sustainable, especially wherever Afrikans are found. And Afrikans MUST take the lead and be fully responsible in that effort. In Afrika, there too, people must consume, waste, pollute, and damage the land LESS. Development, as Frantz Fanon said, must not be into a new Europe or America. We Afrikans can and will make Afrika and Afrikan communities ecologically sustainable paradises, for ourselves to enjoy and raise the next generation within.
No Dollar Value on the Black Lands
I saw this post on Treehugger.com about a pitch by the Cameroonian government to lease some of the pristine rain forest (Ngoyla-Mintom) of that country to the highest bidder, whether conservationists or loggers. No one has yet taken up this seven-year-old offer, and the treehugger.com mentality is to encourage some wealthy Western conservationist to rent the forest before it’s too late and the loggers come through.
My view is that there should be no leasing of such precious lands in the first place. Why must the concept of property and title infect everything and every society? It is a toxic and vomitacious mentality, to sell everything of value to whomever in the world can pay. A serious Afrikan government wouldn’t even think to sell such precious forests to any international bidder. The fleecing of Afrika must stop somewhere. Our deepest natural heritage is our tropical rain forest, whose herbal and medicinal secrets, sanctity, animal habitat, and limitless beauty should bear no price tag, and shouldn’t even suggest to some men the idea of selling it.
Profit motive must die. Capitalism must die. Private property must die. Individualism and greed must die. The idea of selling out the habitats of the planet must die.
I don’t want to see the Ngoyla-Mintom rain forest sold to anybody, conservationists or loggers, poachers or game haciendas. The Ngoyla-Mintom rain forest belongs to all living beings, and all Afrikans. The trees and animals and flora and fauna have a dignity all their own that we as humans must be able to respect. The natural gifts of the rain forest, in herbs, fruits, medicinal botanicals, and so on, should be explored and received delicately and with immense gratitude.
As much as Afrika’s tropical rain forest ecosystems have been reduced and decimated over the past several decades, can’t we as Afrikans now finally see the fruit of such destructiveness and haphazard, unscrupulous sale of our own natural heritage to the looters of the world?
Ngoyla-Mintom, and all the other great tropical forests, mangroves, and other natural areas of the Congo-Basin and West Afrika, should be allowed their full dignity and spared from the capitalism and rapacity of men who would put up such land for sale, irrespective of the cost to land and the environment, indeed the entire global ecosystem of all Earthbound things.
Ngoyla-Mintom doesn’t need to be signed off to some white liberal conservationist from Liverpool or Berkeley. And she mustn’t be signed off to some logger from Calgary. She must simply be left in peace, her beauty and bounty to be shared modestly and graciously with human beings on her own terms.
Long live Ngoyla-Mintom and all unspoiled natural places all over our precious planet!!
To Be Agronomic…
This is actually the only real physical book I took back with me from the classes I took at University of Ghana and Ashesi University in the Spring semester of 2007. This book is Managing Agrodiversity the Traditional Way edited by Edwin A. Gyasi – the professor of the course I took with him, Sustainable Agriculture in the Developing World – and Gordana Kranjac-Berisavljevic, Essie T. Blay, and William Oduro. This course, a graduate-level class in the Geography department at Legon, was only attended by three students that whole semester – two of us from America (including a white woman from Northern California) and a young Ghanaian woman. It’s troubling, at best, that matters of agronomy, food security, and sustainable land management are not attended to by more students, particularly right in Afrika. But I consider it to have been a great honor to have studied the contemporary thought around sustainable development with Prof. Gyasi.
That is the man himself, during our field trip to Aburi Hills, where we visited Ebua Danso’s farm, the one I mention three posts down, where organic agroforestry impressed the hell out of me and blew my mind. And Ebua Danso wasn’t a master, world-renowned organic Afrikan farmer because of something he learned in a Western-oriented agronomy program somewhere. He was simply reproducing the beautiful and effective methods of traditional, local farmers in Ghana and elsewhere in West Afrika. I come back to all this subject matter and these past events in my life as I reflect on being a raw vegan/ fruitarian, an Afrikan, and a revolutionary concerned with food security, sustainable and plentiful food production and transport, and justice. Raw Vegans/ fruitarians like me eat a lot of tropical fruits and nuts. Bananas produced for the Bonita, Dole, and other big US corporations that maintain banana republics in Latin America – I eat them. I live in North Jersey, just outside NYC where I work and conduct all my business. And I enter the market and select all sorts of tropical fruits that were grown many thousands away, in the very tropics I am native to (and would probably rather be most of the time). If the Afrikan situation was correct, I would be there today with no looking back, doing work, being free, eating right off the land and most likely growing most of my own food. I know activists here in NYC that want to do something like establish organic herbal gardens in Cameroon which will grow medicinal herbs to be exported to the US. Yet the cost of such transport, and the relationship of cash-cropism – an economic practice I approach with some ire – might not be overturned in such an arrangement.
It is likely very impractical to imagine, at this point, a world which, in concern for the pollution and waste of intercontinental food trading – and realizing the injustice of cash-cropism imposed on the (tropical) third world by the (temperate) first world – moves to locovorism, where everyone is eating locally-grown whole foods. In New York state or New Jersey, what do we grow that I dig, apples? A lot of salad crops, yes? Many sorts of berries? Well, that is excellent and I eat the local varieties of those, and have visited apple farms in South Jersey, where I was impressed and felt my innate desire to be a rural, food-growing, simple-ass man, reinforced. But me, I eat a whole lot of tropical fruits. I eat citrus grown in Florida, avocados grown in California (as well as a lot of salad greens), pecans grown in Texas, as for this country. I eat avocados from Mexico, too, Ecuadorian bananas, Brazilian cashews, Chilean blueberries, Peruvian cacao beans, Canadian hemp-seed, Spanish unpasteurized almonds, even New Zealand Kiwis. And that’s certainly not all I eat. I feel concerned about being a non-locovore, a man eating from the global kitchen assembly line established long ago by European mercantilism and colonialism, the antecedents of contemporary cash-cropism. I don’t even eat fair-trade bananas (not even organic).
Does one like me just keep going this way? Agronomy is one of my many, many interests. I’m an urban-ass person, something I can’t apologize for because I was born into that, though I have friends who have moved on from that, and at least tried to dedicate more of their lives to agronomy and food security issues. In the meantime, I suppose we must be advocates for, aside from revolution, or in until its occurrence, clean-green-energy means of international shipping and sustainable locovorism to the extent that it is possible and practical. Surely those in cities and towns with land should say fuck a lawn, and grow food on their free land. Lawns are the invention of retards. Food security is undermined by lawns. Whenever I get a true place of my own, best believe I’ll be growing food on it like a hardcore farmer. But it could be the case, some day down the line, and within the context of repatriating, that I just move to the tropics, to Afrika, where everything grows, and grow durians, pineapples, avocados, mangos, oranges, cashews, cacao, and all that good shit, alongside other Afrikans, a beautiful sista, some little ones, sweating under the palms and sipping fresh juices by the sea (or in the valleys). Ah, to aspire to the good life…
