Anything that can be bought and sold is going to have a complicated story behind its existence, and certain commodities filled formative roles in important historical events. For instance, cash crops such as tobacco and cotton were a source of vast wealth for American plantation owners, produced by back-breaking labor under the barbaric conditions of the institution of chattel slavery. These crops and the products derived from them (and by extension, slavery) were what drove the economy and propelled America into a position of global power. Similarly, corn has an underappreciated but substantial stake in African history.
Due to its sheer utility as a dietary staple, the spread of maize cultivation to Africa’s west coast played a vital historical role both globally and locally. On top of altering the culinary landscape and population capacity of an entire continent, its use as a dietary staple provided vital fuel for the slave trade and potentially had a part in exacerbating its death toll. The historical reasons for maize’s agricultural presence in Africa can be likely attributed to European colonial interests. Some scholars hypothesize that it was initially introduced by the Portuguese. According to anthropologist Arturo Warman, “The linguistic trail, decidedly elusive, confirms such a scenario. Corn is still known as European grain or, more precisely, as Portuguese grain in several different languages spoken along the African coast” (Warman, 61). While it was originally endemic to and cultivated in ancient Mesoamerica, corn is thought to be introduced to Africa’s Atlantic coastal regions and the Cape Verde islands as recently as the sixteenth century CE. According to the writings of an anonymous pilot from Portugal, corn had already become “the chief food of the people” (McCann, 250) a few short decades following its initial arrival. Obviously, the perspective of a Portuguese sailor may not be strictly accurate to the actual material conditions of day-to-day life in historical West Africa, but this source provides some key context for understanding the rapid pace at which the crop became a continent-wide staple. Since then, its consumption has increased drastically, to the point that “in southern Africa, maize has become by far the most important staple food, accounting for over 50% of calories in local diets; in Malawi alone, maize occupies 90% of cultivated land and 54% of Malawians’ total calories” (McCann, 246). The sailor’s account makes sense when compared with contemporary corn consumption statistics.
The enduring popularity of maize can be ascribed to a few factors, not the least of which is its high density of carbohydrates, making it a filling food. More important than that, though, is the relative ease of mass-cultivation; an average corn crop will yield “more food per unit of land and labor than any other [grain]” (McCann, 249). Also noteworthy is its short growth cycle (Warman, 64), which means these larger yields can be harvested more frequently than other grains. Warman also notes that when compared to rice, corn also required fewer “technological transformations [than] rice demanded” (Warman, 64) and was more readily adaptable to the already-ubiquitous slash-and-burn agricultural customs present in Tropical Africa (Warman, 64). These factors explain the historical rise in maize cultivation across the continent. However, this widespread consumption is not without drawbacks.
Even though corn is an abundant source of carbohydrates, it lacks in nutritional content, being “low in useable protein, especially the vital amino acids lysine and tryptophan; its leucine content blocks absorption of niacin” (McCann, 249). Deficits of these nutrients can lead to a potentially lethal condition known as pellagra, the spread of which has been correlated with the increase in cultivation of corn and the dwindling presence of native staples it displaced in some regions of Africa (McCann, 264). These data demonstrate that while maize is a versatile and useful crop, a diet consisting of corn and corn alone is unsustainable in the long term. But this did not matter to those involved in the extremely profitable business of human trafficking in the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Warman makes the observation that corn was a vital asset to slavers, highlighting the sheer tonnage of it that was loaded onto the ships that ferried slaves across the Atlantic. Readily available data confirm that corn was the principal food used in the slave trade. Each slave ship needed a minimum of more than thirteen tons of corn for the transatlantic leg of the voyage, supposing a normal duration of forty-five days and an average cargo of 250 slaves with a daily ration of just over two pounds of corn per person (Warman, 63). This is an immense volume of corn, and the location of corn plantations along the west coast, where human cargo also happened to be exported from, was surely no coincidence. The cheap cost of procuring large amounts of corn, combined with the ready availability of it in these coastal regions made it the ideal crop to use as rations for human cargo. Warman goes on to iterate that the holds the slaves were kept in were described as tombs; the people being transported in these ships were subject to abject and unconscionable conditions, with in-transit fatalities being extremely common due to overcrowding in unhygienic spaces (Warman, 63). Their prescribed diet of corn was almost certainly a factor in the in-transit death toll. It’s easy to infer that the low-nutrition, corn-only diet, which would only occasionally supplemented with other low-cost foods such as beans, only contributed to these fatality rates; however, it likely wasn’t pellagra specifically in these cases, since pellagra generally takes a few years to develop. Instead, the low nutritional content of their rations can be understood as having a more immediate effect: a low-protein diet can lead to a weakened, compromised immune response and muscle atrophy, which combined with the cramped, unsanitary, and overcrowded conditions of a merchant vessel’s cargo hold would effectively turn these slavers’ ships into floating charnel houses. The corn essentially served as inexpensive feed for expendable merchandise; the bottom line took priority over safety, so corn’s lack of meaningful sustenance did not matter because it was cheap. Only most of the captives had to survive the journey for a profit to be made, and corn enabled that inhumane process to be completed at a discount.
The reasons for the spread of corn farming are complex, but in the case of Africa they can in no small part be attributed to calculations made in the interest of colonial expansion and empire. This is to say that West African corn plantations were a critical piece of the infrastructure that enabled the triangle trade, and the human rights abuses that followed. Outside of these systems of abuse, corn itself remains an important, even necessary, crop in many parts of the world; to this day it serves a crucial function as a staple crop not only in Africa, but across the globe, supporting large swathes of the population with inexpensive and filling carbohydrates. Corn serves as a case study in how seemingly simple, everyday things can exist within complicated historical context and problematic social structures.