The legume’s history in West Africa is intimately linked with conquest.
Credit: François-Edmond FortierThe peanuts we devour today, seeds of the legume, originated in South America and spread around the world because of the peanut’s popularity as a snack and a source of oil. But as with many commodities, their expansion is also a story about the conquest of land and of humans.
The hard facts of the material are made lively through a few main characters and Lewis’s imagery as she traverses the land where the dramas of the book unfolded. “We traveled like the people whose steps we were retracing might have in the nineteenth century, in our horse cart that clip-clopped on a dirt trail toward the horizon,” she writes.
Still, Taylor didn’t say much about slavery in Kajoor and other peanut-producing regions — at least that was preserved in archives. Perhaps such advocacy did not seem worth the risk, given the threats he already faced to his career from some Europeans in the evangelical mission. But there is no way to know his sentiments because, as Lewis reminds us, history is only as complete as what’s left behind.is a valuable addition to agricultural and West African history.
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