Sun, Oct 17, 1943: good feed

"It's up to Dad to write you tonight, so I had better get at it, its bed time now so don't expect much of a letter....

"We had two hard frosts last week so the kaffir is ready to be cut, have 20 acres over on Ed King that you helped plant to cut yet, and DeLoss Myers is going to start cutting it tomorrow, it didn't get ripe but will make good feed."

-- Letter from my grandfather, Bloomington, Kans., to my father, Cape Girardeau, Mo., Sunday, October 17, 1943.

What my grandfather called “kaffir” or “kaffir corn” is a southern African variety of sorghum first brought to the United States in the 1870s.  It was an important source of fodder for cattle, hogs, and chickens on my grandparents’ farm.  My family letters indicate it was planted on the farm in May and June, cultivated and curled in July, and harvested from October to April.  As I discussed in an early blog post, the word “kaffir” derives from the Arabic word for “infidel” and is a highly pejorative term that white South Africans have used to refer to black South Africans (see my early post, “Sun, Jan 18, 1942: ‘kafir corn").  My sense is that it has always been seen as an offensive term by black South Africans; but I don’t think white Americans or black Americans in the 1940s had any sense that it was such a derogatory term.

            Southern African sorghum was not, however, the first sorghum to come to the Americas. People in what is now Sudan and Chad had domesticated sorghum by 4,000 B.C.E.  From there, farmers developed some twenty different varieties of sorghum and spread them throughout the savanna belt from Sudan to Mauritania.  Likewise, sorghum spread from areas in Sudan into southern Africa.

Sorghum and millet (both referred to as “guinea corn”) first came to the Americas on slave ships from West Africa.  In order to feed the enslaved Africans on board, ship captains bought food, including rice, manioc flour, sorghum and millet, meat and fish. Given the cultural expectation of both Europeans and Africans that women would cook, captains made sure to include enough enslaved African women on each ship to prepare meals.  These grains were often purchased unmilled (in the husk), because it was less expensive.  This left African women the job of milling them aboard ship with a mortar and pestle.  It also meant (whether by design or not) that leftover grain could be planted in the Americas, while milled grain could not have been.   

Throughout the three and a half centuries of the transatlantic slave trade, some twelve million enslaved Africans were forced onto ships.  Many died during those voyages, but some ten million arrived in the Americas alive.  At least 35,000 slave voyages brought these men and women to the Americas, and likely each one voyage brought African plants as well.  It was the leftover provisions from these voyages, which allowed some enslaved Africans to continue cultivating these plants in the Americas.

References to “guinea corn” (sorghum or millet) in Brazil appear as early as 1587.  The two grains became crucial to the subsistence and export economies of the Caribbean, based on the labor of enslaved Africans.  The grains were well adapted to the aridity of many Caribbean islands, where they fed both humans and livestock.  When white slaveholders brought African slaves from Barbados to the Carolinas, African crops including sorghum raised in slaves' subsistence plots, came with them.  These slaves also continued African agricultural practices, such as intercropping nitrogen-fixing black-eyed peas with cereals.  By the early 1700s, whites recognized the value of sorghum for feeding livestock as well.  Sorghum has had an important role in American agriculture ever since.  Beyond its role in feeding livestock, most Americans are likely familiar with it today in the form of molasses.  In the 1990s, sorghum ranked fifth among U.S. crops in acres planted (after corn, wheat, soybeans, and cotton).

          (Sources: Judith A. Carney and Richard Nicholas Rosomoff, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009], 16-19, 65, 75, 144-48, C. Wayne Smith and Richard A. Rederiksen, Sorghum: Origin, History, Technology, and Production [John Wiley & Sons, 2000]).