Read an Excerpt

From Agriculture to Agricology

Towards a Global Circular Economy

Real African Publishers

Agriculture in History

According to Sir James Frazer in his book, The Golden Bough [1922, 1966], agriculture had its origins in ancient Egypt and was connected with the myth of Osiris, the most popular of all Egyptian deities. According to this myth, Osiris was regarded as a personification of the great yearly vicissitudes of nature, especially corn. He was also connected with the invention of the calendar of 365 days through which nature produced and reproduced itself through human action and natural processes and in a circular and recurring manner of birth and death. The myth goes that Osiris had a sister called Isis whom he married and who was his companion. Reigning as the first king of Egypt, Osiris reclaimed Egypt from savagery and gave the Egyptians laws, which taught them to worship the gods.

In this process, it is said, Isis discovered wheat and barley growing wild and that Osiris then introduced the cultivation of these grains among his people who abandoned cannibalism and took to the corn diet. Osiris is also said to have been the first to gather fruit from trees and to train vines to poles and to tread the grapes. Eager to communicate these discoveries to all mankind, Osiris is reputed to have left the whole government of Egypt to his wife, Isis, so that he could travel all over the world to diffuse the blessings of civilisation (including agriculture) to the rest of mankind wherever he went. The myth goes that wherever he went and found the soil unsuitable and the climate harsh to the cultivation of the vine, he would teach the local inhabitants to console themselves for the want of wine by brewing beer from barley, instead [Ibid: 436-37].

The myth also goes that Osiris was known as the Corn god so that one of his personifications was corn, which was said to die and come to life again every year. This fact demonstrates that even at this early stage, the circular nature of agricultural production was part of the mythology of humanity and the basis for human action in agriculture. The myth was, in fact, manifested into reality through rituals that celebrated in festivals the birth and resurrection of Osiris as personified in the corn from which the Christian belief of resurrection was drawn. The festival was celebrated in the month of Khoiak and at a later period in the month of Athyr. According to Frazer:

'That festival appears to have been essentially a festival of sowing, which properly fell at a time when the husbandman actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of the Corn god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again with the new crops. The ceremony was, in fact, a charm to ensure the growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as such it was practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his fields long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the stately ritual of the temple [Ibid: 454].'

Therefore, before modern science and through a belief in sympathetic magic, the ancient Africans believed in the circular character of natural reproduction and this 'green-ness' was also inserted in the myths of the time. The myth had to do with the understanding of fertility, which was associated with green-ness. Osiris was also personified as a Tree spirit and in celebrating that fact, every year a pine tree was cut down and its centre was hollowed out and, with the wood thus excavated, an image of Osiris was made out of it, which was buried like a corpse in the hollow of the tree. In this respect, Osiris was also personified as a god of fertility. In this role, Osiris was conceived as a god of creative energy in general, which in its ritual form was believed to be a charm to ensure the growth of crops. Frazer conjectures that Isis, the wife and sister of Osiris, must have been also called the Corn goddess. This was why Isis was referred to by the Greeks as the 'many-named', and the 'thousand-named' [Ibid: 460].

Being the one who discovered wheat and barley, she was, according to Augustine, associated with the myth of Ceres. She was also referred to as the 'create-ress of green things' and the 'green goddess whose green colour is like unto the green-ness of the earth', a 'Lady of Bread', and a 'Lady of Abundance'. The Greeks also conceived Egyptian Isis to be a corn goddess and identified her with their own goddess called Demeter. In their epigram, they described Isis as: 'she who has given birth to the fruits of the earth', and 'the mother of the ears of the earth'. It was through these co-options of the myths of Osiris and Isis by the Greeks that Ceres was regarded as the goddess of grain who introduced grain-based agriculture into Europe.

Agriculture was therefore one of the arts of civilisation that the Genesis of Osiris brought to the world as we have seen. The English word cereal is derived from Ceres, the name of the goddess of grain, according to the Greeks. In European conventional mythology, Venus and Ceres are both regarded as 'Roman' goddesses. However, as Frazer points out, they were conquered goddesses because the Genesis of the Egyptian Osiris and Isis preceded the Roman Empire by several centuries. At the time when grain culture was first introduced in Europe, Rome was just a rustic frontier settlement. Therefore, Venus and Ceres are both older than the Roman Empire that claimed them as Roman goddesses. It also follows that both Venus and Ceres are younger than Osiris and Isis, from whom they are created. Whether or not either Venus or Ceres were Latin goddesses before they were Roman goddesses is not clear, but it is also immaterial; they may both have been Mother goddesses, who were gift wives of conquered peoples, and this conquest must have been at the hands of the Egyptians.

This is because, according to Professor Diop, the predominance of the Black civilisation around the Mediterranean region is attested to by the 'unexpected existence of the pre-Hellenic Black virgins and goddesses, such as the 'Black Demeter of Phigalia in Arcadia, the Black Aphrodite of Arcadia and Corinth, the Black virgin of Saint Victor of Marseilles, and the Black virgin of Chartres, who was once honoured as Our-Lady-under-the-Earth [Diop, 1980: 21].' Diop concludes, therefore, that 'the cult of Black virgins, which the Church finally sanctified in modern times, derived directly from the cult of Isis, which preceded Christianity in the Northern Mediterranean [Ibid: 22].' Diop adds that we lack scientific proof to connect them to the Aurignacian Venus, 'but their existence confirms the southern (i.e. African) origin of civilisation' [Ibid.].

Thus, from the very ancient times, people belonging to different civilisations, through cross-cultural sharing and learning, had a similar view of nature and its products such as agriculture, fisheries, animal husbandry and forestry. They also regarded these products of nature, the animal world and labour as being the product of a circular process in their very connection with nature and the reproduction of food crops and animals for human consumption. The production systems were connected to moral and ethical belief systems that guided the thinking and actions of the people. In reviewing our relationship with Mother Earth in the current crises that confront us, we need to revisit some of these central messages from the origins of humanity and their connection with nature, in order to restore the balance between humans and other members of the natural community if we are to survive as a collectivity.

Western scholars have been divided on the origins of agriculture. Due to the racist 'Aryan Model' of the origins of civilisation [Bernal, 1987], many of these scholars have argued that agriculture in antiquity originated in Mesopotamia, which they believe was one of the first places where plant domestication occurred. They argue that following the domestication of plants and animals, numerous settlements developed in this region and add that archaeological evidence suggests that the first city, Jericho, was built in the area. They point out that the most important crop plants for all of these civilisations were (and still are in that region) wheat, barley, dates, figs, olives, and grapes, and merely guess that it is possible that each of the crops were domesticated from wild plants native to the region.

However, they recognise that the most advanced civilisation of the region, however, arose along the banks of the Nile River where they admit the first exotic ornamental gardens were established. They point out that the Egyptians deliberately planned the grounds and placed plants for both ornamental and utilitarian purposes. They date the first records to about 2200 BC, which is rather too late for discussing the origins of agriculture. They nevertheless point out that among the elements typical of some of the gardens were: pools for fish, trees bearing figs, pomegranates and dates, grapevine-covered trellises, and beds of flowers. Other plants included roses, jasmine and myrtle. The gardens were primarily those of pharaohs and government officials; and those that served as religious or sacred sites.

However, other scholars such as John Claudius Loudon in his Encyclopaedia of Agriculture [1825] have stated the historical record more accurately. In the book he correctly traces the origin of agriculture from Africa (i.e. Egypt) and summarises the historical record as follows:

'Traditional history traces man back to the time of the deluge. After the catastrophe of which the greater part of the Earth's surface bears evidence, man seems to have recovered himself (in our hemisphere at least) in the central parts of Asia, and to have first attained eminence in arts and government, and on the alluvial plains of the Nile (River). Egypt colonised Greece, Carthage, and some other places on the Mediterranean Sea; and thus Greeks received their arts from the Egyptians, afterwards the Romans from the Greeks, and finally the rest of Europe from the Romans. Such is the route by which agriculture is traced to our part of the world; how it may have reached eastern countries of India and China, is less certain, though from the great antiquity of their inhabitants and governments, it appears highly probable that arts and civilisation were either coeval there, or, if not, that they travelled to the East fully more rapidly than they did to the West [Ibid: 3].'

Thus, James Frazer's conjectures about the origin of agriculture dating back to the days of Egyptian Osiris and Isis is better grounded, and it is from here that we can correctly assess the temporal and spiritual basis of agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and animal husbandry as natural circular economies. From here we can see how agriculture began and then spread to the rest of humankind, and how in each region of the world different kinds of crops and seeds were discovered and managed. Indeed, recent archaeological discoveries of African agriculture reported in the British science magazine, Science, in 1979 revealed that the earliest leap from hunting and gathering activities to the scientific cultivation of crops occurred in Africa at least 7000 years before it appeared on other continents. The magazine reported discoveries by one, Fred Wendorf, of agricultural sites near the Nile going back to more than 10 000 years before the dynasties of Egypt were founded. In these areas, Africans were cultivating and harvesting barley and einkorn wheat as well as other crops. These were carbon-dated at Kubbaniya, a site just a few kilometres north of Aswan, and the dating gave a reading of 17 850 to 18 000 years ago. Other sites further south, like Tushka in Nubia, indicated the same dating.

These discoveries revealed that not only were the Africans the first to engage in crop science, but they were also the first to domesticate cattle. A University of Massachusetts anthropologist, Charles Nelson, reported in The NewYork Times in 1980 that his research team had unearthed evidence in the Lukenya Hill district in the Kenya Highlands about 40 kilometres from Nairobi, the capital, that Africans had been domesticating cattle some 15 000 years ago. According to the story:

'Nelson said that the finding led them to conclude that pre-Iron Age Africans in that area had a relatively sophisticated society and could have spread their mores, living modes and philosophy, eventually reaching the fertile crescent of the Euphrates River Valley, which many had once thought was the cradle of civilisation. African technologies, he suggested, were exported to the Middle East through trade and the cultural diffusion of information and ideas [von Sertima, 1999: 322].'

But the diffusion of African agricultural technology was not limited to the Nile and the Euphrates regions. Some African-cultivated crops such as a strain of African cotton, as well as a species of jackbean and yams, were reported in the American agricultural complex before Columbus, while African indigenous rice, finger millet, sorghum, pearl millet and cultivated cotton had entered western Asia very early. The question arises: How did these technologies and crops spread to other major agricultural complexes? According to Ivan von Sertima, as the Sahara became drier from 5020 TO 2500 BC, Africans were forced to migrate to other parts of the continent, 'taking their crop science with them' as they moved from one part of the continent to the other [Ibid: 323].

That is how we are able to infer the wide and early distribution of language networks and shared agricultural terms, linked to cultural and techno-complexes, and the study of plant geography. This is also what has made it possible for scholars such as Professor Clyde Winters, based on his studies of agricultural complexes in West Africa, to demonstrate in several academic papers the movement of Africans in Western Asia and the African origins of the Dravidians in India. It is the Dravidians, belonging to the C-group in Nubia, who have been credited with the diffusion of several African domesticates to Asia. Professor Winters has established many connections between Dravidians, who are now Afro-Asiatic, and black Africa, particularly through linguistic evidence and shared cultural traits. He also demonstrated that the crops mentioned earlier, which were indigenous to Africa, appeared later in the Asian context in the areas where the Dravidians had settled [Ibid: 324]. Ivan von Sertima has also, in the case of Latin America, demonstrated in great detail in his book, They Came Before Columbus, that a number of crops of African origin had found their way to the Incas. From this evidence Sertima came to the conclusion that 'Africans indeed had the most intimate knowledge of plants, a fact used to great advantage not only in crop cultivation but also in the development of medicine [Ibid.]'.

This historical record shows that agriculture has indeed a longer history than previously imagined by Western academic research based on their predetermined diffusionist theories which favoured Asia and the Middle East as centres of ancient civilisation over Africa. Archaeological research carried out on the African soil has revealed otherwise. It also demonstrated why the modern capitalist agricultural theories based on reductionist scientific techniques are indeed short-sighted. They have transformed the entire agricultural economy in the developed western world, and the world over, to individualistic capitalist interests, which have informed the motive for the colonisation and exploitation of the land and the crops that they selected for agricultural expansion for world markets without regard to the prior circular principles on which agriculture was based.

Small farmers in India after the devastations of the Green Revolution always asked the scientists the question: 'from where did the notion that unless plants had something constantly "done to them" they could not grow and not produce, come from, and creep into modern consciousness?' The answer seemed to have been provided by Albert Howard, the founder of modern organic farming in America, who discovered that the entry of modern chemicals into agriculture on a sustained basis occurred when companies manufacturing explosives and weapons of World War II found themselves without a market or a niche for their products once the world war was over. This is how the use of organo-phosphorus insecticides based on the poisonous properties of phosgene gas discovered during WWII came into the picture for commercial purposes. Howard also drew attention to the fact that the same corporation that produced Agent Orange gas chemicals that were used to defoliate the tropical forest in Vietnam during the Indo-Chinese war fought by the Americans in the 1960s, was the very corporation that manufactured herbicides today that kill plants, herbs, weeds and seeds not desired by agribusiness. Alvares concludes from this that:

'Modern agricultural theory conveniently reduced the plant to a combination of nitrogen, phosphorus and potash (NPK), (and thus) laying the ground for a massive diversion of the deadly production of these war industries and their chemicals to agriculture [Ibid: 9].'

---

Excerpted from From Agriculture to Agricology by Dani Wadada Nabudere, Angela McClelland. Copyright © 2015 Dani Wadada Nabudere. Excerpted by permission of Real African Publishers.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---