The staples of cooking in West Bengal and Bangladesh (where my parents and grandparents are from) are potatoes, chilis and tomatoes. The amazing thing is that these ingredients only arrived in India from the New World in the 16th century. A similar transformation took place for maize, another New World crop that has risen to become Africa's dominant food crop. This remarkable story is chronicled in James McCann's "Maize and Grace" which I discovered via the excellent Marginal Revolution. An excerpt is available on the web at http://www.hup.harvard.edu/pdf/MCCMAI_excerpt.pdf.
In southern Africa maize has become by far the most important staple food, accounting for more than 50 percent of the calories in local diets; in Malawi alone, maize occupies 90 percent of cultivated land and represents 54 percent of Malawians’ total caloric intake. Far from considering it a crop of recent origin, imported from the New World a mere half a millennium ago, Malawians of the late twentieth century stated, “Chimango ndi moyo” (“Maize is our life”), and called their favorite variety maize of the ancestors (chimango cha makola).
South Africa's Kwaito Generation
A radio documentary on Kwaito made earlier this year and broadcast on NPR. We've been caning some of the cds we bought while we were in South Africa so I was looking around to see what were the latest kwaito hits. Haven't listened to the doc yet but did browse around the Reporter's Notebook a bit, lots of interesting stories there about kwaito and about life in South Africa today.
Somehow the subject changed to Capetown, from where I'd just returned. It's gorgeous there, though white and black people have very different opinions of it. I was told that all the white people live on the front side of Table Mountain - this beautiful flat-topped edifice with a cloud forever clinging to its scalp and foaming over the edge - whereas all the black people live on the other side of the mountain where it just looks like an ugly, sheer wall. I was told that black people are completely cut off from the rest of the city, that Capetown is one of the, if not the, most segregated parts of South Africa.