For many years the 1420-kilometre-long Kenyan coastline has provided home and sustenance to Arab, Swahili, and Mijikenda societies and boasted food influences from far and wide. These culinary influences have at various stages in history included Chinese, Portuguese, African, Arab, Indian and Italian cuisines. In A history of African Cuisine James McCann defines a cuisine as “a distinct and coherent body of food preparations which is based on one or more starchy staples, a set of spice combinations, complementary tastes, particular textures, iconic rituals, and a locally intelligible repertoire of meats, vegetables and starchy texture … form[ing  a] structure of both preparation and presentation”. Swahili cuisine is a blend of Bantu, Indian, Arab, Persian and Portuguese cuisine that Nasra Bwana describes as a diverse and flavourful culmination of inter-community exchange that it is “rooted in lengthy history”.

Swahili cuisine ranges from the simplest to the most intricate of dishes catering to a wide palate. The mix of cultures, ingredients and cooking methods has produced a wide variety of signature foods. Take the case of Italian cuisine in the north coast area of Malindi that was introduced by Italians who came to work at the Broglio Space Centre that served as a spaceport for the launch of both Italian and international satellites between 1967 and 1988. Many went back home after the launches stopped but a few stuck around long enough to introduce their cultures and cuisines to the local communities. Today the town brims with Italian restaurants, pizzerias, delis and gelato shops. Pizza, pasta, lasagna and risotto are the legacy of their continued stay here. Kenyans along the north coast have picked up these foods and incorporated them into the local restaurant dining experience.

Commissioner James Robertson notes in a 1962 report on the Kenyan Coastal Strip Conference that “apart from the period of strong Portuguese influence in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the presence of Europeans as residents is comparatively recent and can be measured in decades. Arabs, Persians and Indians, on the other hand, have been present in the Coastal centres for as long as there is recorded history”. This is reflected in some of the notable dishes that form Swahili cuisine.

Pilau, a very fragrant dish of rice made with a variety of spices including cloves, coriander and black pepper, has its origins in pulao, a similar dish originating in central Asia. Pilau can be eaten on its own or with chapati, urojo (a popular Zanzibari meat stew or spicy soup) and kachumbari (a relish made with onions, chilli peppers and lemon juice). Like chapatti and urojo, Biryani is a popular dish originating from South Asia, specifically India and Pakistan, a legacy of the historic trading links with that region.

Cloves are a typical Swahili spice, often used in pastries, beverages and foods. The prevalence of this particular spice is a nod to the region’s long association with Zanzibar, where a spice trade flourished prior to the arrival of the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century. Following their expulsion by the Omanis in 1698, large-scale clove plantations were established, with indigenous Africans used as slave labour, and by the second half of the nineteenth century, the archipelago had become the world’s single largest clove producer. The then Sultan of Oman, Seyyid Said, had at the time moved the capital of his empire to Zanzibar and the Kenyan coast came under his dominion.

Other spices to be found in your typical coastal kitchen are cinnamon, black pepper, cardamom and chilli, seasonings used in pilau, biryani, kahawa chungu, tea or mahamri.  Meals are centred on communal dining that brings together extended family, neighbours and guests. The food is served on a sinia, a round shallow plate from which everyone eats with their right hand.

The then Sultan of Oman, Seyyid Said, had at the time moved the capital of his empire to Zanzibar and the Kenyan coast came under his dominion.

Kahawa chungu is very similar to Arabic coffee but has a strong clove and black pepper aroma. It is usually served without sugar hence its name chungu which means bitter. Mahamri and mandazi are pastries that look similar but taste different. While mahamri are made with flour, yeast, cardamom and coconut milk, mandazi are made using either flour and yeast or baking powder but no spices are added.

Coconuts are a local crop that is used in most dishes; while coconut water is used to quench thirst (madafu), coconut milk is used to prepare mbaazi, mahamri, beans, rice and fish. Sea food is also an integral part of the food culture here because it is easily available.

In the past, interaction between the coastal strip and the Kenyan hinterland was limited by terrain. Robertson writes, “Until the construction of the railway line in modem times, the dry, unfriendly stretch of scrub land starting from twenty to thirty miles inland insulated the Coastal Belt from contact with the African interior more effectively than the oceans separated it from Asia and Europe, and it was undoubtedly for that reason that the slave trade routes and the early exploration of the hinterland started from Zanzibar through what is now Tanganyika and not from Mombasa.” However, modern Swahili cuisine is today dependent on produce from the rest of the country. In his PhD thesis Positioning The Gastronomic Identity Of Kenya’s Coastal Strip, Dr Anthony Pepela notes that most of the strip’s signature foods “relied on materials from other regions which were procured from the local market. [Chefs] consented that they could not do without these ingredients in preparation of their dishes. They only had a small fraction of ingredients sourced from the local farmers which created the distinction”.

Street food—from snacks to complete meals—is popular in Lamu, Mombasa, and Diani. Street food vendors cater to different clienteles, with some specialising in pastries and sweets such as mahamri, dates, halwa, ubuyu kashata and achari while others sell fast foods like French fries, viazi karai, samosas and mishkaki. Whole meals such as chapati maharagwe biryani are also sold on the street. Beverages include sugar cane juice and tamarind juice (ukwaju).

While the preparation of meals in the home is largely a female affair, both men and women prepare and sell food in the restaurants and on the streets. However, women are the custodians of recipes in families and even in spaces that are visibly male. They are often the glue that holds the business together, either as partners or as aides, with some cooking at home the food that the men sell on the streets, or helping in advertising it online.

Huda, a food vendor in the Sunpark area of Malindi, wakes up early every morning to prepare breakfast dishes for her customers. Early in the morning, as soon as Muslim prayer of fajr is over, Huda and her husband both head to her kitchen where duties are divided: he prepares the dough and she does the frying. After their children have had their breakfast and left for school, Huda sets out tables on the street in front of her house and starts serving customers while her husband remains in the kitchen cooking the rest of the food. Customers buy takeaway breakfasts or sit quietly sipping their spiced tea. Mahamri and mbaazi are top sellers that sometimes have to be booked in advance as they quickly run out.

To make mahamri, dough is mixed with cardamom, yeast, sugar and coconut milk, then allowed to rise before frying the pastry. This has to be done at least an hour before customers start streaming in, says Huda. Breakfast is served until around 9 a.m. by which time most of the items on the menu have been sold out. The lunch menu is biryani, pilau, and accompaniments which are usually prepared early in the morning or the night before depending on the workload. The best seller on the lunch menu is biryani kuku (chicken biryani) and ukwaju juice, with kachumbari as an accompaniment.

The popularity of street food at the coast is due to the influence of communal dining while the practice of eating outdoors is greatly influenced by the environment and the coastal weather; it is easier to keep cool during meal times and also to accommodate a large number of guests. There is also a high degree of customer trust in the integrity of food vendors, which means that you can stop anywhere in Mombasa, Malindi or Lamu to purchase food. Unlike in cities like Nairobi, sea food at the coast is fresh while access to the ocean also means that unlike the case with Lake Victoria, there is a wide variety of fish. This, however, does not mean that seafood is cheaper at the coast. In 2021, fish was more expensive in Mombasa than in Nairobi because of the availability of cheaper imports in the capital city.

By observation, the population of the Kenyan coast is less segregated socially, which means that, regardless of class, everyone eats more or less the same thing. Trust in the safety and quality of the ingredients used to prepare meals also undergirds outdoor dining and the popularity and accessibility of quality Swahili food explains why fast-food restaurants find it harder to penetrate markets within the coastal region than in mainland Kenya.

Swahili cuisine offers the diversity that lacks in many modern fast-food restaurants/franchises. While fast-food franchises offer competition, it is not enough to put street vendors out of business en masse. For franchises to survive at the Kenyan coast they have to incorporate local cuisines as has been done elsewhere, such as on the Indian subcontinent. Dr Pepela’s study found that although the perception of hygiene in an establishment could drive a preference for fast foods, particularly among those reluctant to try new foods, the majority of international and local tourists visiting the coast prefer the local cuisine.

By observation, the population of the Kenyan coast is less segregated socially, which means that, regardless of class, everyone eats more or less the same thing.

Because of the integral part that local foods play in the lifestyle and culture of the community, coastal communities have been able to hold on to and transmit knowledge of Swahili cuisine in spite of modernization. It is a normal and highly encouraged practice for many local Mijikenda, Swahili, Arab or Indian households in neighbourhoods such as in Mombasa’s Old Town to live in extended families under one roof or in close proximity. This allows knowledge in the form of recipes to be passed on from one generation to next. Because women are the guardians of culture and tradition in these communities, knowledge is transmitted from generation to generation within the confines of the kitchen, with recipes often passed down from mother to daughter.

Food preparation is group work, with specific persons taking up the menus that they are best skilled at. Younger men and women, and those yet to master certain recipes, get to learn from those with the experience and expertise. Proximity to vendors and markets such as Mwembe Tayari is another reason why the street food culture has flourished, especially for consumers who want to take away food to eat at home.

Food festivals have become an annual affair; the Lamu Food Festival and the Mombasa Food Festival bring together food lovers and food vendors with the aim of cultivating the interest in the region’s food cultures and developing the local food economy. The events lean on the organic 24-hour economy—especially around the entertainment industry—that has enabled the street food culture to flourish and compete favourably with mainstream fast-food franchises or restaurants.

Digital media has expanded the interest in Swahili culture and cuisine, with pages like @lifeinmombasa (twitter and Instagram) showcasing it through photography. Vlogger @Swahiligal (twitter, YouTube and Instagram) showcases Lamu through videos and photos and organizes visits to the coastal town, enabling visitors from the mainland and from outside Kenya to get a taste of Lamu.

The increase in online chefs and food bloggers has also brought the cuisine to a wider audience. Chef Ali Mandhry has a page providing a step-by-step guide on how to make even the most intricate Swahili dishes. @shobanes says his aim is to make cooking Swahili food as simple as possible and uses slang to reach a much younger and urban audience. YouTube is the platform of choice that both professional and novice cooks use to share recipes with a much larger audience.

Coastal cuisine is known for being cheap and providing value for money. However, ironically, in the rural areas and informal settlements within the coastal region, a balanced diet is often inaccessible, especially when the rains fail. In 2020, local health officials warned of a surge in cases of malnutrition in children under five, with around 90 children diagnosed with severe malnutrition in Mombasa town alone. In 2021, health officials raised the alarm about nutritional deficiency in Kilifi where they estimated that 148,000 people were facing possible starvation, with this number rising to 200,000 in 2022. Kilifi is a paradox in that while the street food is very cheap in urban areas like Malindi, Watamu and Kilifi town, the county also has a 90 per cent malnutrition rate in babies under two years.

The increase in online chefs and food bloggers has also brought the cuisine to a wider audience.

Acute poverty and lack of access to food in some areas has led to reliance on wild fruits. Residents of the Bofu Magarini area have been known to eat cactus and many homes restrict themselves to one meal a day. Children are constantly fed unsweetened maize porridge leading to nutritional deficiencies like pellagra in infants and pre-schoolers. While street food offers pocket-friendly balanced meals, it turns out that it isn’t truly pocket friendly for everyone, especially those without a regular income.

The construction of new roads, ports, dams and irrigation schemes by both county and national governments, and the influx of Kenyans from upcountry, will likely have an impact on and enrich the variety of Swahili foods and their methods of preparation, just as interaction with the outside world has always done. It has given us a rich food history such that many towns around the country are now opening restaurants specialising in Swahili dishes to bring these food varieties to other counties. Still, it is important to continue to document the cuisine, the recipes, the history and culture that have evolved over the many years of interactions between the Kenyan coast and the rest of the world.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

Up until the advent of devolution in 2013, several regions of West Pokot including Kacheliba, Alale, Kongelai, Lelan, and Sigor, had one thing in common: the bags of yellow maize that would arrive promptly from the National Cereals and Produce Board (NCPB) storage facilities about two months into the planting season, or when the stores of the previous season’s harvest began to diminish.

Food aid from donors, development partners, state agencies and well-wishers had over many decades become crucial to the residents of these regions despite the significant pockets of onion, maize and beans farming.

While food scarcity affected the better part of the region all the way north to neighbouring counties, it tended to be more pronounced in these areas where underdevelopment had left the populations mired in a continuous struggle for food. So neglected were certain parts of the region that, for example, the electrification of Chepareria Town under the NARC government was greeted with relief and jubilation.

Market days in places like Ortum, Orwa, Kerelwa, Kanyarkwat, Chepunyai, and Morpus were a hive of activity, with barter trade taking place between farmers from the outlying hills where furrow irrigation fed the hillside farms that produced onions, cassava, millet, maize and beans.

Still, for decades, the imported yellow maize continued to occupy a central place in the diets of a population scarred by decades of political marginalization. Yellow maize provided relief to food-deprived households, especially during the drier months and just before the harvest season. The relief food also benefited isolated herders who would move with their cattle through towns like Sigor, Orwa, and Sebit in search of pasture.

The locally manufactured hand-operated maize mill was a rare sign of self-sustenance in a region that before devolution offered little opportunity for advancement. Milling maize into flour using grinding stones was more common—a tedious and time consuming chore often left to the womenfolk.

The first major drought during which food aid was provided to the region occurred in the early 1940s and changed the colonial administration’s policy towards the North Rift region. The drought prompted the colonial government to push pastoralists into the cash economy; locals were forced to sell their herds of cows, goats and sheep to the colonial administration in exchange for jobs and cash.

The locally manufactured hand-operated maize mill was a rare sign of self-sustenance in a region that before devolution offered little opportunity for advancement.

In the mid-1980s, catholic missions and Scandinavian donors stepped in to try and alleviate the perennial food scarcity caused by drought and insecurity, inadvertently laying the grounds for high reliance on food aid. The poorer families among the Pokot would camp at food distribution centres, at church missions and at the offices of non-governmental organisations waiting for food donations.

President Daniel Arap Moi’s frayed diplomatic relations with donors in the 1980s, the structural adjustment programmes imposed by the International Monetary Fund in 1990s and their impact on the economy, as well as the area’s agricultural systems, further negatively impacted the fortunes of many households in the lower economic ranks. In the 40 years since the food aid framework was put in place, food aid continues to occupy a significant place in the region’s socio-political and dietary conversation.

The available data exploring the rainfall patterns, food security and land use, as well as vegetation cover in West Pokot between 1980 and 2011 shows that rainfall has been erratic. Farmers report declining rainfall, rising temperatures and a shortened growing season that has lowered food production. A meteorological mapping of the region over the last few decades confirms the farmers’ observations, leading to notable changes in policy responses such as increased stocking, crop diversification, crop area expansion, but also a reliance on food aid.

Dependence on food aid is, however, not uniform across the highland zones; Kapenguria and Lelan have a lower dependency rate than regions like Chepareria or the more food crisis-prone areas like North Pokot and Kacheliba.

Being a semi-arid, food-deficient and food insecure county, West Pokot requires constant climate change impact assessments, the study of local agro-systems and their incorporation into the formulation of modern adaptation strategies.

The droughts that followed in the wake of the failed rains between 1999 and mid-2002 proved to be the worst in the county’s history. Recorded levels of crop failure were at times as high as 97 per cent, animal numbers fell and aid agencies had to step in yet again to address the food crisis.

Deforestation is the unintended consequence of insufficient food production. Small-scale farmers cut down trees and burn charcoal for sale to supplement their meagre incomes. Sacks of charcoal by the roadside are a common sight, targeting commuters on the Orwa-Wakor-Ortum-Chepareria route.

Sigor, where trees covered 19.9Kha in 2000—or roughly 10 per cent of the land mass—had lost 378ha of humid primary forest or 8 per cent of its tree cover by 2020, leading to an overall decrease in vegetation cover of 7.6 per cent over that period. This has had a direct impact on the recorded rainfall within an area that relies on rain-fed subsistence farming.

The droughts that followed in the wake of the failed rains between 1999 and mid-2002 proved to be the worst in the county’s history.

In the eight decades since the 1940s drought, food scarcity still afflicts a significant portion of the population of the region. In March 2020, exactly 80 years after the first recorded drought, the national government sent food aid into the county: 150,000 kilograms of rice, 120,000 kilograms of beans, and 60 cartons of corned beef were given out to 31,000 households affected by drought across the county at a per capita ratio of 6kgs of rice and 4kgs of beans.

The effects of climate change and population growth have forced farmers and pastoralists in parts of the county to move towards diversification of food sources. One example is the Wei Wei Farmers Association that was formed in the late 1980s to implement an irrigation scheme that would sustain year-round farming. The project involves 600 pastoralists who have put 225 hectares of land under irrigation, with a potential of  1,200-2,000 tonnes of produce per cropping season that could bring in KSh100 million annually.

Food production remains a key priority and a challenge for the county’s leaders. The devolution of agriculture in 2013 placed the responsibility of overseeing food systems in the hands of local leaders who are engaging smallholder farmers, reviving ageing agro-projects, and establishing new ones. But ten years after devolution, many households still partly depend on relief food from local aid agencies and state agencies to supplement the production from subsistence farming.

The effects of climate change and population growth have forced farmers and pastoralists in parts of the county to move towards diversification of food sources.

In 2021, humanitarian agencies in the wider North Rift region placed the number of those at risk of starvation at about 250,000. Decades of partial dependence on food aid in the county have produced a demographic that sees little need to pursue development amidst a perennial food crisis and the predictable intervention of non-state actors. Poor farmers and pastoralists have come to expect—and have incorporated—relief food into their requirements as their incomes are not enough to meet their food needs, factoring in the black tax and reliance on donors and well-wishers.

This demographic is referred to as the satisfied poor in a theory that combines learned helplessness, cognitive dissonance and the subjective quality of life to map out instances in which certain persons and regions outsource their food autonomy to aid agencies irrespective of the projected size of their annual harvest.

Developed by Geraldine Olson and Brigitte Schober in 1993, the paradigm attempts to explain the satisfaction paradox—why some people who are objectively deprived nonetheless claim to be satisfied with their quality of life. They concluded that “being unhappy with the living conditions and yet ‘knowing’ that all available coping-strategies will have no positive effect on the situation, creates a cognitive dissonance within the individual that he will try to reduce. This reduction can be achieved either by finally using an effective coping-strategy or by the re-evaluation of the perceived situation with adapted (lowered) standards”.

Thus when the long-term structures that shape access to and affordability of food do not present clear pathways towards self-sustenance, poor households may learn to lean more heavily on the relatively more predictable provision of food by aid agencies, the state and well-wishers despite the fact that such efforts are meant to be temporary stop-gap measures.

In the longer run, this reliance on aid may result in deliberate disengagement by some from the affairs of the community. In fact, in recent years, the county administration has decried the rise in idling as a social malaise in the region.

Still, it should be noted that the structure of aid programming can also induce dependence, particularly in instances where the aid is sporadic and poorly connected to the food sourcing and storage needs of the local communities.

One can laud the sustained efforts to alleviate food insecurity in West Pokot—where 57 out every 100 residents struggle to meet their basic nutritional needs—while remaining cognizant of the need to move beyond aid. The local administration has brought together a collaborative team from across several sectors with the expectation that a wider pool of stakeholders will more ably fight food insecurity in the region.

Initiatives such as the pro-active poverty graduation policy are closely linked to the mission of West Pokot County Integrated Development Plan (CIDP), the overall framework that seeks to transform livelihoods through an equitable and sustainable utilization of resources in order to bring to an end the dependence on food aid.

In the longer run, this reliance on aid may result in deliberate disengagement by some from the affairs of the community.

To deal with the social and psychological underpinnings of the helplessness that is driving dependence on aid, the CIDP has placed the focus on food and nutrition security, and on improving equity in socio-economic opportunities by 2025.

Given the current food scarcity and impending crop failure, state agencies must continue to coordinate with aid agencies and well-wishers in the provision of relief food. However, critical medium and long-term interventions need to be implemented to undo the learned helplessness that decades of food aid have engendered in the minds of the poor.

A broke treasury, near-empty county coffers and failing rains means that in the short run dependence on relief food might actually escalate. However, aid providers must begin to robustly debate how food self-sufficiency might be achieved both in terms of availability, access, affordability and nutritional diversity.

It just maybe the right time to start working towards not just ending food dependency but also phasing out the gunny bags and the many emblems that symbolise the reality of dependency among the local farmers and pastoralists.

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This article is part of The Elephant Food Edition Series done in collaboration with Route to Food Initiative (RTFI). Views expressed in the article are not necessarily those of the RTFI.

Colonialism structures how we think about the history of Africa’s relations with the world. This is often true even among those who protest reductionist understandings of the continent. The flawed assumptions that oppression was inevitable and power dynamics were invariable between people from both continents loom large in the popular imagination. Subordination can be taken as a timeless norm that explains, in turn, slavery, oppression, and racial injustice in the Americas, Europe, and further afield.

Audre Lorde presciently noted that “we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.” One consequence of that deficit is how hard it can be to imagine a time when people of African descent related to the wider—and whiter—world in very different ways than we have come to expect in the modern era. Has it always been so? Have Africa’s encounters with the world always followed the rhythm of domination and dispossession? It is important to find out.

Psychologists have found that the region of the brain that activates when we think about the past is the same part that lights up in relation to envisioning the future. They found that subjects “place their future scenarios in well-known visual-spatial contexts,” suggesting that the past is the imaginative landscape upon which we situate the future in our minds. Histories that do not conform to the current pattern of relating can serve as the substrate upon which new and more promising futures can be envisioned and designed.

By overlooking what Howard Zinn called “the past’s fugitive moments”—that is, histories that suggest possibilities other than the world we have come to inherit—we consign ourselves to a future that reenacts a limited sense of the past. Moreover, the dangers of presentism, of our propensity to interpret the past through the lens of the present, are well known to historians. Without an awareness of anachronistic assumptions, there can be a sense that how things are now is also how things always have been and, as a consequence, how things always will be. But what if the present is markedly different from the past and, therefore, the future might be very different from the present?

We know that the people and nation-states of the continent have been diverse and variable over time. It makes little sense, therefore, to speak of them in the singular. We also know Africans, like other humans, have been thinking and acting in ways that gestured at belonging to an international human community long before the colonial occupation. We know, too, that these international relations, for lack of a better word, were embedded into everyday realities of African elites, traders, and ordinary people.

Take, for example, the Kingdom of the Kongo: a sovereign, Kikongo-speaking nation-state that spanned modern-day northern Angola, western Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, and southern parts of Gabon. In the Kongolese kingdom, Catholicism became an established religion on its way to domestication early in the sixteenth century—not by conquest or force, as historian John Thornton notes in The Kongolese Saint Anthony, but through voluntary conversion, most notably of King Nzinga a Nkuwu, baptized João I of Kongo in 1491, and his son King Mvemba a Nzinga, also known as Afonso I.

While Italian missionaries from a Franciscan order of European monks, the Capuchin, are often credited, incorrectly, for the spread of Catholicism in the Kongo, it was the kingdom’s elites, particularly Afonso I, who did the most to seed and domesticate the religion. According to Thornton, they saw it as a source of diplomatic power.

It was clear early on that the exercise of this power would not be easy, and it was the Capuchins who made it especially difficult for Kongo’s rulers: Thornton notes that from the time of Alfonso I and for much of the next century, the kingdom’s rulers faced intransigence on the part of both the Capuchins and the Portuguese, who controlled the colony of Angola to the south, when they tried to appoint clergy, control bishops, and establish an independent church—the latter turning out to be an aspiration never realized before the kingdom’s end.

That is to say, had Kongo’s rulers had their way, the kingdom would have been more thoroughly—and, most of all, autonomously—Catholic. This cuts against the commonly held view of Christianity as the intellectual justification for European’s civilizing mission across the continent. Christianity certainly did serve the colonial project in this way at certain times and in parts of the continent, lowering indigenous spiritual practices and beliefs to the status of heathenism that had to be stamped out.

But the reasons for Kongo’s rulers’ full-throated embrace of Catholicism was—and it bears repeating—to access the religion’s diplomatic power. They understood the threat of the Portuguese to the south, more so after fending off a series of invasion attempts early in the seventeenth century.

Historian Linda Heywood argues that the Kingdom of the Kongo mastered “European-style diplomacy” to “ensure that Kongo be regarded as a Christian power with the same status as European powers.” Having established an embassy in Rome as early as 1488 and a resident ambassador in Lisbon in the 1530s, a few Kongolese elites studied in European capitals, mastering languages that facilitated the deepening of diplomatic ties. Alongside economic and political power, participation in the Christian commonwealth granted Kongolese elites access to cosmopolitan lifestyles that seldom draw attention.

Another important instance that complicates received knowledge of colonialism as inevitable is the kingdom of the Asante, in modern-day Ghana, which ruled at the turn of the eighteenth century. The Asante had longstanding trade and diplomatic relations with European states. Today, along Ghana’s Atlantic coast, there remain a few dozen forts, castles, and other outposts—some of them, like in Elmina and the Cape Coast, in excellent condition—that are perfectly rendered examples of late medieval European architectural technology.

Visitors often take these fortifications to be symbols of European conquest. But in reality, they were meant to secure access to the Asante Kingdom and, if possible, prevent other European countries from doing so. That different states built forts in that part of West Africa attests to the importance of the trade and the political power of the local authorities that determined who could trade there and under what terms.

The Asante at the time were wealthy, trading in commodities such as gold, ivory, and enslaved people by sea and by land. This wealth was won and preserved through military might, of course, but it was furthered by a masterful foreign policy that exploited the needs of European visitors.

Art historian Fiona Sheales records one such performance by Asante King Osei Tutu Asibey Bonsu on September 7th, 1817, the day the first Anglo-Asante trade treaty was ratified. According to British records, on that day, the Asantehene, or Asante king, appeared wrapped in a cloth perhaps not dissimilar to the style of kente cloth—but made of flags of European nations sewn together.

Flags played a key role in trade and diplomacy for Asante and European alike. But whereas the latter presented flags to the former in the hopes it would lead to formal diplomatic relations, the former displayed flags for the latter, as the Asantehene did that day, to demonstrate the breadth and reach of the Asante kingdom. The Asante king, explains Sheales, was aware of and not above playing up European competition for access to trade and other ties to the Asante.

It is difficult for many today to imagine the respect that African political authority commanded in the first half of the nineteenth century. The period of conflict that followed, the rise of the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery in the Americas, amplified by competition for access to trade with the kingdom, makes imagining this even more difficult. But imagine it we must.

These moments in the two kingdoms offer glimpses into how Africans understood their relationship to the wider world, as sovereigns and actors, and the other possible futures they anticipated at that time. These paths are still worth imagining, despite the actual future that ultimately unfolded. Through spirituality and trade, in these particular instances, Africans were relevant players in a shared global imaginary. The notions of belonging, in effect, were rooted in a spatial imagination—of both the inner and outer worlds—that reflected dynamic, transregional networks. Importantly, their rhythm of relating was out of step with the familiar tempo of oppression. These moments gesture toward relations that could be called un-colonial.

History, of course, should not be read only to glean lessons for the present. But it certainly can help make more sense of contemporary struggles. The past’s fugitive moments in particular offer a revitalizing challenge to the linearity with which we often understand, and limit, what is possible.

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This post is from a partnership between Africa Is a Country and The Elephant. We will be publishing a series of posts from their site once a week.