As Kenya’s cities grew, more and more people left their rural homes and subsistence farming systems to go to urban settlements like Mombasa to find work. In the city, meals were paid for with cash, a major transformation in Kenya’s food systems.
A new book called Preparing the Modern Meal is an urban history that explores these processes. We asked historian Devin Smart about his study.
What’s the colonial history of Mombasa?
At the turn of the 20th century, the British were expanding their empire throughout sub-Saharan Africa, including the parts of east Africa that would become Kenya.
Map of Mombasa Island, 1963.
British Library Collection/OUP
They built a railway that connected the port town of Mombasa on the Indian Ocean coast with the newly established Protectorate of Uganda in the interior. This created the foundations of the colonial economy and drove urbanisation.
While Nairobi grew in the Kenyan highlands, Mombasa became the most important port in east Africa. The city grew fast as people came to work at the railway, docks and in other parts of the urban economy.
After independence in 1963, cities like Mombasa carried on growing rapidly and more and more people started working in the informal sector, which included making and selling street food.
How did rural people get their food?
During the early 1900s, the cuisines of east Africa’s agrarian (farming) societies were mostly vegetarian. Much of the food people ate was grown in their own fields, though there were also regional markets.
These communities grew lots of staple crops like sorghum, millet, maize, bananas, cassava, and sweet potatoes. They also had legumes, greens, and dairy products as regular parts of their meals.
Ohio University Press
These ingredients were prepared into a variety of dishes, like the Kikuyu staple irio, a mash of bananas with maize kernels and legumes added to it. The Kamba often ate isio, a combination of beans and maize kernels, while the Luo who lived along the shores of Lake Victoria regularly included a dish called kuon as part of their cuisine. It’s a thick porridge of boiled milled grain (often millet), eaten with fish or vegetables to add contrasting flavours and textures.
In these communities, the daily meal was also defined by seasonal variety. Food changed depending on what was being harvested or what stores of ingredients were dwindling. These were also gendered food systems, with women doing much of the farming work and nearly all the cooking.
In my book, I consider the dramatic changes in how east Africans came by their food when they left these rural food systems for the city.
How was food organised in the city?
In Mombasa, they entered a food system organised around commercial exchange. My study is about Kenya, but the story it reflects is one that’s unfolded on a global scale.