We belong to a transitional generation. One foot in the memory of my grandmother’s kitchen, the other in the fast-food lanes of modern convenience.
We still remember those evenings when my grandmother insisted we eat brown sorghum ugali. It was thick, earthy, and filling. At the time, it felt like a punishment. We would sneak glances at my friends’ plates, where white maize ugali gleamed, softer and quicker to cook. Later, my mother’s kitchen leaned into that “modernity” — maize ugali with sukuma, or rice and beef. Sorghum disappeared quietly from our plates, like a forgotten guest who once carried the weight of survival.
At the time, we didn’t see the shift as dangerous. It was just the natural flow of things. But looking back now, it was more than just taste or convenience. It was part of a much larger story — one that began long before we were born.
The disappearance of sorghum and millet from our farms wasn’t accidental. It was shaped by history. During colonial rule in Kenya, indigenous crops were quietly sidelined, while maize, wheat, and rice were promoted as superior and profitable. Farmers were told these new crops represented progress. Markets, policies, and even relief food reinforced the shift.
The result? What was once the backbone of African food systems — sorghum porridge in the morning, millet ugali in the evening, cassava and sweet potatoes in between — was replaced. By the time I was growing up, it felt normal that sorghum was old-fashioned, even shameful.
Today, the consequences are everywhere:
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Hunger in abundance: Maize dominates our farms, but one bad season of armyworms or drought and entire regions face famine. In contrast, sorghum and millet, with their drought tolerance, could have kept us fed.
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Nutritional decline: Those “brown foods” we ran away from were actually richer. Sorghum carries iron and fiber, millet packs essential amino acids, while cassava is a climate-resilient calorie source. Replacing them with polished rice or maize flour left us with diets that fill the stomach but starve the body.
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Environmental degradation: Monoculture maize demands fertilizers, pesticides, and endless water. Indigenous crops, however, thrived naturally in African soils, protecting biodiversity and working with the ecosystem, not against it.
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Cultural erosion: My grandmother’s sorghum ugali wasn’t just food. It was a ritual, a rhythm of life, a connection to land and lineage. When that disappeared, part of our identity vanished with it.
Seed resistance, for me, is not a political slogan. It is the recognition that we were robbed — robbed of crops that sustained us for centuries, robbed of food systems that protected us from hunger, robbed of cultural pride tied to our seeds.
It is also an invitation: to bring back those foods, not as relics, but as solutions for today. Climate change is here. Hunger is real. Our communities are paying the price of over-dependence on crops that were never truly ours.
But there is hope. Across Kenya and Africa, there are movements to reintroduce indigenous crops, seed banks are being restored, and farmers are once again exchanging seeds the way their grandparents did. Youth are rediscovering the power of forgotten grains.
Seed resistance is about choosing life over dependency, biodiversity over monoculture, sovereignty over exploitation. It is about reclaiming the foods that once made hunger rare in Africa.
As I write this, I think of my grandmother. She may have seemed stubborn, forcing us to eat sorghum ugali. But maybe she was the last to fully understand that food wasn’t just food — it was survival. She was resisting without calling it resistance.
For my generation, the choice is clear. We can continue down the path of dependence, where our diets are dominated by imported and chemically produced crops that degrade our soils, pollute our rivers, and leave our communities vulnerable. Or we can take the harder, but wiser, path — to realign our food systems with indigenous wisdom, to embrace organic farming, and to rebuild a food culture that is healthy, sustainable, and ours.
The seeds of resistance are already in our hands. The question is whether we will plant them.
✨ This is not a call to conflict. It is a call to memory. A call to healing. A call to the soil. Because when we resist with seeds, we resist for life itself.
About Author: Kevin Makova
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