African Food Production and Domestic Animals

Key Insight

Africa's food staples originated from diverse sources, with five sets of crops being grown by the 1400s before European colonization. North Africa, with its Mediterranean climate, cultivated crops like wheat, barley, peas, beans, and grapes, first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10000 years ago. South of the Sahara, in the summer-rain Sahel zone, indigenous crops like sorghum and pearl millet were domesticated, becoming staples for much of sub-Saharan Africa. Ethiopia's highlands yielded unique crops such as ensete, noog, finger millet, teff, and the globally significant coffee plant. West Africa's wet climate fostered crops like African rice, African yams, oil palm, and kola nut, which contained caffeine and were chewed long before Coca-Cola.

A significant surprise is the widespread presence of Southeast Asian crops like bananas, Asian yams, taro, and Asian rice in sub-Saharan Africa by the 1400s. Their existence, alongside the Indonesian colonization of Madagascar (over 4000 miles from Borneo by sea, by A.D. 300-800), highlights a prehistoric Asian connection. Intriguingly, all of Africa’s indigenous crops—those from the Sahel, Ethiopia, and West Africa—originated north of the equator, with not a single one from south of it. This geographical accident meant that southern Africa’s wild plants were largely unsuitable for domestication, preventing the Khoisan and Pygmies from developing agriculture independently, a factor exploited by farmers from the north.

Africa's domesticated animal species are remarkably few. The only animal definitively domesticated in Africa, due to its wild ancestor being confined there, is the guinea fowl. While domestic cattle, donkeys, pigs, dogs, and house cats may have been domesticated in North Africa, they also have wild ancestors in Southwest Asia, making their precise origin uncertain, though early evidence for donkeys and cats favors Egypt. All other African domestic mammals, including sheep, goats, chickens, horses, and camels, were domesticated elsewhere in Eurasia and introduced. Notably, none of Africa's famous large wild mammals—like zebras, wildebeests, rhinos, or hippos—were ever domesticated, a reality that profoundly impacted African history.