Decolonising: African diet in 1500 BC

Common bananas, chickens, Chinese rice & corn all came from southeast Asia, China & the Americas respectively. They arrived in Africa around the same time of the European colonisation of Africa in the sixteenth & seventeenth centuries AD but we definitely had our alternative fruits & cereals that we either planted or found in the wild on the continent.

This is a list of foods Africans are said to have eaten in 1500 BC:

• Fish

• Cattle & milk

• Fonio & black fonio (A type of rice)

• Guinea rice

• Yam

• Ensete & noog (i. e. Ethiopian banana & niger seeds)

• Teff (a grain/cereal of Ethiopia)

• Groundnuts

• Sorghum

• Pearl/Bulrush millet

• Finger millet

African cuisine

History of the Mpofana by Mthoko M. Mpofana

I'm not very traditional, I'm more straightforward & basic & often disregard cultural nuances so this history of the Mpofana tribe is going to be as direct & concise as possible. Growing up, I grew up knowing that the clan praises or izithakazelo of the Mpofana are "Zulu" & "Ntombela", I never questioned that. What I know now for sure is that there's a lot more that's hidden in history. What I keep seeing being repeated from various sources is that the Mpofana were part of the Amazizi (or AmaTiti) tribe. I now know that in the midlands & perhaps further north, up to the northwestern parts of KZN, they use the greeting "MaZizi okuhlala", perhaps alluding to the fact that the Mpofana as well as other Amazizi tribes were among the original tribes to settle in present-day KZN from 200 AD onwards & the "Dlamini" praise or greeting was used among all Dlamini tribes i. e. the Amahlubi, Amazizi (Mtiti), Hlangwini...

Black, Red & Green...

The black, red & green flag or variations of it has been a symbol of black/African emancipation since the 1920s. The most popular version is the Marcus Garvey created "Pan-African flag" which has red on top, black centre & green at the bottom. These colours are used in official flags of a few African countries which are: Kenya, South Sudan & Malawi. I do not believe it's an ethnic flag as many ethnicities use it & could vary in symbolism for various lands but for me, it could be; black for the night sky or people of that land, red for the blood of that people's forefathers & green for the land of those people. It is also used as the flag of the Biafran independence movement. Kenya. South Sudan. Malawi. In South Africa; the horizontal colour scheme is also used by the IFP's student brigade called SADESMO. In the Arab world, it has been used by the Kingdom of Libya (1951) & vertical colour s...

The modern Zulu language.

I always wondered which of the many Zulu dialects modern Zulu is & always thought it was Hlubi (isiMbo) & according to this thesis by a Mr. Isaac Sibusiso Kubeka written in what was apparently 1979, we see modern Zulu is more the original Ntungwa dialect. The Mthethwa dialect (isiLala) that was likely spoken by King Shaka looks more a Tsonga dialect from a Zulu-speaker's perspective. Despite the "Zulu area" speaking many dialects, I'm of the belief that these dialects were mutually intelligible & similar for the most part. This is the only way these Nguni tribes from southern Mozambique up to Umzimvubu River & inland into the Drakensberg Mountains up to Gauteng could understand each other because I, genuinely, think that it was seldom that an African travelled to a land where he couldn't speak the local language in precolonial times. Mild differences between Zulu dialects. Writing Zulu I remember reading a book written in 1930 by ...

What's on Mthoko's mind?

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