Rank: Veteran Joined: 1/10/2015 Posts: 961 Location: Kenya
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Seems agriculture was very developed in kikuyu country in the 1800s, many yrs before colonialism. Entry into kikuyu country Pg 302 Quote:A little further tramp uphill through the narrow belt of primæval forest which forms a natural frontier encircling the whole of Kikuyuland, and we found ourselves on its inner edge, looking down upon a charming landscape, with nothing to recall the dense woods with which it had once been covered but here and there a group of trees or a few stumps some three feet high . From the picturesque little groves still left rose columns of smoke, betraying the presence of native settlements, whilst all around them as far as the eye could reach stretched well-cultivated, undulating pasture-lands, which were a revelation to us, explaining the ease with which the Wakikuyu can supply the needs of the largest caravans. Pg 315 Quote:In the ravines and valleys flow insignificant streams, and the country is almost bare of trees , but very well cultivated , the more humid valleys with sugar-cane, more rarely with bananas or colocasia ; the hill- slopes with potatoes, beans, gums, millet, tobacco , and so on. Pg 332 Quote:During our march here (within wakikuyu country) we had passed through districts so carefully and systematically cultivated that we might have been in Europe. Pg 352 Quote:In the light grey volcanic soil of Kikuyuland grow nearly all the cereals native to East Africa, and it is , in fact, the granary of a very extended district. Several kinds of bananas are grown as well as beans, sugar- cane, maize, potatoes, yams, eleusine, dhurra, millet (Panicum italicum , L .), mawale ( Pennisetum spicatum ), gourds, colocasia, and tobacco . Of course all these are not equally distributed, millet, beans, and potatoes being most plentiful in the south , whilst bananas abound in the north and millet is entirely absent. The occurrence of millet in Kikuyuland is of peculiar significance , as it has not so far been met with elsewhere in Africa.
Bananas are seldom allowed to become ripe, and we could rarely get them . They are picked when still green and either cooked for food or dried to make flour. Dhurra, eleusine, and yams are also used for flour. Sugar- cane thrives admirably here, but it does not grow to the great height it attains in tropical lowlands. The natives chew it and also sometimes make it into an intoxicating beverage.
The Wakikuyu are not only zealous agriculturalists, they also keep bees and breed cattle, sheep, poultry and goats - occassionary castrating the rams - which they are willing to sell, though it is difficult to get them to part with their cattle. Proverbs 13:11 Dishonest money dwindles away, but whoever gathers money little by little makes it grow.
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