rukweza (finger millet)
2023 is the Year of the Millets as declared by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). For farming communities who live along the millet belt and are accompanied by EarthLore in Zimbabwe and South Africa, this pronouncement will mark a time of celebration of years of reviving this vital small grain.
EarthLore has long held this grain in high esteem and the communities we work with have come to value this robust, generous, life-saving crop. Our logo is crowned with the five-fingers of a finger millet head. The process of choosing our logo is an interesting story that will be shared in a future post.
In collaboration with various partners like the African Biodiversity Network (ABN), Seed and Knowledge Initiative (SKI), PELUM Zimbabwe, EarthLore has lined up several events on the 2023 calendar to celebrate and share stories of farmers’ journeys of bringing back millet. The celebrations started with the construction of tsapi in late March, a temporary facility to store millet heads before threshing, and will continue with a millet harvesting ceremony on 5 April 2023 in Chiroorwe community in the district of Bikita, Zimbabwe. It will be attended by EarthLore’s Programme Facilitator, Mashudu Takalani; EarthLore Board member and PELUM (Participatory Ecological Land Use Management) Zimbabwe Country Coordinator, Gertrude Pswarayi; Natasha Kusemamuriwo, who will document the event; and dignitaries, local government officials and other invited guests.
In 2015, when EarthLore started working with five farming communities in Bikita, hybrid maize was the staple crop. It was a period of severe drought and year after year anguished farmers watched their maize crops wilting and dying in the heat. For many years there was pitifully little, if anything, to harvest. Families went hungry and had to rely on food aid from the government to survive. The few farmers who planted millet were the only ones who brought in a harvest.
By 2017, many farmers in all five communities had witnessed the benefit of planting millet. As a group, they decided to change from maize and that season they planted their fields with millet. Despite extreme weather events, the harvest was bountiful and, for the first time in many years, families had enough food to last several months.
This was the start of a rapid revival of millet and reweaving the basket of life in Bikita. Each year new varieties of millet and other traditional seeds were added. Forgotten memories were reawakened and important lost knowledge, traditions and practices re-emerged and were joyfully embraced.
In South Africa, the revival of planting millet is more recent in Mazwimba, Venda, which is situated in the northern part of Limpopo province, bordering Zimbabwe. There are still farmers who remember planting millet in the mountains and they have been keen to bring it back. Millet is used to brew special beer, important for many ceremonies. Finger millet, in particular, is regarded as sacred.
For Mashudu Takalani, whose family roots are in Mazwimba community in Venda, millet is a very special seed that Africans cannot afford to lose. Her response to the Year of the Millets is that “it is so crucial to recognise this year of millet that touches many lives, including other species. Millet also connects Africans through different ceremonies that are held across Africa.
“Millet is a legacy that allows many African communities to maintain biodiversity within their homesteads and the wider wilder landscape, as it invites different species of birds and insects into an area. This diversity of life fosters biodiversity.
“Millet also builds community. It is labour intensive yes and thus requires the whole community to work together to grow, harvest and process a millet crop. In the process it builds cohesion in clans and in and between communities.
“The custodians of sacred natural sites and clans are also very important people who preserve these seeds because the rituals they are required to do cannot be done with seed that is bought. If we are to revive and protect different varieties of millet, it also includes reviving different activities integrally linked to the different millet seeds. There are some customary laws that are very specific to the elders and to young girls and boys, before puberty, who need to be looked after as they have an important role to perform in rituals that honour both the ancestors and the land.
We welcome the opportunity that the Year of Millets offers to share many exciting stories over the course of the next eight months.
