Staple Crops and Symbolism: How Religion Influences Cuisine Across sub-Saharan Africa
Lying south of Earth’s largest hot desert and encompassing forty-six of Africa’s fifty-four countries, sub-Saharan Africa is renowned for incredible landscapes, diverse populations, and rich cultural histories. With estimates of three thousand ethnic groups and over one thousand spoken languages, religious conviction is a uniting force across this vast area. Few are religiously unaffiliated, and whilst Christianity and Islam dominate, the syncretism of these Abrahamic religions with traditional beliefs a unique aspect to life in the sub-continent.
A key way this melding of religions can be witnessed is through local cuisines. Foodstuffs are used ritualistically, eating practices become religious in tone, and the protective power of spirits and ceremonies all demonstrate the influence of faith across this diverse continent.
A country where religion is of great salience in mealtimes and eating practices is the West African Guinea-Bissau. For many Guinea-Bissauans, religion is as much a statement about belief as it is ethnicity, with religious identity impacting heavily on cuisine. In a country where forty-five percent of the population is Muslim, practiced widely by the Fula, Soninke, Susu and Mandinka ethnic groups, Islam overcomes ethnic and linguistic differences through specifically Muslim dishes.
Kaldu di mankara (chicken with peanut sauce), kabeza di karnel (sheep’s head), and kabra (grilled goat with vegetable oil and tomato sauce) are favoured as distinguishable from Kristons, or non-Muslim, preferences. Adhering to religious taboos on alcohol and pork and eating halal foods purchased near the mosque further establishes Islam as a determining factor on accepted foodstuffs.
Furthermore, engaging with specific religious food practices is considered as a way to reaffirm one’s religious identity, and as a means of engaging in the umma (global Muslim community). Eating with one’s right hand, common across Guinea-Bissau and embedded within Islamic tradition, again enacts this virtuousness, entangling eating with faith as well as ethnicity. Cuisine thus embodies the multiple identities inhabited by Guinea-Bissauans − Muslim/non-Muslim, Guinea-Bissauan, African, Black − with these identities all being mediated by the experience of food.
The influence of traditional beliefs across sub-Saharan cuisine is another aspect where religion and food interact. Many actively participate in Christianity or Islam, yet also believe in witchcraft, evil spirits, sacrifices to ancestors, religious healers, reincarnation and other elements of traditional African religions.
The customs of the Mbeere in Kenya demonstrate how traditional beliefs surrounding human harmony and wellbeing implement food taboos within their society: pregnant women are forbidden to eat offal, gourds of milk, or drink bitter substances, highlighting the role that Indigenous knowledge plays in building a healthy body.
Other ethnic groups in Kenya traditionally prohibit pregnant women from eating eggs and reserve chicken meat for men and guests, drawing attention to how cuisine and traditional beliefs cross at gendered intersections within communities across the sub-Sahara, and how these beliefs are embodied by the pregnant female.
Celebrations are also where tradition and cuisine marry. The ritualistic sacrificing and feasting of goat in South African Nguni communities when a new-born arrives stems from respect for the spirits of ancestors, ensuring the child will grow and thrive. This again reinforces a relationship between food and religion, where sacrifices and feasts serve a greater purpose than simply sustenance.
Staple crops provide a further prism through which to understand religious influences on cuisine across the sub-Sahara. The reverence for rice across the region owes itself to many African histories and geographies including climate, colonisation and migration, yet religion here too has a grip. Across the Diola people of Guinea-Bissau, the Gambia and Senegal, rice symbolises ethnicity, continuity, ‘all that is traditionally Diola’, and is considered part of a promise with the supreme deity, Emitai.
This covenant encourages Diola farmers to work hard, cultivate the crop, and receive the nourishing rains from Emitai. Rice is thus used in shrines, rituals, and celebrations. The grains become deistic, anthropomorphised, embedded with religion even as communities turn to Christianity and Islam: the role of rice as integral to religious practices and celebrations is not lost.
However, the impact of climate change on communities dependent on this thirsty crop has meant a shortage of African rice for these ceremonial purposes. The Asiatic rice that is now imported to sub-Saharan Africa is deemed sufficient for satiation, but insufficient for celebration. The monumentality of changing environments is influencing religious practices right down to the tiny grain of rice, thus reinforcing the entanglement of belief and food with wider phenomena across Africa.
Whilst sub-Saharan African cuisine in all its variety and contextualisation cannot be addressed in a singular essay, reflecting on the way faith unites millions of people across the African continent draws attention to the role of religion in food practices. Islamic meals and mannerisms, Indigenous beliefs, and the symbolism of staple crops highlight the connection between ethnicity, gender, tradition, politics and climate change that all come to the fore on the dinner plate.