Overview
Cassava has been celebrated as a vehicle for African development. As a drought-resistant crop, cassava has been hailed as a solution to food insecurity during ecological and climate crises. Aspirational plans seek to convert the starch within the hardy tubers into industrial products and biofuels. Yet, this optimism for cassava’s potential belies an often fraught colonial history. In the West Nile sub-region of Uganda, the British Protectorate government introduced the crop as a biopolitical solution to hunger. It was a means to maintain bare life in a remote region deemed economically unproductive with respect to the wider nation-state. The unpredictability of the plant itself matched the turbulence which accompanied its introduction. The defence mechanism which makes the crop durable also makes cassava hard to consume – tubers contain toxic hydrogen cyanide.
This project is invested in how cassava might serve as a vehicle to understand the frictions around health and health-related interventions from the colonial period to the present in this border region. Through ‘plant history’ and archival research, it maps an archive of bodily effects onto political economic changes, as cassava moves from subsistence to a vegetal which becomes entangled in classed and gendered dynamics of cultivation. It asks how we might understand the toxic within this context and how we might hold the unruly qualities of a crop as it is drawn into differential human relations based on terms of survival, production, and innovation in an African borderland.
This grant is a collaboration between Elizabeth Storer (QMUL), Charlotte Brown (LSE) and Professor Robert Kajobe (Muni University). Seed funding for this research has been provided through LSE's CPAID, Queen Mary's IHSS Seed Fund and a British Academy Small Grant.
Elizabeth Storer
Elizabeth Storer is currently a Lecturer in Health Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. She was previously a Research Fellow at FLIA (21-23) and continues to hold a Visiting Fellowship at the Institute. Elizabeth’s research, which has been funded by AHRC, ESRC and the British Academy, uses ethnographic methods to trace the connections between borders/ bordering mechanisms and health outcomes. She maintains active research connections to people and institutions in the West Nile sub-region of Uganda, but also conducts research in the UK context.
Charlotte Brown
Charlotte Brown is a PhD student at the Department of International Development at LSE. Her doctoral research focuses on the fractured mobilities resulting from humanitarian policies in Uganda. Her research interests are humanitarianism, mobilities, gender; and areas of interest are Uganda and South Sudan.
Professor Robert Kajobe
Robert Kajobe is the Director DGTRI and he is also a Research Professor at Muni University. Robert was the founding Dean of the Faculty of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences in Muni University (2020 to August 2022). Before joining Muni University, Robert worked at the National Agricultural Research Organization in various capacities including being the founding Director of NARO’s Rwebitaba Zonal Agricultural Research and Development Institute.