Mukimo Period COrigin theory CVerified

Mukimo is a dish of the Kikuyu (Agikuyu) people who live in central Kenya, around Mount Kenya. It is a mash of boiled ingredients pounded and mixed together, and the name mukimo comes from the act of pounding, kima. It has been made and shared when the community gathers, at weddings, circumcision feasts, and other celebrations. During the Mau Mau uprising in the years of the independence struggle, it is said to have been carried to the front as a food that kept well. Today it is eaten across the whole of Kenya, well beyond the central region.

On where the dish began and who made it, the sources agree: they point to the Kikuyu country of central Kenya. That much is firm. But the ingredients that give today's mukimo its shape — potato, maize, and beans — all came from the New World.

The potato was brought to Kenya in the 1880s, by British farmers and colonial officials. That was first of all a matter of the settlers' fields; African farmers came to grow potatoes for their own tables somewhere between the turn of the century and the years after the First World War. Maize reached the highland fields only in the twentieth century, around 1914. Once these three stood together in the fields at the foot of Mount Kenya and lay side by side within daily reach, the mukimo we eat today came into being.

Mukimo is pounded in a great pot in the Kikuyu (Agikuyu) villages that look up to Mount Kenya, whenever people gather for a wedding or a circumcision feast. Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography Facing Mount Kenya (1938) set down that festive life and the table that went with it. On the place and the people the sources speak with one voice, the Kikuyu country of central Kenya, and no rival account assigns the dish to another people.

The story moves when you ask when the present form began. What is often said is that today's mukimo, of potato, maize, and beans, is an ancient dish carried on unbroken from before the colonial period. But all three of these leading crops came from the New World. The potato was brought to Kenya in the 1880s by British farmers and colonial officials, and by 1909 European growers were shipping it out, mostly to South Africa. That was the settlers' side of it: African farmers are recorded as beginning to grow the crop for home consumption after 1918, and as late as 1920 the potato was described as spreading rapidly among African farmers in the highlands. Hoorweg and Niemeyer, who studied Kikuyu food habits (1980), instead place the introduction of the potato at the turn of the century. Whether the potato entered Kikuyu household pots around 1900 or only after 1918 is a point on which the sources disagree; either way it is later than the 1880s, when it reached the British farms. Maize spread through the fields of the Kenyan highlands at the start of the twentieth century, around 1914.

None of this denies the dish its antiquity. By Kenyatta's account, the pre-colonial Kikuyu table rested on millet and beans, with local crops such as green banana, yam, and taro alongside. An older form, in which such local crops were pounded and mixed together, may well have existed. No source recording that older form under a name of its own has yet come to light. The gathering of people for a feast and the pounding of a great pot are old; the three crops now in the pot joined it later.