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 at the gatherings of the community, 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 loved 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 look at the ingredients that make up today's mukimo, potato, maize, and beans, and the dish turns out to be less old than it appears.

All three of these crops came from the New World. They became available in the Kenyan highlands during the colonial period, roughly from the 1880s to the years around the First World War (1914), as British introduction spread. It was only once maize and potato had taken root in the fields at the foot of Mount Kenya and lay together within people's reach that the mukimo we eat today could come into being.

That mukimo is a communal, celebratory dish of the Kikuyu (Agikuyu) country of central Kenya is now settled. For a long time this picture of its origin rested on blogs and encyclopedia entries; it has since come to be supported by scholarship and primary sources. Jomo Kenyatta's ethnography Facing Mount Kenya (1938) recorded the Kikuyu's festive life from within, and the study of food habits by Hoorweg and Niemeyer (1980, Ecology of Food and Nutrition) described mukimo as a mash of potato, banana, and greens pounded together in the Nairobi-Kiambu area. On the place and the people, the sources speak with one voice: the Kikuyu of central Kenya.

The question that moves the story is when the present form came to be. A view often heard treats today's mukimo, of potato, maize, and beans, as an ancient dish carried on unbroken from before the colonial period. But these three leading crops are all New World foods, and they reached the Kenyan highlands no earlier than the colonial era, when British introduction ran from the 1880s to around 1914. Miracle's study of the spread of maize in Africa (1965, Journal of African History), the history of the potato's introduction to Kenya, and the arrival dates that Hoorweg and his colleagues recorded all mark this line in time. Today's three-colored mukimo cannot stand before the colonial period.

This does not deny all antiquity to the dish. 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 layer, in which such local crops were pounded and mixed, may well have existed. To set that older layer apart as a dish in its own right would need a source that records it under its own name, and none has yet been found; it stands as a matter for separate inquiry. Telling the old festive practice from the later form, into which the New World crops entered, is the point to keep in view when reading mukimo.