Popularizing Traditional African Foods for Industrial Development: Constraints and Opportunities

This paper attempts to identify, in a fairly general and, to some extent, impressionistic way the constraints and opportunities that would attend upon any endeavour to popularize or repopularize traditional African foods as one way of furthering industrial development in Kenya. Since popularizing implies increasing demand, the underlying principle in this paper is that before any large-scale effort to popularize, supply must be assured.

It is argued here that while actual shortages may turn out to be less severe than officially projected for 1989, shortages are nevertheless likely to be substantial; necessitating a considerable amount of food importation unless a herculean counter-measures are in the meantime taken. This likely shortfall in the supply of most basic foodstuffs complicates in many ways any envisaged campaign to expand the existing demand for traditional foods in the country. It is also likely to undermine any move to seize the industrial opportunities such a campaign may offer.

A number of possible complications and opportunities are discussed. Also discussed are normative, structural and aesthetic constraints likely to undercut the efforts to make particular dishes, or traditional dishes in general, more "popular" than they now are.  


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HERE TOO: A Sampling of African Foods


NOTE: 

1.This paper was originally presented at The First Kenya National Academy of Sciences (KNAS) Annual Symposium, held at Sirikwa Hotel, Eldoret, Kenya, which was held from September 17 to 22, 1984.

2. I have finally scanned and uploaded the paper to my blog on an "as is" basis, for whatever that is worth, in order to facilitate a wider readership without further delay. I have in that way avoided to the end, as I had done for some time already, the temptation to undertake minor or full-fledged editorial interventions in this pre-digital text, great as the temptation has on occasion been. It is my hope that the reader will find the essential content worth the while, despite the chaff.

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is a person dedicated to leveraging resources of one kind or another (or set of kinds) and first-order opportunities in order to create or expand second-order opportunities for value-addition or value-creation.

'Resources' in the sense used here include financial or physical or social or cultural capital, skills, talent, drive, insight, time space/geographies and other assets. 'First-order opportunities' refers to initial opportunities which, if seen and seized, lead to other opportunities. Thus, the opportunity to export oil (itself the result of successful exploration and the subsequent building of the requisite infrastructure and legal framework) avails the added opportunity to create wealth and jobs, and improve the general quality of life. Second-order opportunities are thus the added opportunities -- such as creating jobs, making a profit, enhancing community welfare, and being upwardly mobile.

Second-order opportunities may be, and indeed typically are, considered the "ultimate goals." And so be it. As I have said elsewhere, "You cannot have fruit if you don't grow fruit trees" -- unless, of course, someone gives or 'loses' or sells it to you, But what lies past the second order? That is, how are we to characterize third-order opportunities and those cascading beyond? The third-order, I would like to argue, is the beginning of self-creation and self-propagation; the beginning, in other words, of self-creating and self-replicating opportunities, and even resources.

That is the evolving idea I had in mind when I recently posed this crude CAT question to my Work and Industry class:

“When the ingenuity of well-educated or well-trained minds collides with the ‘hidden’ potentialities of an inter-connected world, the result is bound to be a wealth of self-creating jobs” Critically discuss this proposition, in terms of scholarly conversations about job-creation, wage-employment  and self-employment.

All in all, then, an entrepreneur -- when truly successful (and sometimes/conceivably even in failure) -- is a catalyst for civilization's self-replication and evolution in any field of human endeavor, and in any of society's ecologies of presence.


Notes: 1. Inferences relevant to this conversation can be derived from this useful text: Click Here  
           2. You may also want to read this text, and check the references .
           3. I find the imagery of the "sphinx" hexiamond to be an intriguing way to interrogate self-replication

Updated: May 22-23, 2013