Land Justice: Re-imagining Land, Food, and the Commons

by Justine M. Williams

We grow crops that connect us to African heritage and speak to our experience in the diaspora. Black-eyed peas were our common bean and sorghum was our mother grain, fit for our DNA and also appropriate for the changing climate. We grow the black peanut from South Carolina that the Gullah people cultivate and eat. Newsome has revived and innovated ancestral intercropping strategies, putting together the “three more sisters” of sorghum, sweet potato, and field pea (Bolden-Newsome 2016). Like Newsome, Fleming uplifts Afrocentric pedagogies and farming techniques on her farm. She uses drumming, call and response, storytelling, and Djare (talking stick). Their bread ovens are made of clay and the learning center is built with a thatched roof, like the indigenous people of Guyana. Fleming is also conducting trials on the impact of electromagnetic energy from Giza-style pyramids on seed germination rates and crop growth. “All of those are African centered ways of farming and being,” she says (Fleming 2016).

Alive ethnoscape