Istwa Nou

Southern Cushitic speakers in East Africa domesticated the cowpea by the third millennium BCE, working independently of the West African farmers who had domesticated the same plant among Niger-Congo speakers. Two centres, two cultivated varieties, two language families, one continent, and both running at the same time. The West African variety is the one that travelled. It went east with the other African exports, reached India and kept going, and it is the cowpea that turns up in cuisines far from where it started. The East African domestication stayed close to home, which is why almost nobody has heard of it, and it is the more useful of the two facts for anyone trying to understand how agricultural invention actually works. Crop improvement went on in several African regions at once, in different ecological zones, among peoples of different language families, each of them responding to the ground in front of them.

Watermelon was well established in Egypt before the middle of the second millennium BCE, and the botanical remains say so. The word Egyptians used for the crop says something more. It was taken from Nilo-Saharan languages spoken upriver, south of Egypt, and the borrowing happened centuries before the earliest surviving specimens. Language keeps a record that dirt does not. A word crosses when people cross, which means knowledge of the crop reached Egypt earlier than any preserved seed can prove. The direction is the part worth holding onto. Egyptian borrowed from Nilo-Saharan, which places the crop in the hands of peoples to the south first and puts Egypt downstream in the cultural sense as well as the geographical one. Cattle keeping, sacral kingship and the older religion of the river travelled that same way, from the middle Nile northward. The watermelon on an Egyptian table was a Sudanese fruit that had been on the move for a very long time.