Why we should value food

Konkankoh, founder of the Ndanifor Permaculture Ecovillage in Bafut, exiled in Portugal because of the Ambazonia War, and Indigenous Elder from Cameroon, answers Laureline Simon’s question about what it means to be conscious with food. This dialogue is part of a storytelling project in partnership with Climate Illustrated, for the Conscious Food Systems Alliance convened by the United Nations Development Programme.

Laureline: Thanks a lot Konkankoh for accepting the invitation to this dialogue. We are very honored to have you. And jumping right in with the first question, I would love to hear what the word ‘conscious’ in relation to ‘conscious food systems’ means to you. What does a conscious food system look and feel like? How does this concept resonate with your experience?

Konkankoh: I look at it in terms of the two words: ‘conscious’ and ‘food’. I would take food first, because food to us, in our Indigenous community, it’s not a commodity, it’s a way of life. It’s really what epitomizes the whole culture of our people. And I once wrote an article called ‘The Love Economy:’ it was all about food. Because this is what shows how we are connected as a people, and how we are connected to our land. When I was growing up, what we called our world revolved around our village. We didn’t understand the world as it is, scientifically. So if I start with food, it’s because when there is peace, food is life. And I would break it down again, because water is important for our food, and if water is life, then food is also life itself. It does not need so many other tools: it is the economy. When people get together, it’s because there is something before them. And it is food. If, for example, I wanted to get married, which is a ceremony in itself in the community, I would have to bring food. When I was growing up, the concept of money was not important in the life of the community. So in terms of economy, you could see the standard of living of any family based on their capacity to feed people. For instance, if people are visiting, and we have to make a banquet, there are some people who will be able to feed these strangers. And these people have excess or abundance, so food is actually what shows that life is flourishing in a community. So then, connected to consciousness, food becomes a very important concept in the community, because young people are initiated to understand where their food is coming from.

Before I could walk, I spent hours on my mother’s back in the farm. So naturally, my consciousness started in a certain environment. Houses where the place where we come home to sleep. But generally, life was spent where life flourishes.

To explain the term ‘consciousness’, I would also like to talk about my own initiation in a spiritual forest. Some ceremonies are conducted in spiritual forests to bring consciousness between internal and external ecology. And consciousness is important because it is what makes us start to respect certain moral and ethical values. These values include our beliefs. If we believe that our food comes from our farms and from food forests, our life is integrated into nature. If you look at the forest, it’s part of our community. The trees, the rivers, the mountains, the stones, … And so we can conduct ceremony in the water, or the stones, or the Earth, because this is part of the community and every life flows as this system, as we understand it. Because we know that life is all interconnected. You could also see the relationship between the human beings and the animals. And it was funky, like real fun! If you went to harvest meals in the forest, you’d be fighting with monkeys for bananas. There was no fear between the animals and the human beings. So there was something connected. And in terms of consciousness, we now know that some things have to be blessed. In other words, we now have certain norms for which animals can be caught and eaten and which animals cannot be caught and eaten. And this is a fundamental basis of conservation.

So consciousness is also essential because without consciousness, life is not sustainable. That’s because we don’t know where we are coming from, and we don’t know where we are going to.

If you extrapolate it a little bit to the West, where I’m talking from today, I see that young people think that they have this chocolate from the supermarket. So how would they respect food? How would they know whether there were lives lost for them to see chocolate in shops in Europe? How would they know how the young people who are enslaved because of chocolate production even feel? Because the connection is not there. We cannot talk about consciousness without connecting both sides. It’s all about humanity, and not about a certain group of people. In order to respect the values of other people, or the cultures of other people, we will need conscious living as one people. And this begins to remove us from the boxes in which we are put, which create tensions and conflicts. You can name racism. Even when you look at it spiritually from the side of nature itself, climate change is a rebellion. It’s conflict in nature. These systems are clashing. Why are they clashing? Consciousness also asks of us to attain peace in the world. You can liken it to conscious breathing. When I hear about breathing, I remember that in our initiation, we were told to breathe as one breath, like the breath of life in everybody. It was like regulating the heartbeat of everybody. And it really is our breathing that makes us know that we are living. If you stop breathing you are dead. So, I wonder if there is a natural rhythm in life, which would ensure that we have a certain flow.

Laureline: Do you also see this breathing as creating peace, by connecting different groups of people and connecting them to life in general? Maybe, if we have this ability to imagine that all our breathing is connected, we can realize that we are breathing from the trees and that the trees are breathing from our breath, and we can start feeling the interconnectedness? And as you were talking about the youth in Western countries that have no idea where their food comes from or the amount of suffering that goes into producing it, I was wondering if you had ideas or recommendations about how we could make people who have not had the chance to grow up in villages feel this interconnectedness today.

Konkankoh: I would draw from my experience in regenerative agriculture, because plant consciousness flows in rhythms. There are natural rhythms in all life systems, but not in human consciousness. When it comes to human consciousness, there is a gap. The culture that considered itself superior excluded itself from the rest of nature, and dictated the principles of how they want every other being to align. So this kind of situation humanity created calls for something called equity in natural law.

If there is equity, trust can be built.

There is no better example than to describe the apathy of the enslaved who look at their masters with hate. There can never be trust in such a situation of exploitation. So in the Indigenous ways of life, we conduct ceremonies together, to coordinate the breathing of the community. Ceremonies create empathy for those who don’t have and those who have. As a result, there is nobody who feels a lack, and nobody who feels that they don’t belong.

Sometimes we have created systems of empathy that are capitalistic. Let’s take the word ‘aid’, for example. It does tell me at the receiving end, as a have-not, that I should be happy receiving something that I don’t deserve, because that’s how it is tagged. Actually if we are looking at life, I think there is an English adage that says something like: ‘even the dull and the ignorant have to have their own story’.  But if my own story is not important to you, how are we friends? You cannot be giving something to your back. You know that you don’t know. What do you know about the people? Who tells you they need your aid? Where they consulted when that magic word ‘aid’ was constructed.

So consciousness will require a new kind of regenerative education. I’m not saying it’s against the West. Everybody needs regenerative education because we have been subdued by the current education system. We went through it, and we consumed it, wholeheartedly, only to discover that it is the very cancer that is destroying us from within.

Laureline: I fully agree with what you said and the need for a regenerative education. And I am all the more sad that my kids still have to be part of a school system from which they will have to unlearn so much later on in life. Their young minds are being filled with upside down values of what matters in this life, how we can relate to one another and what nature is. And, I guess, at our level within One Resilient Earth, we are also looking at learning as a tool to change our relationship to ourselves, to one another, to the world in general. But then we are thinking about a totally different education system, right? I see it as taking place in nature. Is the word education even the right way of describing it?

Konkankoh: If I call it food education, will it make more sense? And maybe we should allow the kids to develop a new education for us. Can we trust the kids that they can? They may have an opinion about how they want food to be produced and consumed.

There is also a saying like, you can take a horse to the water, but you cannot force the horse to drink the water. What that means is that when people begin to realize that this is not good for consumption, this is not what they are supposed to be eating, they can begin to think of alternatives. I bring this up because

I started a community garden to complement the education that I criticize by making hands on education using Indigenous tools. I wanted to reconnect young people to the land, and I discovered that a real revolution had started.

This is probably why the small Ecovillage that I started in Bafut reveals an African spiritual framework. As a Westerner, you might have wanted to come to receive the education that was handed down to us from our ancestors, and that we consider the natural way of living. Our Indigenous food could also be an education to the West, who have imposed something on us called cash crops. You know, cash meaning money, which we never get although we spend so much time producing something that is not the thing. We would have rather had food sovereignty, if we had had a say about things, and had a chance to produce in a way that aligns with our values.

The spiritual forest can also be a good example. You never have a spiritual forest that is a monoculture. You have all the diversity in the world. And we know that diversity is the spice of life. Without diversity, all ills will come: it could be boring or it could be that any little thing in the system will destroy it. Because when you have permaculture, plants all support each other. And this is what you find everywhere in life. You go to the ocean, you don’t have only whales, only dolphins, or only crabs. So in a system where we now have food, which is the second pillar of life after water, and it determines our cultural outlook, you might understand why we eat in silence. It is because we honor food. While here, if people have a business meeting, they will be speaking over food. Because actually, it’s not about the food, it’s about the business. What do we give value to, in our lives?

Laureline:  It’s a good question for the Western world where we tend to put all our energy in making money so as to be able to survive or to shine. But then we live in in a way that many of us either don’t have the time or do not feel the need to spend time valuing the important things, giving back to others, experiencing this feeling of reciprocity, or practicing equity, as you mentioned.

Konkankoh: So can I ask: how is it that these high profile beings don’t even care about self-value? What is our own value if we don’t care about the things that give us value? What then are we chasing? Shadows?

Laureline: Yes, to a large extent. I think we have the belief that we live in a world of scarcity. We’re also taught to believe that unless we work a lot, we don’t have value, although our value depends on totally different things, such as our respect for food and for all people, as you said. I guess when people realize that, they are likely to go through a big existential crisis. They realize that everything they have been doing so far is totally meaningless and that things need to change. Yet, I can understand that many feel trapped in an economic system that forces us to align with these non-values all the time. It creates a huge tension between this awareness of where values are, and the fact that we still have to make money to live. It can feel really hard, especially when we have not learnt the skills that could help us stand for those values, and when everything we’ve been taught in school does not really help us become permaculture farmers for instance. I am also feeling the tensions I have within me between what you say that is so obvious and so true and so clear, and the fact that even as I try to have a different way of living, I still have to compose constantly with the non-values that the current system is built upon.

Konkankoh: Then I would have a question back about the tools of Indigenous people. Can they be valuable? Can they be experimented as we seek solutions? Why is it that despite all odds, these have-nots still feel so full and full of life? They don’t even have a concept of time. They spend all their time celebrating love and food, and dancing, and singing, as if the world would never end. I mean, there is no anxiety, or chasing life, like in the West. Here, I have a feeling that life is running very fast, we are chasing it, and every day, the speed is increasing. At the other end, people are more relaxed, and the world is not on fire.

Why are Indigenous people more resilient when it comes to the crisis, even when they are the most affected, like with climate change?

Or you can look at Covid. Africa seems to have been more resilient. I don’t know, but as an African, when I was growing up, people would not be told that they need to separate themselves from other beings like bacteria or viruses because they are all part of life. Actually, when a child was born for them to quickly gain immunity and resistance, the child would be put on the Earth. And then the child would start to forage and put everything in their mouth. I don’t remember those children ever falling sick. But when we start cleaning and saying we want purity like today, every other thing which is part of us is something that needs to be cleaned out. Yet we don’t attain purity. How have the Indigenous people I know in Africa survived Covid? They don’t even know about vaccines. So how did they survive?

Laureline: I don’t know. I can only imagine that there may be some local knowledge and practices that gave them access to better health and more resilience, as well as to a different understanding of time and of its value. I guess the situation you describe also explains why people in the West are curious about ancestral wisdom, or Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems and practices. There is a desire to see the world from a different perspective and to learn about different ways of being and doing that could help us address some of the challenges we now have in the West. I see it as people trying to solve some of the dysfunctions of the Western system with Indigenous knowledge, or as a wish to transition to a more Indigenous way of being in the world. But based on what you have just said, do you think that Western science and technology are of any use? Or do you think that there is so much to learn from Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems that Western science or technology should be left out of the equation?

Konkankoh: I’m putting my weight behind technology. Not because it is the only way, but because a post-pandemic world calls for connecting technology, or what we call ‘modern’,  and Indigenous. We do work with concepts of attaining better lives through the Sustainable Development Goals, and the goals set in the Paris Agreement. We experimented with what the Millennium Development Goals meant for Africa. Of course, Africa was never near any goal, so we would need a real world goal now. And I think the Covid crisis brings an opportunity. The world will never be the same again: as systems crash, something new has to emerge.

The question now is whether we, as humans, are now open to these heart-to-heart connections without hard feelings.

Laureline: And do you feel that modern technology can bring something that is missing somehow in Indigenous Peoples’ knowledge systems and practices? What would the role of technology be, beyond helping us connect? Maybe what I am asking is very complex, cannot be easily summed up, and could depend on the situation.

Konkankoh: There is nothing in the world that is either good or bad. It is the application of the thing that matters. If we take the case of atomic energy, it can be used for civic purposes, for development, or to destroy. The golden opportunity we have today is that we can talk across screens. When I was growing up, if somebody ever told me that you could communicate with somebody in real time across the world, I would have said that it will never happen. So everything in life is possible. It all depends on the way we direct technology. We should not use the world’s resources to barricade other people from this opportunity, because this is exactly what is happening. Indigenous people need technology.

That’s why I am working hard to see how we can bridge our worlds through technology, so that some people do not consider that either they are the only ones owning the world or that other people are completely on another planet.

Maybe the dark continent is not in this world? Technology should not be used to barricade other cultures out of the opportunity of a world resource. I can tell you how much African permaculture has benefited from being able to access information, and being able to share. So it’s actually possible to share best practices without assimilating, and without completely subjugating. Technology is the solution to the challenges of the world crisis. But I doubt that people use it right.

Laureline: As we are getting to the end of this interview, I am wondering if there is something you would like to add that you feel you didn’t have a chance to say.

Konkankoh: I am a bit at a loss because when we refer to the human spirit, many people are referring to religion. But I grew up knowing that a healthy spirit lives in a healthy body. And vice versa, a healthy body must have healthy spirit. So I spent my life developing a concept, the Ndanifor Permaculture Ecovillage, which won the Gaia Trust Excellence Award as the most inspiring project from the Global Coalition Work in Africa. It was simply because our values aligned with natural laws. And the values we lived by in Ndanifor are not different from Ubuntu. Most African Indigenous cultures live according to these principles because of the quest for a positive communion between humans. There’s probably a need to consider positive aspects from Africa.

Some people say that Africa is where everything started, and maybe, just maybe, there are some things in this cradle of civilization that we need to revisit.

The error of man is not to look back into history, and learn from the root causes of the mistakes that we are still making. We are the root causes of these mistakes. Well, that is something I would have proposed to the world, from my heart, from my own life experience. I have had both the African experience and the European experience. And I keep wondering: despite the unfortunate history, do we need to keep on repeating history? There is a chance. This, for me, is capital for the world. Despite Europe colonizing and devastating Africa, Europeans and Africans know each other. So the question will be about future relationships, connections between young people like you, and organizations like the ones you work for. A community of nations and a community of people is possible.

Laureline: And, if I may ask, does it take something specific from us, Europeans, in relation to colonization? You say we know each other, but we’ve essentially done lots of harm to Africa. I mean, that’s a form of… link. But is there something that needs to be done much more than what we are doing at the moment to ensure that we can have better relationships in the future?

Konkankoh: That is healing – so that there is no more guilt. Because people are being encouraged to carry their guilt, and that’s it. And I don’t know how much that is helping because I’m very much aware of the education that is being given to the young people in the West. And actually they carry wounds although these young people don’t even know this history. Why? Most are victims of a history that they did not make. When does this become an obstacle for them to make their own history? I mentioned relationships. It’s because this is the basis. Everything is related to everything. We haven’t gone very far in making connections rather than disconnecting. I would mention the word that I hear used so much: inclusiveness, inclusiveness. We are including people in our own concept, and excluding them from their own concept. What about if we used words like equity? And recognize that the consideration of superior culture, civilized people and less developed, less civilized and under civilized must go. What about we give value to what is valuable? Is it valuable to have a free Africa on board?

Laureline: Of course!

Konkankoh: So we are humans. And we have adopted a policy of hypocrisy in everything that we do because we are superior.

The heart does not recognize and cannot connect to hypocrisy.

That would be my last word.

Laureline: Thank you. Thanks a lot for your time, your words, and your wisdom. I do hope we’ll be able to continue to work together, to grow out of the current system, in a spirit of equity and community, where the laws of nature and our interconnectedness are acknowledged for what they are and valued.

Konkankoh: I also acknowledge that we are what we say and especially what we eat. So conscious food systems would be the conclusion.

Banner illustration by Carmen Garcia Gordillo for Climate Illustrated.