Afro-Tourism: Land Restoration is Our Liberation
Agriculture is the landscape where we find a departure from this understanding of the wisdom of the Mothers in the United States. We find an agriculture that is industrialized to a massive scale. We find that the food that sustains us comes to our plates by the truckload from across the continent, through the labor of farmworkers who lack access to safe working conditions, adequate pay, and citizenship. (3) We find that conventional agriculture is eroding our topsoil, threatening keystone species (the honey bee), polluting our waters, and still leaving 1 in 5 Black Americans food insecure (4) The need for a dramatic shift in our agricultural system is undeniable; Afro-indigenous agricultural systems provide us with a sustainable way forward.
A grasshopper on top of flowering amaranth, the plant that yields the delicious Afro-culinary green, lenga-lenga.
Afro-Culture: a Long and Sacred Relationship
The Young Jupiter Women’s Afro-Tourism Center is committed to creating a restorative agricultural home that repairs the link between Black people and their cultural food ways. West African peoples were targeted by European enslavers for their extensive agricultural expertise (5) The legacy of forced labor on the land for people of the African Diaspora creates a difficult relationship to the practice of agriculture today. However, African peoples have a long and sacred relationship to agricultural stewardship that we at the Young Jupiter Women’s Afro-Tourism Center lift up as afroculture: the preservation and reclamation of African cultural practices of holistic, biodynamic land management and the Afro-culinary flavors, customs, and spiritualities tied to these practices.
Community members work in the garden at Our Community Place, a partner of the Young Jupiter Market Garden.
Photo: Holly Marcus, Harrisonburg Citizen
Natural, Organic, & Biodynamic Approach
Engaged community members will learn the necessity for our community to be involved in the process of fighting climate change by cultivating healthy food locally. We seek to create workshops teaching how to minimize the application of synthetic plant protection products (such as herbicides, fungicides, and pesticides) and synthetic fertilizers; encouraging healthier, sustainable farming methods elsewhere in the community. Specifically, the Young Jupiter Women’s Afro-Tourism Center will create on-farm workshops showing how we will deviate from the Green Revolution (the use of High-Yielding Varieties, the practice of monoculture, widespread mechanization, the contribution of agrochemicals).
Hope and Healing
Participants will engage in basic trauma awareness and resilience education through talking circles to connect and address care needs within the community. An African drumming circle will be offered as a method to bring community members into a healing space where they will be able to use vibration as a bridge to reconnect with our heart beats, our soil, and our spirits.
Sources
Gorbhani, M. (2015). “Afro-feminism in France: The struggle for self-emancipation.” Association for Women’s Rights in Development (https://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/afro-feminism-france-struggle-self-emancipation
Leons Kabongo, interview in March, 2021.
Farmworker Justice https://www.farmworkerjustice.org/
Feeding America; https://www.feedingamerica.org/hunger-in-america/african-american
Farming While Black (2018). Leah Penniman https://www.farmingwhileblack.org/about-the-book