Africa's reliance on industrial agriculture reflects colonialism, inequality, and the erasure of indigenous knowledge, while intensive farming has driven soil degradation, environmental harm, poor nutrition and economic exploitation. Restoring agricultural sovereignty requires reclaiming indigenous knowledge, addressing land inequalities, and shifting toward regenerative 'landculture' centred on soil health, biodiversity, food security and community wellbeing.

Across Africa, modern industrial agriculture is celebrated as a triumph of scientific efficiency, technological progress, and global economic integration.

We are urged to embrace high-tech solutions - from satellite-guided tractors and autonomous drones to artificial intelligence and proprietary hybrid seeds - as the only path toward feeding a growing continent. Yet beneath this narrative of technological modernisation lies an unsettling reality: the systematic erasure of African agricultural history, the devaluation of indigenous knowledge, and the entrenchment of a racist, class-based agrarian structure that harms both human populations and the ecosystems that sustain them.

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Africa's ongoing agricultural crisis is not simply a technical failure of yield optimisation or distribution. It is the living legacy of a capitalist-colonial-industrial system that treats soil as a commodity to be exploited rather than an ecosystem to be stewarded. Restoring Africa's agricultural sovereignty requires confronting the structural inequalities of race and class that govern our land, dismantling the ongoing epistemicide of local ecological knowledge, and transitioning from extractive agriculture back to indigenous landculture.

Erasure of African agrarian history and epistemicide

A foundational myth of European colonialism is that Africa lacked agricultural innovation prior to Western contact. Colonial and imperial discourses constructed a hierarchy in which non-white,...