A Double Prelude to the Series “Farming in the Mirror”

“Do not remove the ancient landmark which your ancestors have set.” — Proverbs 22:28

“Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” –

Romans 8:21-22

Before we begin, a word about what this is—and what it is not.

This is the first post in a 10-part series drawn from years of walking fields, reading archives, crunching data and statistics, listening to farmers, and wrestling with questions that do not have easy answers. Grounded primarily but not exclusively in Malawi’s agricultural landscape, it is part memoir, part reflection, part invitation. These posts are not reports, though they are based on research. They are not manifestos, though they carry critique. They are a meditation on what it means to know the land—and to be known by it—in the midst of policies, metrics, funding cycles, and often-forgotten wisdoms.

Together, we will trace how agriculture—so often framed as a site of growth and innovation—has also been a site of extraction, erasure, and epistemic and ontological violence. But this series is not only about what has been lost. It is also about what remains. What resists. What refuses to die.

Each post will follow a thread: language, valuation, seed, silence, time. We will meet characters—some real, some remembered, some imagined. We will drift between policy meetings and kitchen fires, field notebooks and scripture, dreams and dashboards. At every step, we will ask what it means to listen well. To reclaim what has been buried. To till the ground of our own epistemologies and ontologies with care.

This opening post is offered in two distinct voices—two ways of knowing. The first is a narrative of memory and metaphor, crafted in the style of creative non-fiction. The second is an analytical reflection, grounded in political critique and conceptual clarity. You may read one or both. They speak in different registers, but share the same soil.

This is a journey into the heart of agricultural governance—but also into the soul of witness.

Welcome.

1.1    ✨ Part 1: In the Mirror of Memory

Creative non-fiction + ethnographic memoir + philosophical narrative

1.1.1   The Soil Remembers

On Seeds, Silence, and the Violence of Knowing

The story begins before the rains, with a woman listening to the land. It follows memory fragments, philosophical reflections, and imagined dialogues between farmers and systems. It ends with a quiet planting—curved, not linear—and a whispered prayer to the seed. The spreadsheet forgets. But the soil remembers.

1.1.1.1    Before the Rain

The sky is heavy with waiting.
In a village in Dedza, a woman crouches at the edge of her field. She presses her palm into the soil, then lifts it to her nose. Sniffs. Waits.

A small child stands beside her, barefoot.
“Amayi,” he asks, “why haven’t you planted yet?”
She does not answer immediately. She turns her face to the west and squints.
“The ground has not spoken,” she says at last. “It is not time.”

From a distance, a development officer might see this as delay. As inefficiency. But something deeper is happening here—something beyond scheduling, beyond metrics.

She is listening.

1.1.1.2    Field Memory

Years ago, I stood in a field with a man whose name I never wrote down. He wore a blue jacket too large for his frame and held a hoe like it was part of his body. He had just finished speaking at a farmer consultation meeting hosted by an NGO.

“They ask us what we know,” he said, half-smiling, “and then they tell us we’re wrong.”

I nodded, notebook in hand. But I had no words in response. I still don’t.

That sentence returns to me like a proverb.
It is not angry. It is not even bitter.
It is just… accurate.

1.1.1.3    The Mirror and the Mask

They call farmers the backbone of the economy. But a spine, too, can be bent.

Agricultural policy in Malawi is clothed in the language of productivity, resilience, participation, even co-creation. Reports speak of "inclusion" and "traditional knowledge integration.” Donors quote participation rates and cite partnerships. Extension officers distribute inputs while praising “indigenous wisdom.”

But somewhere in the folds of these compliments lies a quiet violence. A sweet poison.

The farmer becomes a symbol. An icon. A logo.

Meanwhile, their knowledge—‘messy’, historical, embodied—is sliced into data points. Translated into inputs and outputs. Compressed into tables that do not know rain delays, family funerals, or the scent of seed storage smoke.

This is not just technical. It is theological.
It is the substitution of relationship with representation.
It is forgetting disguised as progress.

1.1.1.4    The System That Speaks

Systems like NAMIS, the National Agriculture Management Information System, do not blink.
They process reports from the districts. They flag anomalies. They project national resilience scores.

A woman in Mchinji reports planting her groundnuts after the first rains.
The system marks her “late.”
The system does not ask why.

Her brother died that week. She buried him with her bare hands.

NAMIS records her yield.
NAMIS calculates her household food sufficiency.
NAMIS moves on.

She does not.

1.1.1.5    The Fogged Mirror

In this world, gaslighting doesn’t always feel like violence.
It feels like form-filling.
Like the soft echo of your own voice in a consultation you didn’t ask for.
Like being thanked for your participation in a project that has already been designed.

“You are free to use traditional seed,” says the NGO, handing out only hybrids.
“You can plant your own way,” says the extension officer, marking “noncompliant” on her tablet.

Over time, the mirror fogs.
Farmers begin to mimic the language of resilience.
Begin to report what is expected.
Begin to doubt the timing in their bones.

This, too, is a kind of forgetting.

1.1.1.6    Not All Resistance Is Rupture

Some plant secretly.
Some nod in meetings and ignore the advice.
Some quietly save kholiwa seed in jars tucked behind flour sacks.

But not all deviation is dissent. Not every refusal is resistance.
Some is economic constraint.

Some is exhaustion.
Some is grief.
Some is the dull ache of being misread for too long.

Some is the mistrust of years of unsuccessful yet prideful, unyielding and unrepentant social experimentation.

I do not romanticize survival. I do not mistake persistence for liberation.

But still, I have seen seeds planted with stubborn love.
And that, too, is something.

1.1.1.7    Technologies and Temptations

At a conference in Lilongwe, I watched a presentation on AI-based farm monitoring.
It was slick, efficient, impressive.
The satellite imagery was breathtaking. The dashboard showed yield prediction, drought alerts, even pest surveillance.

And yet—
No column for mourning.
No tab for ancestral calendars.
No space for a farmer’s silence.

Still, I do not reject it outright.
Not all tools are idols. Some may become instruments—if shaped with care, governed by justice, and guided by love.

It is not the presence of technology that wounds.
It is the absence of informed humility.

1.1.1.8    The Soil Speaks

Later that evening, back in the village, the woman planted her first row.
The child watched. The air smelled like memory.
She did not plant in straight lines. She planted in curves—like her mother taught her.
She murmured something under her breath. I did not understand the words.

It was not for me.

The spreadsheet forgets.
The satellite forgets.
The strategy document forgets.

But the soil remembers.
It remembers grief, and hunger, and fidelity.
It remembers the prayer whispered between thumb and seed.
It remembers the covenant.

It holds the truth.

We just have to listen.

1.2    📚 Part 2: Unearthing Knowledge — A Critical Introduction

Analytical essay introduction to the series

1.2.1   The Soil Remembers — Agriculture as Extraction

Once again, this post is the first in a 10-part blog series drawn from years of research and reflection on agricultural governance in Malawi and the postcolonial world. The series explores how agriculture—often framed as a site of development and inclusion—is also a site of extraction, erasure, and epistemic and ontological violence. Yet within the ruins of this system are seeds of something more: African agrarian knowledge, faith-rooted resistance, and a vision for just and relational futures. Each post unpacks one theme—language, valuation, resistance, or memory—to help us reimagine how we relate to land, governance, and knowledge in our time.

As we journey through these reflections, a caution is necessary: not all signs of deviation are acts of dissent. Not every local practice interrupts the logics of extraction. In fact, some forms of participation—though presented as empowerment—merely reproduce the structures they appear to challenge. This series is not an invitation to romanticize survival or reinterpret every tradition as resistance. Rather, it is a call to deepen our reading of agrarian life. To ask hard questions about where true epistemic and ontological rupture occurs—and where reclamation begins. This requires not just attention, but humility. Not just critique, but care.

The story of agriculture in Malawi—and across much of the postcolonial world—is often told in a hopeful language. A language of productivity and resilience. Of participation, co-creation, and pluralism. Development reports speak glowingly of inclusion and innovation. Farmers are invited to “have a voice.” Traditional knowledge is said to be “valued.”

But as I argue in this series—and in the research it’s based on—this language is inadequate. In fact, it often conceals more than it reveals. These terms can mask deeper forms of extraction, control, and racialized epistemic violence.

Pluralism, for instance, doesn’t just select what fits. It often refuses to name the colonial and racial foundations that still shape what counts as knowledge. It creates the illusion of openness while preserving a hierarchy of truths.c

We begin, then, not with solutions, but with a reckoning. With the soil—not as ancestor, but as witness. As record. As bearer of ancient marks.

From this reckoning, we move into deeper questions: How does data erase memory? How does language govern the governable? What happens when AI systems take on the task of classifying life? Can knowledge systems be reclaimed without being captured?

1.2.1.1    Extraction Revisited

Extraction is not just about minerals or oil. Agriculture, too, can be extractive. Not only in its physical demands on land and labour, but in its hunger for data—for knowledge that can be abstracted, standardized, and exported.

In Malawi, this happens through valuation systems—like measuring output in “international dollars”—that translate diverse local practices into foreign logics and linguistics. It also happens in development spaces where farmers are invited to participate in processes whose terms are already decided. Where knowledge is “co-created”, but only within the safe limits of pre-existing models.

But it’s not just governments and donors. Major agri-tech firms, seed multinationals, and digital platform providers shape the very language in which agriculture is understood. Their datasets and dashboards quietly determine what counts as a “yield”, what qualifies as “climate-smart”, and which farmer practices are “scalable”. They claim to mind their own business—just offering tools or technologies—but they operate as editors of agrarian reality.

Their neutrality is a myth. Their influence is linguistic colonialism in modern form.

And yet, not all technologies are born of erasure. Not all data is extractive. Some tools may yet be reclaimed and redirected—if they are governed by ethics, humility, and love. The challenge is not to reject technoscience outright, but to discern the spirit in which it is wielded.

The spreadsheet forgets. But the soil remembers.

1.2.1.2    Postcolonial Scripts, Colonial Foundations

Agricultural governance today walks in the footprints of empire. What we call modernization often replicates the rigidities of colonial rule: straight rows, uniform standards, and a suspicion of anything unmeasurable. The colonial agronomist’s blueprint is still alive in today’s policy frameworks, databases, and yield projections.

Even development buzzwords like “inclusive,” “climate-smart,” or “farmer-centered” rest on infrastructures that were built to exclude. Language becomes a tool not only of communication, but of control.

Farmers may be listened to. But they are rarely heard.

1.2.1.3    Toward Epistemic Reclamation

If agriculture has been a site of deep forgetting, it can also be a site of remembering. Of reclamation. Of recovering the ancient landmarks of agrarian wisdom—not in the name of nostalgia, but of truth.

We must ask: What does it mean to know the land on its own terms? To resist abstraction? To insist that seed saving, intercropping, and rotational fallowing are not just “local practices,” but serious philosophies of survival and progress?

This is the beginning of epistemic rupture—the breaking of inherited logics and linguistics that no longer serve. And it is also the beginning of repair. Of new covenant. Of healing.

1.2.1.4    The Africanization of the World

To speak of Africanization is not to ask the world to mimic African forms. It is to call the world to reckon with what it has erased—and with those who continue to erase. Today, it is not only governments and donors who shape what can be known about agriculture. It is also the data scientists hired by corporations, the AI tools sold as neutral solutions, and the platforms that decide which farmer voices are visible and which are not.

These companies often present themselves as mere facilitators—interested only in productivity, sustainability, or innovation. But they participate in the same infrastructures of erasure. By shaping the language, they shape the world.

And yet, this world can be unmade and remade. Even in the realm of digital systems and artificial intelligence, there is room for reimagination. We are beginning to explore how large language models (LLMs) and AI tools might serve not empire, but justice. Not abstraction, but rootedness. Not domination, but care.

Technology must not become a god. But neither must it be cast as evil. Like the seed, it must be tested by its fruit.

The agrarian imagination in Africa is not backward. It is prophetic. It offers an alternative to burnout, to extraction, to the endless search for growth at the expense of grace.

The soil holds this memory. Not because it is sacred in itself, but because it has been marked—by violence, by survival, by love.

It holds the truth.

We just have to listen.

1.3    Coming next: Post 2 – The Grammar of Control: How Language Colonizes the Land

We’ll explore how terms like “extension,” “input,” and “smallholder” shape what can be known and governed—and why translation itself can become a form of domination.

30th March 2025