Why Africa’s agricultural crisis is a matter of race, class and epistemicide

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.

Nazeer Sonday is a smallholder farmer, Chairman of the PHA Food & Farming Campaign, a community-based organisation working to protect Cape Town’s 3,000-hectare Philippi Horticultural Area and the Cape Flats Aquifer. He practises Indigenous Regeneration at Vegkop Polyculture Farm.

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.

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.

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, non-Christian peasant knowledge was rendered invisible or dismissed as primitive folklore. Where sophisticated indigenous practices were acknowledged, they were frequently appropriated by Western institutions and rebranded as modern discoveries.

This deliberate destruction, silencing and devaluation of indigenous knowledge systems – a process known as epistemicide – continues today. History tells a very different story about African agrarian capability:

The Terraces of Bokoni: On the Mpumalanga escarpment in pre-colonial South Africa, the Bokoni civilization constructed massive, stone-walled terraced settlements between the 1500s and 1820s. Operating complex mixed farming systems of livestock, sorghum, and millet.