Feb 6, 2023
In the Bena village pictured, which I assume is in the Njombe region of Tanzania, one of the main cash crops is tea. German colonists introduced it in 1902, and the British created plantations in the 1920s. So the Bena have been growing tea for over a hundred years, but is what they know about the process of growing tea in Njombe "indigenous knowledge", since their ancestors learned that information from the British? Does the fact that colonialism changed them from subsistence agriculture to raising cash crops like tea make any of their knowledge about agriculture and land use "indigenous knowledge"?