Awakening the Seed of Kenyan Women’s Narratives on Food Production: A Glance at African Indigenous Technology

Abstract

This paper’s focus is the role of women in Indigenous Knowledge production, particularly, the use of Indigenous technologies. The study took place among Embu rural women in Kenya. During my research, I noticed the reliance that the women had on Indigenous ways of knowing, yet this knowledge was not part of what I would teach in the academy. By collecting and piecing together the shards of Kenyan Indigenous technologies is to recapture and legitimize a form of technology that is embedded in the cultural psychology and psycho-ecology of a community. This chapter strives to narrate my conversations with the women elders who felt that, I had been away for too long to be trusted that I would pass on this knowledge to the next generation. However, after rituals of mutual crossing, I was able to earn the elders’ trust, because I told them that my time in the West could not change the person I was and that the invisible thread that linked us should not be broken because I had a Western education.