I have been reading Jori Lewis’s Slaves for Peanuts (Lewis, 2022), an impressive historical investigation that reveals how this humble crop took a big part in systems of coercion, colonial expansion, and plantation capitalism. Lewis demonstrates that peanuts were a commodity circulating within imperial economies, tied to the exploitation of enslaved people across West Africa and the Atlantic world. Reading this from Madagascar—where koba, our iconic peanut-based sweet, feels so culturally rooted—invites a deeper question: how did a plant native to South America become central to Malagasy culinary identity?

It took me years to summarize my very modest findings. I evidently didn’t read all the references and asked AI to corroborate some affirmations but I am sure you are going to enjoy my post.

Botanical, archaeological, and genetic research leave no doubt: peanuts (Arachis hypogaea) originated in South America. Studies locate domestication primarily in the regions of present-day Bolivia, Peru, and Brazil (Simpson et al., 2001; Krapovickas & Gregory, 1994; Moretzsohn et al., 2013). Excavations at Ancon and Ayacucho in Peru reveal peanut remains dating back more than 3,500 years (Pearsall, 2008). Europeans—mainly the Portuguese—were the first to remove the crop from its Indigenous American context. By the mid-16th century, Portuguese traders transported peanuts from Brazil to West Africa via the transatlantic trade routes (Carney & Rosomoff, 2009). From there, the crop traveled across the Indian Ocean to East Africa and maritime Southeast Asia, linked to the same maritime circuits that moved enslaved people, spices, and precious metals (Alpern, 1992).

Within slave systems, peanuts became what Lewis calls a “provisioning crop”: calorie-dense, protein-rich, fast-growing, and ideal for sustaining enslaved labor (Lewis, 2022). Historical accounts of the Middle Passage note the distribution of groundnuts as ship rations (Eltis, 2007), while plantation records in West Africa and the Caribbean show how peanuts became an inexpensive energy source for coerced workers (Carney & Rosomoff, 2009). In the Indian Ocean world, peanuts spread through Portuguese, Dutch, and later British colonial circuits, reaching coastal East Africa, Zanzibar, Mozambique, the Comoros, and Indonesia by the 17th century (Reid, 1993). By the time the crop reached Madagascar—through Indian Ocean trade, plantation agriculture, and later French colonial farming programs—it was already globally diffused, thoroughly embedded in systems of labor, empire, and circulation.

Madagascar as we already know took a big part in this. as a counter for provisions on the Portuguese way to the East. Therefore Malagasy foodways have long absorbed new crops—cassava, maize, sweet potatoes—transforming them through local techniques. Koba is a perfect example of this creativity: peanuts blended with rice flour and sugar (another colonial crop), wrapped in banana leaves, and steamed until dense and sliceable. But understanding the peanut’s transoceanic past reveals how each piece of koba sits at the intersection of long histories: Indigenous South American agriculture, European imperial expansion, African and Asian plantation economies, and Malagasy culinary innovation.

What makes koba especially fascinating is that its technique—compressing starch with sweetness, wrapping in leaves, and steaming—belongs to a deep Austronesian culinary tradition that long predates the arrival of peanuts. Comparative food ethnography demonstrates that Austronesian cultures from Taiwan to Polynesia developed a shared grammar of preparing portable, leaf-wrapped starch cakes (Bellwood, 2017; Blust, 2013). Under a viral video of a tourist tasting koba, commenters from Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Vietnam immediately recognized the kinship: dokono (Indonesia), suman (Philippines), bibingka (Philippines), bánh tét and bánh tét chuối (Vietnam), lepat (Malaysia), kulolo (Hawaii), binagol (Philippines), bintanok (Sabah), pais (Indonesia), hinompuka (Hiligaynon), and others. These dishes share a structural logic: a starchy base (rice, taro, cassava), mixed with fat or sugar, wrapped in leaves, compressed, and steamed (Mintz, 1985; Reid, 1993). When peanuts—an American crop moved through colonial violence—arrived in Madagascar, they slipped naturally into this Austronesian form. Koba thus becomes a historical fusion: a South American ingredient embedded seamlessly in an ancestral Austronesian technique, resulting in a Malagasy classic that embodies two vast oceanic histories in a single bite.

And perhaps this is where koba reveals something deeper about us. We Malagasy often imagine our traditions as timeless—anchored in our hills, valleys, lavaka, and ancestral enclosures; inherited unchanged from the Vazimba, the first Bantu settlers, and the Austronesian navigators. Yet koba itself is a perfect example of what historians call an Invention of Tradition: a dish that feels ancient and “purely Malagasy,” while in reality it fuses a South American ingredient carried along slave and colonial routes with an Austronesian technique of leaf-wrapping, steaming, and compressing starches.

And the story does not end in the past. Today, peanut cultivation—particularly voanjo gasy grown for domestic markets and export—drives significant deforestation in western Madagascar. In Menabe Antimena, conservation studies show that seasonal peanut farming (tavy for peanuts) is now one of the principal causes of forest loss, contributing to the rapid decline of dry deciduous forests (Gardner et al., 2018; WWF Madagascar 2017; Scales 2014). The same dynamic exists in Boina, where shifting cultivation linked to peanut production accelerates fragmentation of the remaining western forests (Vieilledent et al., 2018; Global Forest Watch, 2020). The crop that once moved through forced migrations now contributes, unintentionally, to a new form of erasure: the disappearance of ecosystems found nowhere else on Earth.

Just as our genealogies are layered—multiple origins, multiple crossings, multiple silences—our traditions too are the result of encounters, adaptations, and creative reinventions. Recognizing this does not diminish koba; it deepens it. It reminds us that our culture is not a static inheritance but a living construction shaped by centuries of movement, violence, resilience, and imagination. And perhaps acknowledging this complexity will help us finally write our history with more clarity, honesty, and compassion—for ourselves and for those, near or far, who carry fragments of our story.

References (Academic)

On peanut origins and domestication

Krapovickas, A., & Gregory, W.C. (1994). Taxonomy of the genus Arachis (Leguminosae).

Simpson, C. et al. (2001). “The origin and evolution of peanuts.” Plant Systematics and Evolution.

Moretzsohn, M. et al. (2013). “Genetic evidence of South American domestication of Arachis hypogaea.” Annals of Botany.

Pearsall, D. (2008). Crop domestication in the Americas. Academic Press.

On African and Atlantic peanut history

Lewis, J. (2022). Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History.

Carney, J., & Rosomoff, R. (2009). In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World.

Alpern, S. (1992). “The European introduction of crops into West Africa in precolonial times.” History in Africa.

Eltis, D. (2007). The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas. Cambridge University Press.

On Indian Ocean and Southeast Asian food circulations

Reid, A. (1993). Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. Yale University Press.

Mintz, S. (1985). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.

On Austronesian culinary techniques and cultural diffusion

Bellwood, P. (2017). First Islanders: Prehistory and Human Migration in Island Southeast Asia.

Blust, R. (2013). The Austronesian Languages. Asia-Pacific Linguistics.

Peanut-driven deforestation

Gardner, C. J., et al. (2018). The Rapid Expansion of Smallholder Agriculture in Western Madagascar: The Case of Menabe Antimena. Conservation Science and Practice.

WWF Madagascar. (2017). Etat des forêts et pressions anthropiques dans la région Menabe Antimena.

Scales, I. R. (2014). Conservation and Environmental Management in Madagascar. Routledge.

Keller, C. (2015). “Agricultural expansion and shifting cultivation in western Madagascar.” Journal of Land Use Science.

Forest loss and land-use in Boina & western Madagascar

Vieilledent, G., et al. (2018). Deforestation and forest fragmentation in Madagascar: 2000–2014. Biological Conservation.

Global Forest Watch. (2020). Madagascar Deforestation Dashboard (with sub-regional analyses including Boina).

Ingram, J. C., Dawson, T., & Baldini, A. (2015). Agricultural drivers of forest loss in Madagascar’s dry regions. Land Use Policy.