Jori Lewis was born in the plains of central Illinois, but she found her voice as an international journalist. For the past decade she has called Senegal home. It was there that she adopted a dog (Pepper), became acquainted with Senegalese culture, and began learning about the complex geopolitics of the peanut basin — a wide stretch of Senegalese farmland devoted to peanut harvest and production. It was the perfect setting for Lewis to incubate, write, and publish her critically acclaimed book “Slaves for Peanuts: A Story of Conquest, Liberation, and a Crop That Changed History.”
The book explores how the need for peanut oil across Europe sustained slavery in Africa long after the practice was banned in the Americas. Lewis’s writing was directly informed by her lived experiences in Senegal and her interactions with its people, whose rich history and narrative transcends French colonization. Lewis says her unique writerly lens has been shaped by her interest in the environment, and in the ways we learn about, interact with, and love the lands we call home.
I recently sat down with Lewis, who is currently spending the year as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at MIT, to learn more about her journey to becoming a published author and journalist. This conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Sarah R. Akaaboune: How did you find your calling in writing and journalism? What about this work is so meaningful to you?
Jori Lewis: I studied anthropology as an undergraduate, and my first master’s is also in the social sciences. And of course, I think it’s a really useful way to have those tools of participant observation and reading both cultural landscapes and spending a lot of time with people. I was studying historiography and how people were making sense of independence movements in the French Caribbean, and the sort of production of knowledge about those independence movements changed over time. I realized after I finished my master’s that I didn’t want to write in this really annoying academic way, and then even, like, the positioning of an academic paper, is usually relevant only to a handful of people, right? And then I somehow came back to journalism, and I had forgotten this skill, this thing I had, or even a desire to be a journalist, until I was like, I want to write things that people actually read.
SRA: Your book “Slaves for Peanuts,” has garnered a lot of praise. Can you tell me a little about your experience writing that book and how you landed on the interplay between agriculture, colonialism, and slavery?
JL: I’d been spending all this time in the peanut basin. I had been reading about the history of Senegal and thinking about that connection between slavery in the Americas and slavery in Africa. Specifically, I was thinking about the legacy of enslavement in Africa, and I think that’s kind of where the book started to take shape. I was also really interested in this kind of dramatic history of Senegal. What we learn starts with the colony and colonization and afterwards, decolonization. But there’s this other history before Senegal was a part of French West Africa. There were kingdoms, there were people who had their own reasons and motivations for what they did, that were both informed by these conflicts with the French and a lot of other things too.
I was starting to read about and learn about and think about that legacy of slavery — and thinking about the environmental devastation that had been wrought by the peanut…. Essentially, I was thinking about widespread monocropping and what it did to the landscape, and why this landscape in parts of the peanut basin and other areas felt so apocalyptic.
SRA: What kind of unique burdens did you face while writing about such a heavy topic? What things did you learn?
JL: I mean, there were so many burdens, like when a book project stretches from a two-year contract, which is pretty standard, to seven years, maybe eight. I had a lot of challenges. First, this is an archive driven book. But nearly as soon as I signed my contract, Senegal’s archives closed for a year and a half. I needed those archives because the book is narrative driven and in order to create a narrative, you need primary source material. France does have a microfilm copy of everything in the archives in Senegal, but microfilms are very difficult to use and they’re really a last resort. So I waited. There were so many ups and downs and it’s really hard to sustain momentum. And, of course, it’s really hard to support yourself for seven years while working on this one long project.
SRA: What led to you covering food systems, agriculture, the environment, and these topics’ undercurrents of colonialism in Western Africa in particular? What about this region of the world drew you there?
JL: It’s just my lens. I’m interested in the environment. I’m interested in our relationships to the environment. I’m interested in how we make meaning from the environment. Agriculture is one aspect of that, but not the only one, right? This is just the lens that I have, and this is how I prefer to think about the world. I unpack the story through that way, specifically about Senegal, because I had been studying food security and spending all this time in the peanut basin. The peanut basin was very interesting to me for all these reasons. There were just a lot of layers. And it’s because I’d already been doing that work. I am not a person who’s just going to be writing a simple history of decolonization. I would always probably take this lens that’ll have some deeper sociocultural element.
SRA: What future do you envision for reporting, literature, and stories based in the Global South? How can these regions of the world ascertain a sense of self and identity, distinct from Western ideals and projections?
JL: In a way, that’s not my question to answer. You know, it’s weird, because I do feel like I occupy a strange intermediate place. But I’m never trying to hide the fact that I’m an American, right? And it’s maybe through some kind of privilege that allowed me to set myself up and tell stories from the Global South, which is different from people in the Global South taking ownership of their own stories, right? It’s a complicated thing, right? I would say that I try very much to lift up local stories. So my book involves a lot of oral history. It involves a lot of civic leagues, historians, and other people whose stories are also important.
Sarah R. Akaaboune is a student in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing.
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