By Imani Spencer •
Last October, Black Kreyol educator, author, and food justice activist Leah Penniman released Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land, a 355-page-gloss-covered book that details the history of agriculture among Africans and offers guidance to African descendants who aspire to grow.
Penniman serves as co-founder of Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York⏤a Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) centered community farm committed to ending racism and injustice in the food system. The farm, founded in 2011, operates a low-cost fresh-food delivery service for people living under “ food apartheid.”
The guide presents evidence of race-based discrimination and violence that has led to the major decline in African-American farmers. In 1920, black growers made up 14 percent of the grower population. Today, the numbers have dwindled to less than two percent. This decline, the book explains, directly relates to the loss of over 14 million acres of land among members of the black community. Despite the major decline, the existing African-American growers throughout the nation continue to grow, harvest, and heal by way of the land.
Among the present-day percentage of black farmers are Dr. Nazirahk Amen.
For over 20 years, Amen, a naturopathic doctor, homeopath, and Chinese Medicine practitioner has practiced as a naturopathic healer. His journey began as a child in Louisiana where he was hit by a truck, taken to a hospital, and racially insulted by the head doctor, a white man who happened to be the father of the driver who injured Amen. He decided to become an Emergency Medical Technician as a student at the University of Louisiana.
Eventually, after a personal struggle with drug addiction while in school, academic redirection, and introduction to farming, he began to study to naturopathy healthcare.
Today, he treats patients with various ailments at the Wisdom Path Healing Center in Takoma Park, Maryland. As a healer, he teaches people the energetics of food. In traditional cultures, such as in African, Amen explained, people view things from an energetic perspective. This aspect of understanding has been lost in America, he continued.
The consequence is that people are unaware of how to treat themselves using flavors. Each taste value, such as sour and bitter, has a specific temperature function in combating diseases.
“When you teach people energetics, they can empower themselves. And that way, you’re not giving them a ton of nutritional supplements,” Amen said. “You’re actually getting them to help heal themselves through their diet.”
In addition to an imbalanced nutritional culture, people in the United States also have a fear of death, Amen explained. This fear, which he considers to be the greatest of them all, can be alleviated through farming and the acknowledgment of the patterns that exist within nature.
“Farming and gardening connect you to the natural cycles of nature. Through farming, people can overcome their fear of death, because, in nature, there is winter, but the spring always comes after winter,” Amen said. “Meaning, there is death, but there is also rebirth.”
Amen began to farm during his early days as a graduate. It was there that he realized the healing properties of the activity and incorporated into his life. As a healer, Amen deals with patients who are sometimes at their worst physically, spiritually, and energetically. Due to the close proximity, he is susceptible to absorbing the energy he said. The land, however, is also his means of personal treatment. When farming and gardening, he is able to restore himself.
“For me, as a healer, I deal with people, I deal the worst of people sometimes. But I can bring all of that energy to the soil and just let it go and it just absorbs it and it’s gone.”
In an early part of Farming While Black, Penniman described her experience of living in a “food desert,” while residing in Albany, New York.
As defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), a food desert is an area with limited or no access to fresh fruit and vegetables. These communities, urban and rural, reside more than one mile from a supermarket or large grocery store.
In 2009, 23.5 million people lived in food deserts, according to the USDA Economic Research Service. Nearly half of these residents were also considered low-income. Today, in the nation’s capital, food desertion remains a major issue.
Food deserts span 6.5 miles of the District of Columbia or 11 percent of the entire city. Juxtaposed with the lack of access to grocery stores, corner stores and carry-outs overwhelm the neighborhoods⏤a disparity that Penniman considers to be a direct cause of health ailments among the black community, such as diabetes, obesity, and heart disease.
Yuma “Docta Yew” Bellomee, 37, a local DC holistic health consultant and herbalist, is witness to the food desert epidemic and seeks to combat the issue through holistic healing.
Among issues of nutrition in the black community, Bellomee explained, processed foods are one of the leading problems.
“[Foods] that are taken out of its natural state, I think it what is doing the worst to us as people, health-wise, in terms of physical items,” Bellomee said.
“Next to that, I would go to the animal products. The meats, the dairy products, the yogurt, eggs, and so on and so forth. Those things that are known to create a lot of acid build, mucus build in the system,” Bellomee continued.
As a healer, Bellomee has seen people eliminate processed foods only and have more success than others who go vegan or plant-based but still consume chemical-based foods.
“I think it's more important to eat closer to nature, what’s natural for us, as opposed to chemicalized things that are masquerading as foods,” Bellamee said.
Among the issues that Bellomee has treated includes brain tumor, fibroid tumors, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, bronchitis, cysts, and seasonal allergies.
Bellomee is not surprised by the seemingly rapid rise of interest in natural healing among African-Americans. The practice is ancestral, he explained. It is only natural that black people return to the ancient way-of-being.
“It doesn’t surprise me that African people are gravitating back towards utilizing herbal medicine, because it's embedded in our culture. it’s embedded in our history, and it’s embedded in our DNA,” Bellomee said.
According to a 2007 study, African-Americans are less likely to trust mainstream physicians than their white counterparts. These high levels of distrust are associated with “lower” socioeconomic status, including lower income, lower education, and no health insurance. The research notes that the it is “widely believed” that trust has declined over the past 40 years in most segments of U.S. society, including healthcare.
“Disclosures of prior episodes of unethical medical research” is among the factors contributed to the decline. The stolen cells of Henrietta Lacks by Johns Hopkins Hospital gynecologist Dr. Howard Jones in 1951 and the syphilis experimentation on 600 black men by the Public Health Service from 1932 to 1972, known as the Tuskegee
Experiment, are two well-known cases of malpractice of black patients.
Bellomee considers herbalism a form of resistance for people of African descent. It empowers patients to care for themselves without the threat of "race" based mistreatment historic to mainstream healthcare.
“This medical system and system of healthcare is a major mean of our oppression. And I don't think a lot people realize to what extent,” Bellomee said.
Born just across the Chesapeake Bay in Dorchester County, Maryland abolitionist, activist, and herbalist Harriet Tubman used plants to heal Union soldiers during the Civil War and to care for Africans escaping to freedom on the Underground Railroad. In Farming While Black, Penniman honors this master herbalist with a passage on her practice.
Once, the text reads, Tubman successfully cured a soldier who was in near-death condition due to dysentery. With a medicinal infusion made from lilies and cranesbill, she was able to save him. While traveling North, Tubman also used her knowledge of herbs passed on from her grandmother to make a paregoric⏤a medicine used to sooth pain⏤to quiet babies.
Also in the field of child-related work is Talibah Ndidi, a natural health educator and herbalist located in Maryland. Ndidi is the founder of Urth Herbs Organic Herbal Company, a health store that offers herbal products, and director of Divine Wombs For Life, an organization that offers various holistic health-related resources, such as information on the ancient practice of womb pulsing and access to Ndidi’s e-book, Womb Sense.
While a student in Los, Angeles, Ndidi learned to formulate herbs for women with reproductive health ailments. In the process, she discovered that she, too, had developed a health issue. Rather than investing in mainstream medical care, Ndidi chose to heal herself by creating an herbal vaginal suppository. She was successful in her effort and has continued to assist other women since.
The product, listed on her site today, is made with black walnut, slippery elm, neem, cleavers, yellow dock, goldenseal, coconut oil, lavender oil, rosemary oil, and tea tree oil.
Within her natural healing practice, Ndidi’s focus is on womb health. Many women, she explains, are unaware of the power of their wombs. Beyond the physical ability to reproduce children, there are several other qualities that make women divine.
The best way to tap into divine womanhood is by being in tune with nature, Ndidi explains.
Women are naturally in sync with the moon, as most women menstruate or “bleed” on a cycle that is similar to the 28-day moon phases.
“If you govern your life with nature, then you weed out most of the obstacles that you bring upon yourself,” Ndidi said.
While much attention is given to the body in the healing process, it is just as necessary to be mindful of the spirit, Ndidi explained. The spirit is the source. If unattended, there may be physical consequences.
“It doesn’t really matter what illness you have, the way that I work with all my clients is with their spirit. Everything starts with spirit first, and if you’re not nurturing your spirit and healing your spirit, it’s going to manifest into something physical,” Ndidi said.