By L. Kravit-Smith
Mercy Kariuki-Mcgee’s passion for social justice and farming shone through my laptop. Despite the screen I felt her presence, much like how it felt hearing her perform in her Afro-fusion band Mazigazi before the pandemic. A year later, I interviewed her about her newest project, the Haki Farmers Collective.
Kariuki-Mcgee taught at The Evergreen State College for eight years and did climate work for two years at the Washington State Department of Transportation. She has also been part of the artistic community for about 20 years now. Her band started as a family before growing to nine members, and performed frequently before the pandemic. They do African style rock music, a mix of Afro house and Afro beat. Kariuki-Mcgee is also involved heavily in community activism, especially advocating for rural communities. Through her graduate studies she was able to focus on climate change and sustainability, especially in Africa. Last summer Kariuki-Mcgee did intensive organizing in the wake of Goerge Floyd’s murder, organizing rallies and pushing city council and elected officials for police accountability. Kariuki-Mcgee spoke to me about the Capitol Hill Organized Protest in Seattle and her appreciation for the healing space it created for many BIPOC (Black and Indigenous people of color) folks. She was especially touched by the CHOP’s garden. At CHOP She saw messages of unity and hope, as well as a place for people to reunite and have a cup of coffee with one another.
Her time at CHOP spurred Kariuki-Mcgee to reflect on the Olympia area. She felt there wasn’t a place here for the community and healing she had witnessed. “We have a lot of movements and a lot of activism happening in the South Sound, but it’s not a space for Black and brown people to be heard most of the time. There is very little focus on the Black and brown students. We make up such a small part of the population, so at the end of the day it really doesn’t matter. We are not seen and we are not heard,” she said. “Our voices were constantly being diluted in all these protests and in all this messaging. So I felt like I needed to find a way to channel the Black and brown community, and that’s how Haki was founded.” Haki means justice in Swahili, a commonly spoken language in Africa. Founded by Kariuki-Mcgee and her daughter Elisa, the Haki Farmers Collective hopes to center Black, Indigenous, Latinx, LGBTQ+, disabled, and other marginalized community members.
Kariuki-Mcgee began working on her idea and reached out to the community non-profit Garden-Raised Bounty, known as GRuB. GruB let her use Victory Farm, a garden space for veterans unused due to the pandemic, allowing the collective to plant and harvest. This work at GRuB got Kariuki-Mcgee connected to the Community Farm Land Trust to begin looking for a larger piece of land. She believes that farming is a way to empower people, building a good community, access to healthy food, and knowledge of where that food comes from. The collective wishes to reunite people and bring in elders to show old ways of collecting and sowing the seeds, cooking the food, and cultivating the soil.
The collective and its small membership have had to build up from scratch. They encourage BIPOC people, largely pushed from farming, to come back and own land.“BIPOC people don’t have the capability to go back to the land, they don’t have the generational wealth,” said Kariuki-Mcgee. “So, how do you get the Black and brown people to go start farming? You have to start very small, and you have to show them the way. Haki is going to help lead that way in finding the land, putting the policies together, connecting with resources, as well as starting to build this generational wealth for BIPOC folks.”
Kariuki-Mcgee spoke of the financial challenges to projects like hers. “It is very hard to get the money to even buy a tractor. If you look up on the web, you see a ton of GoFundMes for BIPOC farmers. Why do we have to do this? White people rarely have to start funding pages. We hope that within the collective we can form a community of same minded people who feel the same oppression, who feel the same need of acquiring land and growing their own food. We also want to see directly how our food is grown, because half the time, BIPOC people are the ones who suffer from health impacts of bad food or eating unhealthy food due to systemic racism.” To address the issue, the collective is trying to make Community Supported Agriculture, or CSAs, accessible to BIPOC communities. CSAs include produce and value added products from farms, depending on what’s available. The collective offers free CSAs to BIPOC folks if they volunteer at the farm.
The collective is currently working with GruB, the Community Farm Land Trust, and the Black Student Union at North Thurston High School. They hope to start a program to bring students to the farm once the pandemic ends. Kariuki-Mcgee’s plans to work with youth are rooted in her own experience as a child on her family’s small farm in Kenya, which grew a wide variety of crops.
Working with young people doesn’t come without concerns. Kariuki-Mcgee expressed worries about the collective moving to a rural area of Washington. “I fear putting a load of students in the yellow bus and having them get attacked…We have to always be cautious and as a Black or brown person, you’re always walking on eggshells, always worried about who is watching you, who is following you, you’re always looking behind your back.” She continued, “We want the community to know that the existence of Black and brown farmers next door to you doesn’t take away work from you. Doesn’t change your farming habits, doesn’t take away your rights. All it does is help increase the diversity of your community and help grow their economy at the same time.” The Haki Farmers Collective has created what I’ve always dreamed of having in Olympia and throughout the world. It’s a space where BIPOC people and other marginalized groups are centered. Where we can come together in a space that focuses on collective healing and accessibility to our traditional medicines and food sources. Kariuki-Mcgee’s vision of farming and food is an act of resistance against white supremacy and a challenge to neoliberal, capitalist views on land ownership. I am more than thrilled to get a chance to work with her community.
