blueprints vol. vii: rice farming updates 🌾

Hi! This went up on ismatu.fm | I wanted to make this one available in real time to all, because literally everyone paying for Threadings ensures that my offline work in Sierra Leone is possible. I’m including a few more pictures I took with my film camera in November of 2024 when we went to get the farming land approve.

Transcription below:

Alright, we're getting ready. I have a meeting in like... now. And I need to do my makeup such that it can withstand like 30 minutes on a motorcycle. The question with getting dressed in Sierra Leone is always, (1) is it Muslim appropriate? Because this is a Muslim country before... eight or nine p.m. And also, (2) is it going to hold up on an okada? Like, I'm going to be speeding through the highways, through the mountainside. Is the head wrap going to fall off in the meantime? Questions that need answers.

I'm here to update you on the rice harvest.

Welcome to Blueprints. This is volume viii. I have been thinking about my life in context of what 13-year-old me would think lately, and that has been a really hilarious process. 26 sounded so adult when I was a new teenager. 26 sounded like– first of all, I didn't even think I was gonna live that long. But secondly, was assuming that I was gonna be engaged to be married at, of course, a respectable 26. I would have been just graduating from a medical school, thinking about my residency. I would have been thinking about when I wanted to have kids. And now I'm 26 and I wake up every day and think of what? …The rice harvest, exactly. Life comes at you fast.

Grab your tea. I do have– there's some pistachio tea behind you that I've been working on very slowly. It's been an 'all day sipping the same cup of tea' kind of day, if that tells you anything about my mental state. So I went up line yesterday to Masiaka to see the boule lands, the rice lands that we are farming on for the 2025 harvest. The process of rice farming really centralizes around the building of relationships with the people who are the stewards of the land. Again, I am Limba on my father's side of the family and we are farming on Temne tribal lands. So that's a tribe that I have nothing to do with in terms of my lineage.

We're outside of our tribal lands, part of the family lands, those are pretty far away from Freetown and it will be really difficult to get there once the rains come, which always makes things really difficult. Like– rainy season makes travel in the country by car very difficult all the time or really any kind of travel quite frankly, but especially to like Numea Village where my father is from, that's an unpaved dirt road for like two and a half hours and you cannot get there when it starts raining. There's no way. So, in the interest of making sure that we still had access to these lands when the rains do come so that we can see the progress of the rice harvest, my uncle had found these lands.

Boule lands, which doesn't have an English equivalent. I don't know, maybe like swamp lands, something like that, fertile lands. But we're farming on Temne lands, so there's a really hefty amount of tribal diplomacy that entails making deals like this. No one here is really truly motivated by money. That's not the word of the day. The word of the day is cooperation, okay? So they're not charging me rent or anything to be able to use the lands we're just engaging in systems building for one another, right? Like they are allowing us to have a rice harvest, which if this year goes well, this is the start of a very long and prosperous partnership in the quest to feed Sierra Leone– and also the surrounding regions, because quite frankly, the amount of farming that we have in Sierra Leone, we could feed all of West Africa. I digress, don't get up on your soapbox right now, Ismatu. So for every 10 bushels, barrels of rice that we produce, we are giving them one. And then we have also agreed to build them a courthouse which I just put like the down deposit on. So that's all very exciting. They need an establishment with which to sort their legal matters out as a tribe– or as like a village within the Temne tribe. So this trip was to introduce myself to the village as a whole. The last time I was there was November of 2024. So it's only been like a few months, but I didn't get to meet, you know, most people I only really met the people that were going to be working on the land and one of the elders that was going to be quintessential in making the decision as to whether they were going to allow us to farm there. I did film a video about that already; I will link it in the show notes because it's just an unlisted video y'all can watch it. It went up on the Patreon but y'all are welcome.

Yeah, I went to see the head of the land available the last time that I was there to strike up a partnership. And when they approved our partnership with their own council of elders, when they had that conversation within their own selves, the next step was to secure the land with a structural investment. So that is that down deposit that I put on making sure that they have a courthouse with which to their legal matters with.

Think of money in this situation like water.

Structural Investment vs. Cash Influx

We want to think about structural investment as something that is better than just like a one-time cash influx. So if we imagine money is water, right? A one-time cash influx to be able to rent the lands creates I think more problems than it worth. It floods an area with water that we were (or were not) prepared to deal with. The ground will be wet for a moment. People will drink for a moment if that water is allocated appropriately. And then, you know, things are dry again.

Versus the creation of systems or infrastructural support: it's like building a system for water collection and irrigation. It's not as quick in terms of the immediate gratification of everybody having something to drink. However, it is a longer term fix. So instead of just paying rent, right, and then creating the issue of fair and proper financial distribution, we're building a courthouse, right? It's straightforward and it's very easy to see the tangible effects.

So I, at this point, I more of a figurehead than I am a farmer. This is a transitional space for me. I know that everybody wants to keep me in cute, pretty princess land. Watch me: I'm going to have orchards in this lifetime. I'm going to have fruit trees abounding in this lifetime. In the next 10 years, in fact! It's not going to take me a lifetime, by the way. This is very much princess work, right? I come in a very pretty dress. I make sure that I look absolutely gorgeous. I come with cash leones and a very nice smile and a very sweet disposition. I actually wanted to bake some small chocolate cakes because sugar is truly like the height of luxury– especially if you are in rural Sierra Leone. You never get to have sugar for fun. So I really wanted to get that done, but I was beat. I was too tired. I could not go– no we don't really use ovens like they take too much electricity just use willy-nilly so if you do have an oven you have an outdoor oven when that lives outside, and my aunt has one, but I didn't have time to go over there to bake at her house for like, hours on end the day before I went.

In any case, I will bring some celebratory cupcakes the next time that I'm there which is drop off heavy machinery so that we can start plowing the lands, masAllah. Let's see, where am I? Right, my job is to go and sit and exchange words in my very questionable Krio.

My job is to make sure that I am magnanimous and graceful and that I hear everybody out. My job is to sign a check. My job is to make sure that everybody knows that the investor that is making these projects move forward is not just a face without a name and is certainly not a foreigner, but a child of the country that I so seek to love tangibly and not just in reason, or within mental circumstance, but such that it tangibly affects my life.

So this time I met everybody– or not everybody that lives in the village, but kind of like all of the important adults that are load bearing or decision making within these particular boulelands in Masiaka. It was a lot of women and their children. And after they heard that I was the one that put the down deposit on the construction of their courthouse, they sang for me.

They sang to me and they danced and I never feel more Black American than in those moments because everybody else knows what's going on. Everybody knows the song, everybody knows the dance, everybody knows the steps and I am like… doing the jerk. It's like always, I don't want to say uncomfortable because it is such a blessing, but I'm always standing there with just like a placid smile like, “...is this a happy birthday situation? Do I just sit here and receive? Do I participate? How do I participate?" I don't know what's going on. And I never really get used to it.
So, you know, we do with that what we can, I suppose.

All that being said, everything is on track and the next big item is to make sure that I get that tractor that I had to rebuy successfully. There it's probably going to require like some sort of police or military escort so I'm going to have to ask my family members for some help on that. Now, if you remember, I did a whole hell of a lot of work to acquire a tractor for my father's tribe in the top of 2023. In quarter one of 2023, we had all that money and then I… wasn’t particularly loud about like, why that went wrong, but in essence, it's because my father stole from me. I didn't really know that that was a thing that could happen to me. Everyone was very– well not everyone, but there was a decent amount of warning from very kind internet strangers saying, you know, be careful, people get stolen from. I was like “Yeah but, I know everybody that is working along this route. I don't have any fear of being stolen from."

And then wouldn't you know it, the person that really sabotaged these plans was my dad, my literal biological father, the man who has been my dad my whole life. And we still really haven't talked since because he, I don't know, I'm not even gonna pretend to pontificate as to why that's the case.

All I know is that beyond being hurtful, I cannot imagine living a life where I am so scared of scarcity or so scared that money is not going to come in another way that I steal from my people. Because it's not just that he stole from his literal kid, that's bad enough, but you also stole literally from your lineage. It sent me back two years– now 2025. There should have been a rice harvest at the end of 2023, and there wasn’t, because I had to start over with the acquisition of land, with the acquisition of machinery with which to use to be able to create industrial amounts of rice on that land.

I can understand why it happened this way because when I was working with my father, there was, I mean– I was a daughter and it's difficult to be a good daughter and a good business person at the same time. So I can understand like why it played out this way so that I would be put in a position where I was kind of forced to learn the necessary independence to be able to make sure that I can do these things in a sovereign fashion, rather than constantly bowing to a parental figure. Because it's tough doing business with your family. I don't know if you ever have, especially if you have been in a position where you are bringing in the money. I was about say it's like show business, but it's not like show business. It is show business. Social media is me putting on a show to be able to garner funds.

So if I'm the person bringing in the funds but I'm not the person calling the shots with how we use those funds, that's an automatic conflict of interest. I can't say that I'm happy necessarily that it worked out this way. That's definitely not the case. But I can understand how this was a necessary step in my journey of sovereignty, of realizing food sovereignty.

And of realizing sovereignty within not just my day to day, but communal sovereignty within Sierra Leone. I have a certain standard of living that I don't really want to deviate from. I really like comfort. I really like being comfortable. I was raised in the West. I don't want to not have consistent electricity or not have running water or hot running water. Right? Like there are luxuries of life– asphalt, you know, things that I thought were a bit God-given. I don't want to say God given because I did grow up like in a relatively rural place, as compared to lots of my friends who grew up in the city– you know, I grew up in a part of Colorado that has become the suburb over time, wasn't necessarily so suburbanized when we lived there.

I don't want to say that these things like it didn't occur to me that they were rare, or a privilege, but I will say now: having lived with running hot water for the majority of my life, that's not really something that I want to not have anymore. And I am not big on coming back to my home country and living like a Westerner at the cost of everybody else. If I have it, that means everybody else has it. You know what I mean? So the question in systems building, I'm starting with food because you can't get shit done if you're hungry. Really, you cannot. That's on many years of food insecurity. I'm not trying to do shit if there's not food there. Everybody knows that if you're inviting me out, there had better be food involved.

And I personally am taking a pinch from organizing from the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which is: if you want a populace on your side, if you're trying to teach them, you need to make sure that they're fed first. Just point blank, period.

So with all that being said, food sovereignty is the start, but it certainly is not the end. It's just the system within systems of, within these systems of sovereignty that I keep talking about. It's the system that I found most pertinent, but it certainly is not the end all be all for me. I big plans, big plans, big dreams. In fact, that is what this meeting that I am putting on the Girl Suit is for. Girl suit, very lucrative.

Additionally, with this Princess shit, I have the opportunity to study with Africa Rice, who's an organization within the umbrella group of the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research.

Africa Rise was introduced to me by a professor that I met over the summer who is at the University of New Mexico. He's working in their agricultural fields. Really, Dr. Lombard was a great person to meet. He be growing wild grapes. Those grapes are so dope. Grapes that look like little jelly beans. Grapes that taste like jelly beans! Do know how many different kinds of grapes there are? Every time I find out about food, I'm like, colonization has taken so much from us. I digress.

I was put into some contacts there that help young people and also female farmers (so the combination in two, very lucrative here) to be able to study– not just the business of growing drought resistant rice, or rice that grows in different climates (because they are a research group; they be developing seeds that can withstand the changes of climate change), but also the business side of rice production and distribution, exports, all that kind of stuff... and that's something that I need to study in 2025.

Africa Rice also has some fruit departments and right now the only fruit that Sierra Leone produces like on a real mass basis is mangoes. Fruit and rice are the two big projects for the next three years. Fruit, rice, and tea– quite frankly, because I want to be able to produce enough to be able to feed the region, but then also enough money to be able to set up some permaculture… which is not machinery intensive. Or rather, you can't use machinery because the food is stacked so closely and densely together that you do have to harvest it by hand– but that's gonna help with that internal food sovereignty so that we lean and wean off of exports. Particularly for rice.

Yeah, next steps in terms of rice farming are delivering machinery safely and finding workmen to erect that courthouse, but all of that has to be done this week. Okay, much love. I will see you all next week.

peace. ig