Last month, it was announced that Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones was among the 100 candidates on British Conservative Party leader David Cameron’s so-called ”A-list” of Tory candidates. Emmanuel-Jones was described by the press, as he has been many times before, as ”Britain’s only black farmer”. But actually there’s at least one other black farmer in Britain today — and his name is David Mwanaka.
Mwanaka was living near Tottenham football club in north London when he began growing white maize on a small plot of his landlord’s back garden. It was a long way from the cool mountains of eastern Zimbabwe where he had once helped his father grow cabbages and potatoes, but somehow it felt like coming home.
Today, he is a fully fledged farmer with eight hectares in Enfield, north London, another six in Salisbury, and customers the length and breadth of the country. He has the curious distinction of not only being one of the two black farmers in Britain (so far as we know), but of being the only producer of white maize in the country.
Mwanaka, who worked as a journalist before coming to Britain, admits it has not been an easy career choice. He says it took him six years of experimentation to produce a successful crop, and even then he didn’t have the customers to sell it to. ”When I started I didn’t know how it was going to turn out,” he says, perched on the sofa of his house in Tilbury, Essex. ”It’s just like walking in a dark tunnel, you simply don’t know what is going to be at the end. But I really love seeing plants grow, so I kept at it.”
The first year was a disaster. The wide-leafed plants grew tall but never produced the plump, white corn Mwanaka had craved since arriving in England. But the 40-year-old was undeterred. Working as a traffic warden during the day to make ends meet, he ignored the advice of the experts who said the African crop could not be grown in a British climate. ”I never saw him,” says his wife, Brenda. ”It used to annoy me! He would come home, say hi, hi, hi. I’d ask him if he wanted a cup of tea and he’d just go straight out into the garden.”
The family moved, this time to a house with its own garden, and Mwanaka’s experiments continued. The plants finally grew to over 6ft tall but still there was no crop. Then finally, after six years of evenings spent planting and digging, Mwanaka’s passion paid off. He had his white maize.
Although he grew up in Nyanga, a rural part of Zimbabwe where both his father and uncles worked on the land, farming was the last thing on Mwanaka’s mind when he came to England in 1991. A long-standing writer of poetry, plays and short stories, he had been a journalist for an adult literacy magazine for a year when he decided it was time to leave his home country.
”There was no freedom of the press in Zimbabwe,” he says, his clipped, precise Southern African accent still in evidence. ”You can never be objective, you can never write the truth. So many journalists were imprisoned. I worked for a magazine covering trade-union and political issues, so we were not always on the government’s side. I was never detained but there was always that fear that the secret agents were behind you.”
When he joined his brother, who had moved to London in the 1980s, he assumed he would continue with his career as a writer. ”I did a diploma at the London School of Journalism. After that I thought, yeah, well, now I can get a job. But I couldn’t get a job,” he says. ”Then I did a degree in politics and sociology and still I couldn’t get a job. I tried most of the newspapers. I can’t blame them. Suppose you were to move to Zimbabwe and you were going for a job at a newspaper, you probably wouldn’t get it.”
He did a succession of jobs: in a factory, as a chef, as a parking attendant. ”I thought when I applied for the parking attendant job that I wouldn’t tell them I was a journalist because they would think I was undercover.” He laughs a loud laugh. ”I did a lot of jobs and I didn’t like any of them. It was hard, it was frustrating. I thought, why am I doing this? I should be doing something better.” And so the garden, and achieving his dream of growing white maize, became an outlet for his frustrations.
Finally, having successfully raised the crop, it was time to find some land. He began by knocking on the doors of farmhouses on the outskirts of London and asking farmers whether they had any land to let. ”I bet none of them ever thought I was serious,” he says. ”They all thought no, he’s up to something. I mean, if someone comes round to your door asking if you have any land to grow white maize, which you’ve never even heard of . . . it’s very suspicious.”
The family’s luck changed when they put an advert for farmland in classifieds paper Loot and were contacted by a journalist wanting to do a story. ”After the article appeared, two people approached us. One was in Wales, which was too far, and one in Enfield. We went for Enfield.”
Mwanaka is delighted to have proved his critics wrong. He is even more delighted to have a ready supply of his favourite food, fresh from the fields in the summer and straight from the freezer in winter. The couple now also advertise on television, newspapers and their website, and have list of regular customers. They make deliveries to shops and restaurants from Birmingham to Southend, and many places in between.
Brenda says it isn’t the future she expected. ”When I came to England, I thought I would have an office job. If you had told me we would be farming, I don’t think I would have agreed. But going into the field, seeing things grow, being outside … it’s more refreshing than being in an office.”
For the couple, who have three children aged between three and eight, the only thing missing is their own farm, where they can work the land without travelling to the fields they rent. They say they would have no qualms about leaving their Essex home to move further into the countryside — even though they will stand out there more than they already do.
Mwanaka has not met Emmanuel-Jones, the other black farmer, but he did speak to him on the phone after seeing his name in an article. ”When I saw him in the paper, I just wanted to phone him and say ‘hi’; for him to know there was another black farmer out there,” he says. ”At first he was happy that I called and said we could visit his place. I called him again to arrange a time but he never got back to us. I would definitely like to go, though, if he invites us again”. – Guardian Unlimited Â