1619 Through the Lens of Food: Esteban Mesa Montejo Part 3
Courtesy of the New York Public Library
Today we continue our 1619 series in commemoration of the 400th anniversary of American slavery. This collection is part of a larger project on food in the African canon. Each of the stories will contain a related historical image and recipe. In part three of our third installment, we turn to the writings of Esteban Montejo.
Montejo reveals enslaved folks in his local area had a working knowledge of African-based herbal medicine. They used them to combat various health challenges that the enslaved and runaways in the sugar-producing regions of Cuba faced. He shares the natural prescriptions he used for preventive medicine and remedies for a head cold. Montejo writes that during slavery, “you couldn’t find a doctor anywhere.” Those who had “confidence in herbs, which are the mother of medicines” sometimes “cured diseases the doctors didn’t understand.” He goes on to say, it had not been unusual for enslaved folks to practice African-based herbal medicines in the sugar-producing regions of Cuba. “The African, from over there, from the other side of the big puddle, he doesn’t ever get sick because he has all the herbs within reach.” The slave trade to Cuba increased after colonial authorities in Spain legalized rum production in Cuba in 1764. As a result some unknown number of enslaved Africans arrived in Cuba with a knowledge of natural remedies. The majority of the West and Central Africans who disembarked in Cuba during the slave trade came from the Akan, Igbo (Ibo), and Congo. They came from tribes whose elders put a premium on teaching children about plants with medicinal properties. They took toddlers with them into the forest to gather medicinal plants and taught them how to identify different species and their healing properties. Thus, at a young age, some African children acquired a knowledge of how to forage for leaves, roots, and berries and how to prepare them for healing the body.
Montejo held the view that honey served as one of the best remedies to keep you healthy and one could “get it easy in the woods. Anywhere you wanted there was bee honey . . . I found loads of it in the hollows of trees.” He says that coffee made from the guarana leaf and sweetened with honey “gave strength to the body.” To cure heads colds and nasal congestion, Montejo made “a brew of cuajani berries and the honey.” The water in the woods where he lived as a runaway, he says, “was better for you than any of today’s medicine.”
