Bonnetta Adeeb sighs heavily when she hears the term “cowpea.” Seconds pass while she decides how to respond. Will it be the modulated, kind but firm response of the former teacher of 37 years she is? Or will she show some of her vexation at “that word,” which she avoids as if it leaves an unpalatable aftertaste on her tongue?
On this day, Adeeb, the 73-year-old president and founder of the Ujamaa Cooperative Farming Alliance, chooses playful but pointed rhetorical violence. She declared, “I’m not going to allow you to use that word in front of me anymore because I’d have to fight you,” with a chuckle. There is no real danger of fisticuffs here; within agriculture circles, Adeeb is known for her extreme affability and willingness to talk and partner with just about anyone. But she’s making it clear just how much the name angers her and how irked she gets when she hears Black people, in particular, use the term.
In her work with Ujamaa, the Maryland resident promotes seed biodiversity and diversity among seed farmers, connecting growers of color and selling those communities’ valued seeds. And she’s now campaigning to rename cowpeas “African peas.” Such a rebranding, she argues, is a long-overdue recognition that the black-eyed pea and its many cousins came from the African continent, which doesn’t get its due for its contributions to global agriculture.
Cowpea is the common name for the legumes known to botanists by the scientific name Vigna unguiculata. But they’re also called “field peas” or “Southern peas” for the U.S. region where they are legendarily beloved.
In the United States, the black-eyed pea is the most commonly known and available member of the family tree, which is entirely distinct from green peas of English peas-and-mash or Jolly Green Giant fame. The cowpea umbrella stretches far and wide, with multiple sub-categories such as crowder peas (named for how the peas grow crammed chockablock in the pods); lady peas (named for their small and delicate nature); and a plethora of heirlooms that have largely fallen out of commercial production and mainstream memory, and therefore off our plates.
As Adeeb advocates to get more cowpeas back into circulation and foodways, (Ujamaa regularly sells varieties like the Pinkeye Purple Hull and Blue Goose), she’s proselytizing to make sure the peas’ African origins are also known and not forgotten.
It’s hit or miss whether many American students learn about the Columbian Exchange — the movement of plants, animals, and people set a-traveling by European exploration and exploitation of the Western Hemisphere. Legend has it that, in 1493, Christopher Columbus sailed back across the “ocean blue” with kernels of corn in his pocket. This movement set the stage for today’s tomato-sauce nationalism by some Italians and why tobacco use is a global health crisis: All of those crops are native to the Americas. Yet, the Columbian Exchange was never a simple two-way swap between Europe and the places they dubbed the New (to them) World. Africa and Asian actors were also at the literal and metaphorical trading tables.
As scholars Judith Carney and Richard Rosomoff wrote in their seminal 2009 book, In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World, “Africans have contributed more than 100 species to the global food supplies. The plants they gave the world include pearl (bulrush) millet, sorghum, coffee, watermelon, black-eyed pea, okra, palm oil, the kola nut, tamarind, hibiscus and a species of rice. Widely known consumer products — Coca-Cola, Palmolive soap, Worcestershire sauce, Red Zinger tea, Snapple and most soft drinks — rely in part on plants domesticated in Africa. African contributions to global plant history, however, are largely unacknowledged and seldom appreciated. In the popular image, Africa is a place of hunger and starvation.”
Cowpeas traveled to the Caribbean and the Americas via slave ships, where they were used to feed captive Africans on the Middle Passage. Ever concerned with their margins and documenting the business of global human trafficking, slavers routinely listed “peas” picked up in African ports in their inventories.
But the cowpea’s history begins many centuries before. Archaeologists Amanda Logan and Derek Watson have uncovered traces of 4,000-year-old charred cowpeas in central Ghana. But in ancient times, they dispersed throughout the world — a diaspora evidenced by, for example, the presence of black-eyed pea fritters called acaraje in Brazil and akara in West Africa, and sold as popular street food. Cowpeas landed as far away as present-day India and China. In fact, the existence of Asian long beans, which share the same Vigna species classification as black-eyed peas, convinced agricultural scientists in the 1920s that their origins lay in China or India.
But modern scientific advancements have bred scientific consensus. In addition to those ancient cowpea remains in West Africa, scientists have found wild cowpeas only on the continent, where they are grown in 45 of its more than 50 nations and territories. The sheer diversity of varieties supports the conclusion that Africa was the botanical mothership of cowpeas, which cowpeas were probably domesticated at multiple sites across Africa.
Sharing this African ur-story is important to Adeeb, who grew up in a family active in the anti-apartheid movement and who served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana. She’s likely to be carrying sorghum seeds on a given day, as she’s collecting endangered grains from around the world. On a recent trip to Cameroon, she gloried in the sight of cowpeas drying on tarps in tropical sun. Publicly asserting the African origins of cowpeas is an intellectual and activist project, and one she’s proclaiming at agricultural conferences far and wide.
But the anger behind her push also comes from a careless comment of a U.S. Department of Agriculture staffer who allegedly told an Ujamaa partner that cowpeas weren’t fit for human consumption. Of course, Adeeb and partners knew that cowpea leaves and “beans” are important, protein-rich staples in many developing countries and culturally important among Black Americans, respectively. Just recounting that statement, Adeeb switches to the third person: “Now Bonnetta got mad” and says that such provocation unleashed her inner angry granny.
She has a theory: that the term “cowpea” puts livestock over Black people and is, in fact, a coded way of rejecting Black humanity. “In this country, African Americans were treated as chattel [under slavery], and cattle ate some of the same things Black folk ate,” she said. “I will not allow one of the important crops in the world to be defined by its lowest common denominator.”
She spent years trying to integrate Africa into pre-college school curricula, and she’s taken her cowpea crusade to a different educational stage: speaking about it at agricultural conferences and changing how Ujamaa refers to them in its own publications.
Carney, whose book remains the seminal source on the African crop’s global odysseys, found the idea that the term cowpea might be a racial insult intriguing and possible. She also mused about whether the name “black-eyed pea” was not so much a descriptor of its appearance, but a sly way that Africans in the Americas referenced themselves and Blackness, rather than the surrounding light color of the pea and the whiteness that encircled them.
Yet the origins of the term cowpea, the word that so draws Adeeb’s ire, are not entirely clear. Benjamin Torke, a tropical legume specialist who works at the New York Botanical Society, has written a three-part series on cowpea history. In his research, he noted 18th-century sources that talk of “horse beans” or legumes that, like guinea hens, came to the Caribbean via Africa. And according to The National Research Council’s Lost Crops of Africa, across Spanish-speaking America, different vegetables bore the names frijol de vaca (literally, “cow bean” in translation) or chicaro de vaca and judia de baca; some of those vegetables seem to be cowpeas and others not. Trying to connect a modern plant to an older one on the basis of fragmentary records — a short passage in a letter here, naturalists’ illustrations there and sometimes centuries-old botanical samples preserved in herbariums — is risky business.
I asked B.B. Singh, a renowned scientist who was one of the world’s most experienced cowpea breeders, for insights about the name. Singh had written a book about cowpea history, after decades developing varieties, including a much-celebrated 60-day cowpea that only took two months to mature. He’d studied cowpeas in the United States, his native India, and at Nigeria’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, which has a gene bank of more than 15,000 cowpea samples. When we spoke, he was retired and overseeing a farm in his Indian hometown (he died several days later).
During our What’sApp conversation, Singh observed that naming practices of crop families usually don’t mention locations: “Traditionally, common names of crops have not been given after the place of origin, but based on physical and culinary properties selected for in different regions. For example, maize is not called Mexican maize, but yellow maize, white maize, popcorn and sweet corn, etc.”
There is, however, a notable exception, in a different but adjacent realm. Adeeb is talking about replacing a common name of the vegetable, but there’s an ongoing movement to change scientific names that are rooted in racism. In July 2024, the International Botanical Congress, which oversees official scientific names, voted to revise species names that included the prefix caffra-, a variation of kaffir, a racial epithet for Black people in Arabic-speaking countries and Southern Africa. That prefix was often used to indicate that a plant — say, the coast coral tree (Erythrina caffra) — came from Africa; it will be replaced by affra.
Singh was skeptical of the assertion that “cowpea” could be a subtle anti-Black insult. In fact, he considered the idea slander against a plant that has saved lives across the world. Cowpeas are high in protein. Their leaves, “beans” and hay feed millions of people and animals in places often stricken with hunger; the plants’ abilities to capture nitrogen enriches soil and makes it a reliable and beneficial crop to plant in arid and hostile conditions.
He recounted that in northern Nigeria where he was posted as a researcher starting in 1978, herders rolled cowpea hay into big, wispy balls. They’d stash the bundles on their roofs to dry for animal feed. Sometimes the most obvious explanation trumps the complicated, and he insisted the name was just that simple, just as passionately as Adeeb insisted on her racial reading.
She says the answer is rarely that simple. “There’s what people say officially and what people think and feel” privately. Adeeb argues that skeptics should consider how comprehensively and casually Eurocentric cultures have smeared Blackness and how even some well-informed scholars have suggested that cowpea leaves are just last-resort or famine food, when they are choice ingredients in dishes such as East Africa’s kunde. She’s not here for cowpea slander, either, and associating them with only with food insecurity is one that she can’t abide.
The answer is likely not either-or, but that context matters. In a West African pastoralist society, naming something after livestock might not be an insult, given the valued place of animals in such cultures. In an American context — or in the context of global white supremacy or the African diaspora — it’s not far-fetched to see race and racism in plant or food names. “Negro Wonder” was an old type of oats, Brazil nuts have been vulgarly and colloquially called “n- – – – – toes” and across the Atlantic, desserts that once got their sweetness from slave-made sugar sometimes come with similar names.
Researching this story, I came across Charles Piper’s 1912 Agricultural Varieties of the Cowpea and Immediately Related Species, published for the federal government’s Bureau of Plant Industry. Inside was a long list of cowpea names, complete with details of their speckles, degree of mushiness, opinions about taste and market potential, and how their vines creep. It included the “n- – – – – pea,” mentioned in a 1902 agricultural bulletin from Kansas with a scant blurb: “seeds, black small.”