By Anthony Muchoki
No one remembers the farmer’s name. That’s how you know the story is true.
The way they tell it across Nyandarua, Narok, and Kinangop, a man came from the south, from Tanzania, from somewhere beyond the border where hills soften into another country. He carried potatoes in a sack that was not meant to be famous, not meant to change anything. When asked what they were called, he shrugged. Ni viazi tu. Just potatoes.
He planted them.
Within seventy days, sometimes less, the earth gave quickly. The harvest surprised even him. Neighbours came quietly at first. They watched. They asked for seed. They planted without asking for permission, without waiting for a gazette notice, without certificates or scientists or anybody’s blessing. By the time anyone in an office noticed, the potato was already everywhere, renamed by the market itself: shangi, sangi, or simply ile ya haraka, the fast one.
The one that paid school fees.
The one that didn’t wait.
Today, that unnamed potato has become Kenya’s most dominant variety. Shangi now occupies over 70 percent of the country’s potato cultivation area, making it the most widely grown variety in the nation’s potato sector. No government program designed this reach. No extension service could have moved this fast. No research institution could have achieved this scale. Only farmers could. Only the informal economy could. Only innovation that refused to wait for permission.
This is the story that makes policymakers uncomfortable, that makes researchers fret, that should fundamentally reshape how we think about agricultural transformation in Africa. Not because it’s a fairy tale. But because it reveals a truth we’ve spent decades refusing to see: Real change in Africa doesn’t wait for permission. It moves through borders, through kinship, through bus routes and market gossip. It arrives unnamed and unplanned.
And then, we scramble to catch up.
The Official Story and the Farmer’s Story Aren’t Opposite, They’re Sequential
Here’s what happened, most likely: Scientists from the International Potato Center had bred potato varieties suited to tropical highlands. Lines were tested in Tanzania, in Kenya, in demonstration plots and research stations. But a farmer, an innovator, an entrepreneur, someone the official system would never call “scientist,” moved informal seed across the border. Not because he was breaking rules. Because he was solving problems.
Once that potato exploded in popularity across the Kenyan highlands, the state had to catch up. KARI had to test it. CIP had to verify it. Forms were filed. Trials were conducted. Eventually, it was released. Official. Legitimate. Named.
But listen to what this reveals: The real innovation, the discovery, the proof, the transformation, happened before the paperwork. It happened in farmers’ fields. It happened on buses. It happened through networks that no institution controls and no bureaucracy can see.
The official version of agricultural progress tells us that knowledge flows downward: scientist to extension officer to farmer. Reality shows us it flows sideways: farmer to farmer to market, back to science, which then scrambles to formalize what was already being proven.
And yet, in conference rooms from Nairobi to Rome, we still act as if farmers are passive recipients of innovations. We still speak of “adoption rates.” We still fret about “farmer resistance.” We still cannot see that farmers are the innovation system, the most extensive, most responsive, most adaptive network of experimenters on the planet.
Every season, millions of African smallholders conduct experiments that Western agricultural science can barely comprehend. Testing hybrids and open-pollinated varieties. Mixing crops in ways that confuse economists but feed families. Adapting to drought and flood and unpredictable rains with a creativity that deserves the word “genius.”
Shangi is just the potato they named because it became impossible to ignore.
Why Bureaucracies Will Always Arrive Late
The farmer who brought shangi didn’t need approval. He didn’t need a business plan or a loan or a brand strategy. He needed a solution, fast-maturing potatoes for highland soils, and when he found it, he moved.
This is what institutions cannot do. Institutions are built for control, for documentation, for duplication. A university has to run trials before releasing a variety. A government has to gazette it. Seed companies have to certify it. Each step takes time, takes money, creates gatekeepers, creates permission-seeking.
But a farmer? A farmer just plants.
This is not a lack of sophistication. This is a different, older, faster, more resilient way of knowing. It’s how agriculture spread across continents before there were research stations. It’s how crops moved along trade routes, along family migrations, along the daily movements of people solving immediate problems.
The irony is suffocating: We claim to want rapid agricultural transformation. We design programs to “accelerate adoption.” We fund extensions. We build demonstration plots. And meanwhile, farmers are already running ahead of us, moving seed across borders, testing varieties, reshaping what’s planted, without waiting for anyone to tell them it’s acceptable.
And we’re calling them resistant.
The Price of Being Named, and Why Some Crops Refuse It
Here’s what happens when an informal crop becomes famous. Regulators notice. Questions arise. Why is there seed degeneration? Why can’t we control the genetics? Why doesn’t it behave like certified seed?
Shangi degenerates. After a few years of planting the same seed from your own harvest, yields decline. This is ordinary in potato breeding. But because shangi succeeded so spectacularly, because it became visible, its weakness became official scrutiny. Scientists worry. Some argue farmers should switch to certified seed. Regulators fret about “uncontrolled varieties.”
The potato that thrived because it moved through informal, adaptive channels is now threatened by the very formalization that should validate it. It refuses to standardize. It insists on being dynamic, degenerate, responsive, alive, in other words.
This is the trap: The moment something succeeds in the informal economy, the formal system tries to capture it, regulate it, improve it. And in trying to improve it, we often kill what made it work.
What if, instead of turning shangi into certified seed, we learned to value what it already is? A farmer-selected variety. A community-proven success. A crop that thrives in the hands of smallholders precisely because it wasn’t designed by an institution for a standardized world.
What Shangi Teaches About Real Agricultural Transformation
If we’re serious, truly serious, about transforming African agriculture, we need to stop imagining that transformation happens to farmers and start recognizing it happens through them.
This means policy that doesn’t dictate innovation but protects it. Protects informal seed systems alongside formal ones. Recognizes that a farmer’s experimentation is as valuable as a scientist’s trial. Ensures farmers can move seed across borders without criminalization. Guarantees land rights, especially for women, so that people can invest in their soil knowing no bureaucrat will steal their plot.
It means extension services that learn from farmers before teaching them. Not demonstration plots controlled by government officials, but farmer field schools where communities experiment together, where knowledge spreads horizontally, where each farmer’s success becomes the proof that others trust.
It means research that starts in the field, not the lab. Plant breeding programs that develop cover crops for African soils and climates, not adapted imports. Local production of bio-inputs. Indigenous seed systems. Farmer-led variety selection.
Most urgently, it means respecting farmers as scientists, not subjects. Every day, African smallholders are conducting the largest agricultural experiment on Earth, testing what works on their specific soil, in their specific climate, with their specific constraints. They know things that satellites cannot detect. They’ve already solved problems that Western scientists are still studying.
The best policy is the policy that stays out of the way.
The Unnamed Future Is Already Here
Across East Africa right now, innovations are moving that nobody’s recording. Crops are being crossed that researchers haven’t documented. Farmers are adapting to climate chaos with a speed that institutions cannot match. Seed is traveling across borders, carried by hands that don’t wait for permission.
Shangi was just the one we noticed.
The real agricultural revolution, the one that will feed Africa, that will build resilience, that will restore soil and dignity, won’t come from the conference rooms or the research stations or the international institutes. It’s already happening in the fields, in the markets, in the conversations between farmers who are solving today’s problems without waiting for tomorrow’s approval.
Our job isn’t to invent this transformation. It’s to recognize it. To get out of the way. To protect the spaces where it happens. To learn instead of dictate. To listen to the farmer before we listen to the economist.
The potato that crossed the border unnamed is still running. It’s still refusing to standardize, still insisting on being dynamic, still proving that the fastest path to change isn’t permission, it’s necessity and innovation and the quiet certainty of people solving their own problems.
We call that “tradition.” We dismiss it as “resistance to change.”
The potato knows better. It’s already transformed everything.
Ajm.muchoki@gmail.com