Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora by Edda L. Fields-Black (review)

To introduce Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora, Fields-Black first recounts the historical significance of the journal that Captain Samuel Gamble kept after becoming stranded in coastal Guinea’s Rio Nunez region from 1793–1794. Fields-Black highlights how Gamble wrote a detailed record of the techniques that local farmers had developed to create systems of agriculture especially suited to the challenges that Guinea’s costal environment posed. Fields-Black then leads readers to the important point that although the story of rice farming in West Africa and beyond is “framed by sources written by European traders, it is not dependent on them” (21). With an eye on how agricultural knowledge has been preserved and spread, the book explores rice farming “on both sides of the Atlantic” (8) by tracing rice cultivation from West Africa to the New World. Fields-Black favors local and oral history over oft-cited written sources. To do so, Fields-Black draws on a combination of interdisciplinary methods, especially historical linguistics, to add to previous scholarship on rice farming in West Africa and the Diaspora. Each chapter reconstructs and offers a historical perspective on how indigenous agriculture technology developed in West Africa’s coastal region and beyond: “this fascinating indigenous history has been waiting to be told” (22).

Chapter 1 begins by presenting a history of rice production in West Africa with a focus on the Rio Nunez region along with details on the special challenges that rice farmers there face annually, including destructive predators, an unpredictable rainy season, dense mangroves, and soil salinity. Combining prose and photographs, Fields-Black draws from her own fieldwork to describe rice-growing techniques in detail, which helps readers develop a basis of understanding for what follows.

Chapters 2 and 3 utilize Jan Vasina’s technique of “upstreaming,” which uses “glottochronology to estimate the entrance of cultural vocabulary words into daughter languages” (62). With this method, Fields-Black demonstrates that linguistic evidence can be leveraged to consider both the place and lack of inherited vocabulary in present-day Rice Coast languages. Her methodology lets her dig deeper than the archeological record into the history of tidal rice-growing while piecing together a “politically centralized, socially stratified, and highly mobile” picture of Highland society in the distant past (105).

Chapter 4 begins on rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia, and Fields-Black recounts scholarship that demonstrates the way that slaveholders’ rhetoric altogether ignored the possibility that enslaved Africans were skilled laborers who transmitted rice-growing technology into the New World. Moving back to West Africa, the author challenges the description of slave rice production as a diffusion of Mande or European techniques by demonstrating that Atlantic slaves had “deep roots and millennia of skilled expertise at overcoming coastal challenges,” which is consistent with rice production and the management of salinity and mangroves in the Rio Nunez area (133).

In Chapter 5 the author considers the utility and origin of iron tools, especially metal blades, in clearing red mangrove trees and building dikes and bunds. Surveying linguistic evidence, she concludes that “coastal farmers’ ability to adapt to coastal micro-environments and to changes in the environmental conditions therein—not iron-edged tools or iron trunks—gave West Africa’s farmers their global import and impact” (160).

Up to this point, Fields-Black’s study focuses almost exclusively on the Rice Coast with only passing attention to the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In Chapter 6, the author cogently expands the research to consider surplus rice production in Charleston and Savannah ports. She documents the integral role the Rice Coast played in the slave trade by, at least, selling rice to fuel traders and captives during voyages and, at most, providing slaves to rice farmers in the New World. Rice Coast slaves were in especial demand during the eighteenth century and sold for a high price (despite their...