The African Diaspora and the Disciplines

4. Landscapes and Places of Memory: African Diaspora Research and Geography

4 Landscapes and Places of Memory: African Diaspora Research and Geography Judith A. Carney Abroad definition of the discipline of Geography begins with the integrated study of people, places, and environments. In bridging the social and biological sciences, Geography offers a holistic approach to contemporary and historical problems. How can this discipline contribute to African Diaspora Studies? As I hope to show, Geography may add reasonable inferences to the gaps in the historical record. The discipline encourages a critical engagement with culture and environment and the food systems and botanical dispersals that accompanied specific human migrations . At the interface of culture and environment, and in the service of history, Geography uses a unique perspective to examine a past whose witnessing remains obscured by centuries of European triumphalist documentation . T h e A f r i c a n D i a s p o r a a nd t h e D i s c i p l i n e o f G e o g r a p h y Interdisciplinary research is the hallmark of Geography. Some of the pioneering work in Geography, which initiated concern with topics now considered germane to African diaspora research, was developed from four of Geography’s subfields: biogeography, historical geography, cultural geography , and cultural ecology. Biogeography examines the distribution of plants and animals in relationship to their physical environment, the routes followed, and peri­ ods of introduction. The earliest diffusion studies of species across the Atlantic avoided mention of Africa altogether and focused on the linkages between the Iberian Peninsula and the New World. Edmundo Wernicke ’s 1938 study of domestic animal introductions to the Americas, for instance, emphasized the role of Europeans using maritime routes. Cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs were left to roam on uninhabited Atlantic islands as 101 102 Judith A. Carney live meat for passing ships. By the mid-­ sixteenth century, livestock numbered in the tens of thousands in plantation economies, where they provided food, draft animals, hides, and tallow. Wernicke traces the routes by which these animals first arrived in the Americas, identifying the crucial role of the Atlantic islands as steps in their diffusion from the Iberian Peninsula.1 Even though the transatlantic slave trade was already under way, Africa was in his view of little consequence for intercontinental species diffusion in a process later known as the Columbian Exchange. While the significance of the Cape Verde Islands for the Atlantic economy is noted by Wernicke and later by Alfred Crosby,2 little attention is given to the role of the African mainland in providing the species that facilitated their settlement. The islands are a mere 500 kilometers from the Senegambian coast, where one of Africa’s premier cattle economies is found. Portuguese settlement relied on enslaved people to raise the crops and animals sold to European ships. Most of the food crops grown (millet, sorghum, and rice) were planted under a similar climate on the African mainland. The introduced African species included livestock. Seventeenth-­ century accounts reveal a considerable trade in live cattle between the islands and Senegambia. Cape Verdean traders repeatedly introduced African cattle, sheep, and goats to the Atlantic archipelago.3 This mainland cattle economy was also featured in the accounts of slave ship captains. Jean Barbot, who made two slave voyages (1678–79, 1681–82) to western Africa, depicted the transfer of livestock to a slave ship in Sene­ gambia.4 A considerable literature exists on Iberian livestock introductions to the western Atlantic. However, there is little written on the African animals transported via slave ships, the role they played in stocking the Atlantic islands, and their importance for provisioning ships headed for New World plantation economies.5 One exception is the work of geographer R. A. Donkin, who has written on the diffusion of several obscure edible animal species. In a monograph on the guinea fowl, Donkin identifies its African origin and conti­ nental distribution and early diffusion to the Americas; he also ­ reproduces an image of this African poultry drawn in seventeenth-­ century Dutch Bra­ zil. Donkin records elsewhere the introduction of the African bush pig to seventeenth-­ century plantation economies.6 But even when the concern is with African species, the spatial and temporal emphasis of diffusion studies places the context for their dissemination in the background. Thus Donkin’s research is not concerned with the way African edible animal species crossed the Atlantic (on slave ships), their role in transatlantic dispersal (as live meat), or their significance...