In this Book
- Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora
- Book
- 2008
- Published by: Indiana University Press
- Series: Blacks in the Diaspora
Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.
Table of Contents
- List of Maps
- p. viii
- List of Tables
- p. ix
- Orthography
- p. xi
- Acknowledgments
- pp. xiii-xvi
- Introduction
- pp. 1-24
- Conclusion
- pp. 187-194
- Appendix 1. Fieldwork Interviews
- pp. 195-196
- Bibliography
- pp. 237-256