Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora

4. Coastal Collaboration and Specialization: Flowering of Tidal Rice-Growing Technology

 Coastal Collaboration and Specialization: Flowering of Tidal Rice-Growing Technology In the present day a person going over this immense area of rice fields . . . will be struck with wonder at the mighty work, the persistence, the intelligence these men of old exhibited in order to reclaim from the waters this great body of land and reduce it to cultivation . What skill they displayed and engineering ability they showed when they laid out these thousands of fields and tens of thousands of banks and ditches in order to suit their purpose and attain their ends! The outside banks, of course, followed streams and conformed to their meandering, but the “check” banks, which divided field from field, are as straight as mathematical exactness could make them, and divisions are accurately placed so as to separate higher from lower lands. As one views this vast hydraulic work, he is amazed to learn that all of this was accomplished in face of seemingly insuperable difficulties by every-day planters who had as tools only axe, the spade, and the hoe, in the hands of intractable negro men and women, but lately brought from the jungles of Africa. . . . (David Doar, Rice and Rice Planting in the South Carolina Low Country, 8) 108 DEEP ROOTS Unlike coastal farmers in the West African Rice Coast region or their counterparts enslaved on South Carolina and Georgia’s rice plantations, plantation owners and slaveholders left a plethora of documentation about the evolution of South Carolina and Georgia’s rice-growing technology and the rise of the colonies’ commercial rice industries. As enslaved laborers experimented with rice varieties and reclaimed rice fields from wilderness swamps, planters documented their challenges, struggles with the environment, and strategies for surmounting them. In doing so, plantation owners and slaveholders created a body of knowledge, particularly about tidewater rice production and swamp reclamation, which is unprecedented for similar undertakings on the opposite side of the Atlantic. Not only did they share this knowledge among neighbors and pass it down to their descendants, but they also inadvertently passed it along to scholars, including but not limited to historians, who would write the rice story. David Doar exemplified planters’ production and dissemination of knowledge about South Carolina’s rice industry and its technology. Doar was one of South Carolina’s last large commercial rice planters on the Santee River, one of the colony’s most productive rivers, particularly during the peak years between 1850 and 1860. As the rice industry ground to a halt in the 1930s, Doar reflected on its rise and fall, and wrote about the planters integral to its success and their world. In addition to recording his own experiences to share with his neighbors and descendants, he solicited and included in his narrative the reminiscences of fellow planters. Doar and the planters whom he interviewed shared a vision that glorified their class and the plantation economy. He exalted planters for creating superior agricultural technology in the more than 150 years since the introduction of rice to South Carolina; their techniques surpassed those of other cultures that had practiced rice cultivation for hundreds of years longer: “Our people have accomplished more during that period, in the cultivation and preparation of this grain, more than has been done by any Asiatic nations, who have been conversant with its growth for many centuries.” That Africa did not even make the elder planter’s list of ancient and productive rice cultures is not surprising. In addition, Doar advanced another popular view among planters: visiting European engineers taught aspects of tidewater rice-growing technology , particularly the construction of dams, trunks, and gates, to South Carolina ’s planters, who, in turn, tutored enslaved Africans: Tradition says there was in olden times a Dutch engineer, by the name of Van Hassel, who first taught the planters how to overcome these quicksand breaks [in trunks]. There are many of these “half moons” on Santee and the negroes always speak of them as “Ben Horsal.” They also speak of a stump, so large that Coastal Collaboration and Specialization 109 a ditch or drain had to go around it, as a “Joe Fuller,” although why so called, I have never been able to find out. To Doar, enslaved Africans were more likely to call the material culture, which they toiled over every day, by the name of a European “expert.” It was not apparent to Doar that...