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

Conclusion

Conclusion “Innovation, Inheritance, and Borrowing: A Theory on Cultural Change in Pre-Colonial Africa and the African Diaspora” The year 2008, marking the bicentennial of the abolition of trans-Atlantic slave trade in the North American colonies, is an appropriate moment to make a confession that Africanist historians who specialize in the pre-colonial period, such as myself, are usually loath to admit. The forced migration of more than fifteen million Africans from the African continent to the New World—which accelerated the creation of the African Diaspora, was one of many factors leading to the colonization of Africa, and paved the way for the Industrial Revolution—set in motion the most significant social, political, economic, and cultural processes to take place in the last five hundred years of Africa’s, and arguably of the world’s, history. The occasion of this anniversary is also an appropriate time to reflect on the creation of new cultures in the Diaspora and to consider whether or not they have roots in Africa. Where does Africa end and the African Diaspora begin? What is the relationship between cultural transformation in Africa and the African Diaspora? This concluding chapter will argue that early African history and the methods that this study has used to reconstruct it—particularly the comparative method of historical linguistics—provide tools that can be used to understand processes of cultural change in the African Diaspora. The introductory chapter of this study laid out the building blocks of the comparative method of historical linguistics—identifying regular sound correspondences established through investigations of core vocabulary and using such correspondences as the first step to identify cognates and to classify cognate cultural vocabulary words as inherited, innovated, or borrowed forms. Speech communities find the information described by inherited vocabulary words relevant enough to pass down to subsequent generations who must find the information sufficiently relevant to retain the vocabulary. These words retain regular sound correspondences. For example, Coastal speech communities in the Rio Nunez region have inherited a word for salt from their 188 DEEP ROOTS distant linguistic ancestors. In addition to inheriting words, linguistic subgroups also innovate words that cannot be traced to such ancestors. For example , proto-Coastal-speakers in the Rio Nunez region innovated a word for white mangroves which dates back several millennia to their settlement of the region, and proto-Highlands-speakers innovated words for hierarchical social institutions, features of the forest-savanna region, iron, iron cooking pots, and chopping down trees, a process that dates back to c. 500 to 1000 ce and reflects the roots of Highlands-speakers’ knowledge about the forest-savanna region. After c. 1000 ce, Coastal daughter speech communities appropriated terminology, such words for chopping down trees, from their Sitem-speaking neighbors and applied it to the coastal environment. Across linguistic speech communities, Coastal and Highlands daughter speech communities in the Rio Nunez region innovated specialized terminology related to rice-growing techniques and material culture. Lastly, speech communities borrowed cultural vocabulary from neighboring speech communities with whom they had regular language contact. Between 1500 and 1800 ce, Atlantic speech communities in coastal Guinea borrowed generic terminology related to rice cultivation—as opposed to the specialized terminology indigenous to their languages—from Susu-speakers. In coastal Guinea, the comparative method of historical linguistics has provided the tools for this study to trace the development not only of agricultural technology, but also of coastal cultural identities. Its application has revealed intensely localized, highly specialized, and continuously dynamic societies and processes whose deep roots date back millennia into coastal West Africa’s ancient past. This rare picture of early coastal West African societies challenges Africanists’ assumptions that rice-growing technology diffused from the interior to the coast. It also stands in sharp contrast to Americanists’ constructions of a static, undifferentiated pre-colonial Africa that acted as the progenitor of cultures in the African Diaspora. Embedded in the comparative theory of historical linguistics is a theory of cultural change centered on the core principles of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing. Groups inherit cultural practices, social institutions, and other features from previous generations and subsequent generations continue to retain them as long as they have relevance. New circumstances—a change in existing conditions, migration to a new locale, and/or innovation of new strategies for management and new forms of expression—can spark change from within and cause groups to break from their inherited past. Lastly, interaction with other groups can result in...