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

2. The First-Comers and the Roots of Coastal Rice-Growing Technology

 The First-Comers and the Roots of Coastal Rice-Growing Technology A Foulah [Fulbe] law protects [the Baga] from foreign violence (being the producers of salt, this is their prerogative ). Salt is guarded in the Interior as one of the greatest necessities of life, and its makers are under the safe-guard of this law. (Theophilus Conneau, A Slaver’s Log Book or 20 Years’ Residence in Africa, 103 56 DEEP ROOTS Though Oryza glaberrima was domesticated in the inland Niger Delta and is indigenous to West Africa’s Rice Coast region, does it have deep roots in West Africa’s coastal floodplains? Can its cultivation be traced to the earliest coastal settlement? Millennia before the advent of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the linguistic ancestors of present-day Nalu-, Mbulungish-, and Mboteni-speakers inhabited the coastal Rio Nunez region. This chapter will discuss their settlement of the coast and will consider whether or not the region ’s first settlers possessed knowledge about “Black rice.” Throughout West Africa’s Rice Coast, the evolution of coastal rice-growing techniques is embedded in the indigenous history of the region. In addition to evolving out of pre-existing land-use systems, coastal agricultural innovations also grew organically out of the movement of the region’s speech communities, the physical changes that the micro-environments underwent, and the speech communities’ adaptation to, and interaction with, these micro-environments. Reconstructing coastal farmers’ development of coastal rice knowledge systems requires digging deep into the indigenous history of West Africa’s Rice Coast region. As the indigenous history of Atlantic speech communities in coastal Guinea is currently written, it privileges migration and migrants from the interior as the vectors of change and innovation on the coast. In the Rio Nunez region, the story of coastal innovation is even a story within a story. In oral traditions, coastal “Baga” and Nalu elders claim that their ancestors migrated to the coast from the interior. However, the scholarship on West African rice farmers has attributed important aspects of tidal rice-growing technology to Mande migrants from the interior. The current literature attributes innovation on the coastal littoral of West Africa’s Rice Coast region to migration and diffusion. This chapter will examine the earliest settlement of the coast and the lessons learned about the coast by the earliest settlers of the Rio Nunez region. By examining interdisciplinary sources, the chapter chronicles coastal dwellers ’ development of tidal rice-farming techniques as part of an intricate land-use system designed to minimize famine and to ensure food security. It expands our historical knowledge further back in time than the period covered in European travelers’ accounts, which have predominated coastal West Africa’s pre-colonial historiography. A paucity of written source materials pre-dating the sixteenth century necessitates utilizing interdisciplinary sources and methods. Linguistic evidence allows us to establish the degree of relationship among genetically related languages spoken in coastal Guinea today, to generate a chronology of the divergence of ancestral languages into daughter languages, to locate where The Roots of Coastal Rice-Growing Technology 57 ancestral languages were spoken in the past, and to reconstruct words from the proto-languages once spoken by the linguistic ancestors of present-day speech communities. It provides the earliest evidence of innovation for the coastal littoral of West Africa’s Rice Coast Region. From Coast to Coast: Linguistic Evidence for the Earliest Settlement of the Rio Nunez Region In coastal Guinea, generations of scholars, both during the colonial period and after independence, have collected oral traditions among Baga and Nalu elders about the founding of their coastal villages. Major synthetic works on the history of Guinea have also based their interpretation of coastal Guinea’s history on these oral traditions. In many ways, these oral narratives have established the standard for the ways that many coastal elders, colonial officers, and scholars have understood the history of Guinea’s coast. In short, the traditions consist of several interlocking elements. First, coastal elders posit their ancestors’ origins in the “East.” Occasionally, the traditions cite Mecca or Sudan as the homeland of the Nalu or Baga. More commonly, they locate “Futa”—Futa Jallon and various villages therein—and claim that their ethnic groups were the original inhabitants—before the Jalonke or the Fulbe—of these regions. Second, coastal elders claim that their ancestors were motivated to leave the east and to migrate west, because their...