Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900

Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves is a rich contribution to the history of stateless societies on the Upper Guinea coast and brings new energy to the extensive scholarship on the history of the slave trade in western Africa. In telling the story of Balanta communities between 1400 and 1900, Hawthorne argues that people in stateless societies were not passive victims, but actively engaged in slave raiding and slave trading in ways that allowed individual Balanta to protect their own families and communities. During this time, Hawthorne further asserts, Balanta communities underwent social transformations that led to increased authority among elder men who sought to control the labor of young men. The book is divided into two parts; the first half presents a broad overview of the Upper Guinea Coast during the period from 1400 to 1900, while the second half examines more closely the impact of this period on the social institutions of Balanta communities.

Hawthorne's assertion that the Balanta played an active role in the slave trade contradicts the idea that decentralized societies were always the raided and never the raiders. It also challenges the well-established arguments that the slave trade was the domain of aristocrats or wealthy merchant classes only, and that involvement in the slave trade always led toward political centralization. Balanta engagement in the slave trade revolved around one critical trade item: iron. While European-manufactured guns were of little value on the Upper Guinea coast, iron was highly desirable, both to produce weapons and to make better agricultural tools. Access to iron had been limited to the Balanta before the Atlantic trade; increased supplies meant that the Balanta could not only better defend themselves and better conduct slave raids, but they could also more effectively attack the hard mangrove branches in marshy areas and thus farm paddy rice.

The swampy mangroves provided a natural barrier against those seeking to enslave the Balanta. With access to iron tools and in a new environment, the Balanta began to focus heavily on paddy rice farming. Paddy rice supports a denser population and provides more wealth, thus enabling the Balanta to afford more iron. When iron was scarce, the Balanta captured and sold slaves. Hawthorne notes the paradox of communities' producing slaves to acquire iron in order to better defend themselves from other communities' slave raids. Paddy rice cultivation also needs more organized labor. As the production of paddy rice, the defense of the community, and the need to obtain iron (and thus engage in the sale of captives) became increasingly important, the value of young men's labor, both for farming and for slave raiding, rose accordingly. In order to hold on to young men's labor, elder males sought to limit the opportunities young men had for contact with outsiders and opportunities that might draw the young men away. As a consequence, elder Balanta men allowed women to have more opportunities as the intermediaries with outsiders. Women were also more expendable as farmers and thus more likely to be enslaved. Yet again, the case of the Balanta communities contradicts the standard view of the dynamics of the slave trade in western Africa.

Hawthorne has written a history of the Balanta that is highly readable and painstakingly researched. It is based on extensive interviews and on a deep familiarity with archival sources. His arguments are clear and lead his readers to consider a different version of the history of the slave trade. In his conclusion, Hawthorne provides a brief but sweeping review of the way numerous other stateless societies responded to the Atlantic slave trade. This review reinforces his own conclusions, but it also suggests tantalizing questions. In the end, the Atlantic slave trade did not destroy Balanta communities. On the contrary, by the nineteenth century, Balanta communities were densely populated, prosperous, and enviable producers of paddy rice, with strong ties to European traders; at the same time, they maintained the decentralized, nonhierarchical nature of their communities. By itself, the example of the Balanta cannot tell the full tale of the Atlantic slave trade, but Hawthorne shows convincingly that neither can the story be told without them.