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

Over the past two generations, few questions relating to slavery in the Western Hemisphere have attracted more attention than the degree of agency exercised by those enslaved. As economic questions relating to slavery and slaves receded into the background, study after study appeared on one or another manifestation of agency—power to act, instrumentality, etc.—among African American (and to a lesser extent Native American) bondmen and bondwomen. One highly specific, but extremely interesting—and revealing—case of the agency question concerned the degree to which rice technology in the Americas, and, in the more muscular version of the argument, the entire early American rice industry qua industry was based on agricultural "knowledge systems" developed originally in rice-growing regions in West Africa and transferred to the Western Hemisphere by slave laborers as part of what might be styled the Columbian technological exchange. In most inter mediated versions of what has become known as the "Black rice" argument, said transfer is interpreted as something akin to intellectual piracy—yet another act of imperial exploitation.

The earliest proponents of the argument were Wood and Littlefield, but the "Black rice" thesis is associated today first and foremost with Carney, a geographer specializing in West Africa, who has advanced it in its most comprehensive and aggressive form.¹ Simply put, according to Carney, the transfer of West African "knowledge systems"—a broad category that includes agricultural "technology" ranging from tools and implements to earth works, in addition to cultivation and milling practices, gender roles, and methods of labor organization—created the basic platform for rice production throughout the Americas, leaving relatively little role, except that of expropriation, for Europeans and European Americans.

In Deep Roots, Fields-Black offers further insight into, and perspective on, the "Black rice" argument by exploring the agricultural "knowledge system" in one little-studied rice-growing part of West Africa—the Rio Nunez region along the coast of what is now Guinea (formerly French Guinea)—beginning more than a millennium before the onset of the colonial era of West African history. Rio Nunez, long considered a backwater of little historical interest by most scholars, was, according to Fields-Black, actually a dynamic agricultural zone marked by constant ecological adaptation, relatively sophisticated technology, and impressive acts of agricultural innovation. Although rice (O. glaberrima) was not introduced into this particular part of West Africa until the eleventh century c.e., its successful cultivation in Rio Nunez was based upon the agricultural knowledge system created by natives of, and migrants into, this estuarial region during the more than 1,000 years beforehand. In the absence of either written or archaeological sources, Fields-Black is perforce compelled to make her case via botanical and biological evidence and, more problematically, via tools from historical linguistics, particularly glottochronology.

Despite such indirect evidence, her principal findings regarding rice cultivation in Rio Nunez are not merely plausible; they are largely persuasive. But when she attempts to extend her claims to the Western Hemisphere, her argument runs into greater difficulty, not so much because her version of the "Black rice" hypothesis, which is nuanced and moderate, is completely off base but because she demonstrates little familiarity with the history of either rice-cultivation practices in the Americas or the history of the societies wherein rice cultivation took place. For example, she claims that enslaved laborers were cultivating rice in coastal South Carolina "by the early seventeenth century," whereas the Carolina colony was not established until 1670 (157); she talks of "freshnets" rather than freshets (sudden overflowings of streams due to storm flooding) in eighteenth-century South Carolina and erroneously suggests that planters in South Carolina and Georgia "had access to a seemingly inexhaustible supply of laborers" (157, 179, 180). In fine, Deep Roots represents an important contribution to the literature on risiculture in West Africa, but the author's perfunctory attempt to extend her argument to the Americas is unnecessary and...