Working the Diaspora: The Impact of African Labor on the Anglo-American World, 1650-1850

2: Seeds of Change

33 2 Seeds of Change African Agricultural Workers in the Anglo-American Colonies Tobacco, cotton, rice, hemp, indigo, the improvement of Indian corn, and many other important products, are all the result of African skill and labor in this country. —Martin Delany, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) Two generations after the British established their first permanent colonial settlement in the Americas at Jamestown, Virginia governor Sir William Berkeley “caused half a bushel of Rice (which he had procured ) to be sowen, and it prospered gallantly, and he had fifteen bushels of it, excellent good rice.” Behind Berkeley’s claims about causing the development of rice worked a team of unfree labor whom he recognized for their agricultural knowledge. Indeed, Berkeley and through his writings other colonial elites realized that their slaves brought skills in rice production to the colony. The governor acknowledged, “We perceive the ground and Climate is very proper for [rice] as our Negroes affirme, which in their own Country is most of their food, and very healthful for our bodies .”1 Berkeley’s testimony indicates that colonial elites did not maintain complete control over land or labor, so that a space was open for Africans to cultivate a parallel reality. Within the context of a colonial world that was in flux and experienced periodic crises, Africans in early colonial settings working next to Indian and English labor were on their own to survive. Thus Berkeley’s observation opens a window into the world of African agricultural workers in the Americas. Africans, though enslaved, carried 34 Seeds of Change agricultural knowledge across the Atlantic, shaping the agricultural landscape of the Americas.2 As the preceding chapter argues, people from Africa emerged from a material civilization that involved urbanization, longand short-range trade, craft production, and a range of other economic activities. At the foundation of that civilization operated agricultural workers, who transformed forests and savannahs into agricultural fields. The bulk of this chapter will trace the history of West and West Central African agriculture during the years of the Atlantic slave trade, surveying the ecological constraints on, quotidian practices of, and transformations in crop production. In response to their particular environmental and historical contexts, West and West Central Africans developed a host of agricultural strategies. This chapter will then explore the role of Africans in food crop production in the British American colonies. During their early years they worked in the fields next to Native American and English colonists, but over time they played a more central role in producing staple crops. This chapter will argue that through their knowledge of a wide range of crops, ecologies, and practices, African workers shaped the agricultural landscape of the Americas. An interconnected set of human and environmental factors influenced the course of West and West Central African agricultural history during the years of the slave trade. Agricultural communities faced ecological constraints that affected crop selection, prompted local specialization in particular staples, and stimulated diversification. The social organization of agricultural production also varied, ranging from kinship- to tributebased modes of economic production. These modes mobilized free or unfree labor, and agricultural production often depended heavily upon the labor of women. Within these social contexts, agricultural workers used different sets of tools and production techniques, making their decisions on the basis of seasonality, crops, soils, or other factors. While during the years of the Atlantic slave trade agricultural production underwent substantial changes in some regions, underlying continuities remained in others as workers passed down knowledge about ecology, soils, crops, field management, drainage, tillage, and crop storage over centuries.3 The ecology of West and West Central Africa had a distinct influence on agricultural development in these regions. For example, their forest zones harbored the tsetse fly, which spread the disease trypanosomiasis or sleeping sickness to livestock and thus excluded cattle rearing from much of the forested areas. While some agricultural communities raised livestock to be resistant to the disease, most others did not, and Seeds of Change 35 those communities could not rely heavily upon livestock for agriculture. As a result, they used different methods of maximizing returns from the soil—they employed crop mixtures; fertilized their fields with ashes, grass, household waste, night soil, riverbed soil, or millet or rice stalks; farmed on land previously used as cesspits; closely attended to individual plants; allowed land to lie fallow; and...