By Edda L. Fields-Black
Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was once the reflect picture of tidewater rice plantations labored via enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This booklet reconstructs the improvement of rice-growing expertise one of the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, starting greater than a millennium ahead of the transatlantic slave exchange. It finds an image of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, really in contrast to the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of past scholarship. From its exam of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots models a conception of cultural switch that encompasses the range of groups, cultures, and types of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.
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Sample text
The Balanta’s shift in production necessitated significant transformations of age-grades, their most fundamental social institution. The labor-intensive task of clearing the mangroves became the responsibility of young unmarried men whose labor was mobilized and controlled by senior men. Cultivation of paddy rice also transformed the economy of Balanta societies, making them participants in an “iron–slave” cycle. Balanta villagers traded surplus rice to LusoAfrican traders in exchange for iron to make knives, swords, arrows, and spears for defensive and offensive slaving pursuits and tools for agricultural production.
On average, it takes five to seven years for the percentage of salinity in a mangrove field to The Rio Nunez Region 37 decrease to a level tolerable to African rice species. The growth of certain weeds indicates the presence of a “sweet” swamp where rice will grow. Today in the Rio Nunez region, farmers repair earthen embankments but seldom need to construct them, because they farm the same fields year after year unless forced to abandon a mangrove rice field due to severe rainfall shortages over several years.
The Rio Nunez Region 31 Though O. glaberrima is indigenous to West Africa, it is not the rice species primarily grown by West African rice farmers today. Oryza sativa—the rice species indigenous to Asia—is. West African farmers had developed farming systems for cultivating O. glaberrima prior to incorporating Asian rice species into their arsenal of land-use strategies. Scholars continue to debate how African farmers gained access to O. sativa. In contrast, Judith Carney has argued that the seeds traveled via nonhuman vectors—animals, particularly elephants, wind, and possibly water.