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

by Edda L. Fields-Black

Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, quite unlike the static, homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.

Genres: History, Africa, Nonfiction, Food, Anthropology

296 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Margery Osborne · Rating 5 out of 5]

i really enjoyed this book and i learned a lot. not just about the history of rice culture in Africa and the Carolinas but also about the use of historical linguistics. I came to the book because I had just finished Fields-Black's book on Harriet Tubman and because i have done other reading over the years on Gullah Geechee culture and traditions. it was a pleasant surprise to read about historical linguistics and see it used in such a clever way. One of my favorite authors is Barbara Pym. I just love her novels and reread them every couple years and I particularly enjoy the ones where she draws on (and makes gentle British fun of) her experiences as secretary for the International African Institute in the 1950s and 60s. There are a number of very humorous depictions of anthropologists doing the kind of linguistic work that Fields-Black utilizes. Its lovely when intersections like this happen! Anyway a pretty fascinating read both substantively and methodologically as is Fields-Black's of book on Tubman. Highly recommend!