Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas

by Judith A. Carney

Book Overview

Few Americans identify slavery with the cultivation of rice, yet rice was a major plantation crop during the first three centuries of settlement in the Americas. Rice accompanied African slaves across the Middle Passage throughout the New World to Brazil, the Caribbean, and the southern United States. By the middle of the eighteenth century, rice plantations in South Carolina and the black slaves who worked them had created one of the most profitable...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0674008340
• ISBN13: 9780674008342
• Release Date: March 2002
• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

An interdisciplinary and cross-cultural perspective

Carney's thesis is that it was African rice, glaberrima, and African slave knowledge that developed the crop in the Americas, not Asian rice, sativa, or Portuguese traders. Her perspective is interdisciplinary and cross-cultural and establishes a foundation of African rice growing experience that migrated with slaves across the Atlantic. The distinctive shovel or hoe called the kayendo, described in mangrove rice cultivation by Venetian Chronicler, Cadamosto in 1455, supports her premise. It vouches strongly for the fact that irrigated rice cultivation preceded Portuguese arrival. Irrigated rice and the concomitant social development, establishes the presence of an African rice species and native African cultivation well before the Portuguese could have brought seed and rice growing expertise from Asia. The keyendo was a key tool in the highly productive mangrove system of rice production. The men aerated the soil, built embankments and ridges and turned over soil to bury weeds. The kayendo, Caney notes, is still in use today. While the kayendo was used by men to prepare the heavy clay found in costal mangrove areas in Africa, rice was primarily a woman's task. Carney notes similar gender roles and attitudes in the American plantation system. Use of the keynedo demonstrates the early sophistication of African rice production. Mangrove rice cultivation required extensive field preparation and management. This knowledge was transferred to the American continent. It contradicts the claim of Portuguese and plantation origins of American rice production with Asian seed. The rice, Carney argues, was of African origin and she points to the critical role of slaves in adapting it to the New World.

The African Connection

Not long ago, it was common belief that rice was domesticated in Asia and brought to other parts of the world either by Muslims or European traders. Thus, if rice were cultivated in the Carolinas from the late 17th century on, the presence of that crop was due to some European intervention. Carney explodes this myth. Showing the existence of rice cultivation in West Africa for at least two thousand years and proving that a) the variety of rice plant is not the same as the one in Asia and b) that a vast body of knowledge about rice growing existed in West Africa when the Portuguese first arrived there, she lays firm groundwork on which to build her idea that it was African slaves who taught the English planters in the Carolinas how to grow rice, built all the waterworks and field irrigation systems, passed on knowledge about milling the crop, and cooking the rice as well. She concludes that a whole system of knowledge was transferred from West Africa to North America's southeast coastal swamps (and to Brazil and Suriname too). This knowledge belonged especially to women of certain peoples who lived in the coastal rice growing zones of the area between Senegal and the Ivory Coast (and also in the interior [...] delta area of Mali). It was appropriated, just like the bodies of the slaves, and falsely said to originate with the white planters. How a bunch of ship captains and slave traders would have time to master the art of rice cultivation and bring it to the Americas was never explained by traditional historians. And the rice paddies of England somehow do not loom large in British legend. Africans---again---were erased from history. Carney has re-written them into the record in a very interesting book. The transfer of rice from Africa resulted in South Carolina being the richest of the colonies; it resulted in a black majority population for some time with the concommitant fear of rebellion among the white slave owners; and just for a short time, it allowed slaves to bargain with their owners to get some free time to attend small gardens of their own. Husking the rice by pounding it, a daily task for West African women, became a day-long, exhausting job for slaves in the Carolinas, part of the reason for the high death rate. In terms of breadth of research and the very topic of research, this is a five star book. There is one fly in the ointment. I think this book could have been cut, or at least, more carefully edited. There is a very large amount of repetition. The same ideas, even the same phrases, appear many times and it becomes tiresome to be told the same thing yet again. Many times I felt like exclaiming, "OK, OK ! I get it." This aside, BLACK RICE is a fine book. If you are interested in American history or African/American connections, if the tranfer of agricultural knowledge systems intrigue you, you can't afford to miss it.

Rice and the African Connection

Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas. Judith A. Carney. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. xiv and 240 pp. Notes, references, and index. (ISBN 0-674-00452-3) Reviewed by David Barber, Graduate Student, The University of Southern Mississippi; Hattiesburg, MS. Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, By Judith A. Carney, investigates the historical origins of South Carolina's rice industry and the role African slaves played by providing the knowledge and technology of rice cultivation in the Americas. From a personal background, Judith A. Carney is a professor of geography at UCLA. Carney's main argument focuses on the African slaves' contributions to the rice industry, their introduction of rice to the Americas, and their cultivation technology that provided the driving force behind one of the most profitable cash crop commodities in the South. Carney's book dispels the false, popular belief that rice was introduced to the Western Hemisphere by European traders. However, the book is limited, somewhat, as a source for studying the history of American cooking. Although Carney's book provides a valuable insight into the history of rice cultivation in America, it provides very little information regarding the usage or consumption of cultivated rice by the American society. Judith A. Carney is a professor of geography at UCLA. She earned her Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkley. In Black Rice, Carney utilizes a variety of primary sources, as well as secondary sources to support her findings. The book contains an introduction, six chapters, notes, references, and an index. In the first two chapters of Black Rice, Carney describes rice cultivation in Africa, mainly on the African west coast. In Africa, rice was cultivated mainly on rain-fed uplands, tidal floodplains, and inland swamps. The cultural/gender roles in western Africa positioned women as the dominant labors of rice cultivation. In addition to describing the diffusion of rice cultivation throughout Africa's many ecosystems, a large focus is placed on the mangrove ecosystems of West Africa, due to their similarities to tidal swamps in South Carolina. Chapters three and four examine the skilled labor of African slaves producing rice in South Carolina and the organized gender division of labor that remained intact within rice cultivation in America. By seeking African slaves taken from the rice producing regions of Africa, primarily females, plantation owners sought specific slaves knowledgeable of cultivation and technologies necessary for rice production. In comparison to cotton plantations, the labor practices on rice plantations allowed the slaves to concentrate on his or her personal needs once daily task were completed. The slaves on cotton plantations labored from dawn to dusk. This element helped African slaves to maintain a certain level of cultural identity, an uncommon freedo