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

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....