Rice: A cultural system of knowledge

“More than a staple dish, rice in Gullah culture represents a rich heritage reflective of resilience and African traditions.”¹

Psyche Williams-Forson, PhD, associate professor of English, Geechee from Charleston, SC

Peter Coclanis’s book The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 is about the wealth and prosperity that built Charleston, South Carolina. Coclanis describes Charleston’s evolution from a small town with a “medieval flavor” to a place with “a level of aggregate wealth greater than in many parts of the world even today,” a change that took place within the span of a lifetime, from 1700-1774.² He attributes this economic growth to “the successful commercial exploitation of naval stores and rice.”³ By stating that “rice”—an inanimate thing, a crop, a seemingly simple food—was successfully exploited, Coclanis is leaving out the crucial information and belittling African contributions to the agricultural and economic history of the United States. Unfortunately, Coclanis’ work is a typical example of how historians have—for a great many years—gilded over the realities of slavery and the ignored contributions of Black people to the histories of the United States. 

“The development of rice culture marked not simply the movement of a crop across the Atlantic but also the transfer of an entire cultural system, from production to consumption.”⁴

Judith Carney, PhD, professor of geography at UCLA

Judith Carney’s 2001 book Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation In the Americas tells the story that Coclanis leaves out. Carney says her book is “a narrative of the Atlantic slave trade whose telling assists in the recovery of a significant African contribution to the agricultural history of the Americas.”⁵

Carney delves into the connection between mangrove rice cultivation—which is notoriously difficult and temperamental—in the Lowcountry of North American and the shores of West Africa. “The planting of rice along the middle stretches of floodplains seasonally covered by brackish water demands careful observation of salt- and freshwater dynamics during the rainy season in order to time the cultivation cycle to the availability of fresh water in the river.”⁶ This delicate process was not something that white planters in the Carolinas understood, so the fact that rice was successfully cultivated in the mangrove regions of the Lowcountry points to another source of that knowledge.

“The case for African agency in introducing the sophisticated soil and water management infrastructure to South Carolina floodplains shifts considerably when detailing the mangrove rice system.”⁷

Judith Carney

Walter Hawthorne’s 2003 work Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 connects this deep agricultural knowledge back to the shores of West Africa, and provides a descriptive narrative about what the labor of rice cultivation was actually like for those Africans who are performing it, both free and enslaved. In this book, Hawthorne shows how agricultural production and institutional systems of the Balanta people on the coast of West Africa changed and developed since the beginning of the Atlantic slave trade era. He specifically focuses on rice cultivation, and highlights the staggering amounts of work and toil needed to effectively produce the crop.

“…lowland cultivation was practiced in areas where the water table was naturally higher than the land or where man-made dikes kept the ground submerged. Lowland farming can be subdivided into two categories depending on the depth of the water: deep-water cultivation and floating rice cultivation, which respectively refer to rice production in water that is 0.5 to 1 meter deep, and rice production in water deeper than 1 meter. African farmers adapted indigenous O. glaberrima to a variety of water depths.”⁸

Walter Hawthorne, PhD, professor of history at Michigan State University

This quote is important because it shows the sophistication of planting practices right down to the level of the water, and how African farmers of rice were able to work with the crop to manipulate it to specific growing conditions. Hawthorne spends many pages and much ink on explaining the entire process of paddy rice production, from cutting mangroves, to desalinating the soil and building lengthy dikes, all of that knowledge and work prior to planting, maintaining and harvesting the crop, which was also an immense amount of labor.⁹

“In sum, paddy rice agriculture requires intense, organized, and yearlong inputs of labor from individuals acting in the interest of their morancas and from individuals acting in the interest of the tabanca as a whole.”¹⁰  In West Africa, these “intense, organized, yearlong inputs of labor” went to benefit a laborer’s morancas (household) and tabanca (community). Once these same people were enslaved and brought across the Atlantic to the lowland South, these “intense, organized, yearlong inputs of labor” went to the benefit of white plantation owners and the building of Charleston and other southern cities. 

“Proper Geechee Rice”

Vertamae Smart Grosvenor explains how important rice is to Gullah Geechee tables:

“Home was where there was always a pot of rice on the stove or in the icebox. If you asked, “What you having for dinnah?” nobody mentioned rice. That was a given.”¹¹

Vertamae Smart Grosvenor

The centrality of rice in Gullah Geechee foodways was retained from their ancestors who used to cultivate it along the coastal areas of West Africa. Grosvenor shows its importance throughout her storytelling cookbook by speaking about rice many different times, and the recipe for “Proper Geechee Rice” explains the seriousness of the subject, how ones’ reputation within the community is on the line and can be soiled with one bad pot of rice. It’s difficult to tell whether she is joking or not…

Next to Matthew Raiford’s recipe for “Saffron and Coconut Milk Rice,” he gives a more abbreviated, though no less accurate, version of the history of rice cultivation that was explained above. He explains that in the 18th century “rice, specifically an ancient variety of gold rice, served as the cash crop of the tidewater communities along the coasts of the Carolinas and Georgia.”¹² He explains how enslaved West Africans brought with them “the know-how to level land and create irrigation ditches with systems of gates to manage water flow through saltwater marshes and freshwater swamps.”¹³

Even more interesting, Raiford cites The Darien Journal of John Girardeau Legare, Ricegrower—the journal of a manager of rice plantations in Georgia from 1877-1923—saying it “presents a detailed record of the rise and fall of rice growing just after the Civil War.”¹⁴ By including historical information and references, tucked neatly beside scrumptious dishes, Raiford is making his own historical intervention. This is an ingenious way to continue correcting the historical record in the public realm—the one that still holds onto vestiges of Coclanis’ era and before, where enslaved Africans were merely credited with labor and not with the deep agricultural knowledge they brought with them. It is also a brilliant way to engage cooks and readers in the history of a culture—not only giving them a recipe to prepare, smell and taste, but also offering an entryway into deeper learning about the subject of the meal.

“The resilience of rice reflected the strength of the people who, when abandoned and left to die on the Sea Islands after the Civil War, instead thrived and maintained a language and other cultural traditions, like call-and-response shout singing, oral storytelling, and intricate arts like crab net tying and sweetgrass basket making… this is why rice, not potatoes, is the foundation of Lowcountry and coastal one-pot cookery…”¹⁵

Matthew Raiford

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Footnotes

1. Psyche Williams-Forson, “Take the Chicken Out of the Box: Demystifying the Sameness of African American Culinary Heritage in the U.S.,” in Edible Identities: Food as Cultural Heritage, eds. Ronda L. Brulotte and Michael A. Giovine (New York: Routledge, 2016), 102.
2. Peter A. Coclanis, The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920 (Oxford University Press, Incorporated, 1991), 5 and 7.
3. Ibid, 5.
4. Judith Ann Carney, Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation In the Americas (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 1-2.
5. Ibid, 1.
6. Ibid, 63.
7. Ibid, 64.
8. Walter Hawthorne, Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations Along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003), 38.
9. Ibid, 160-166.
10. Ibid, 166.
11. Vertamae Grosvenor, Vertamae Cooks in The Americas’ Family Kitchen (San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996), 15. Available here.
12. Matthew Raiford with Amy Paige Condon, Bress ‘N’ Nyam: Gullah Geechee Recipes from a Sixth-Generation Farmer, (New York: The Countryman Press, 2021), 31. Available here.
13. Ibid, 31.
14. Ibid, 31.
15. Ibid, 31.