Description
Mangrove rice farming on West Africa’s Rice Coast used to be the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the improvement of rice-growing technology a few of the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea, beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It unearths an image of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies, fairly in contrast to the static, homogenous pre-brand new Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance, innovation, and borrowing, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the variety of communities, cultures, and varieties of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.