It built cities and fed colonies, but it turns out that enslaved Africans did more than just plant the cash crop; they likely introduced it to the United States.
A woman whose name I may never know disembarked a ship in the port of Charleston, South Carolina, bound for a rice field just before the American Revolution. She belonged to Sierra Leone’s Mende tribe. The letters “R.A.C.E.” – Royal African Company of England – were brandished into her flesh on her back. The ship that brought her began its journey in Liverpool or London and proceeded south along the upper Guinea Coast. It bobbed in the water off Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone estuary. Waiting for supplies and a cargo of “choice healthy slaves” to be auctioned off on the deck or at the wharf when it arrived at its final destination: the swampy, moss-draped Carolina Lowcountry.
Rice’s journey to the United States is the journey of the people whose labour and knowledge resulted in its successful cultivation. Between 1750 and 1775, the majority of over 50,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped from the aptly named Rice Coast, the traditional rice-growing region between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and western Ivory Coast, where part of my African forefathers are from and whose heart is in modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia. Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no idea how to grow it, enslaved Africans were brought to feed the eastern seaboard of the United States, Britain, and many parts of the British Caribbean. Cotton was the king of commodities in the antebellum South, but Rice was the queen back then. And the queen brought unrivalled economic power, transforming Charleston, and later Savannah, into vibrant cosmopolitan ports.
The women who brought this knowledge were valuable cargo. More than four millennia of experience, from wild rice gathering to domestication around 3,000 years ago, rested in their heads. And in their wombs lay the potential for centuries of wealth for their slaveholders at the expense of human dignity and the US’ “democratic experiment,” the economic foundations of which their descendants would ironically lay.
Long before their arrival, there was likely Oryza glaberrima, or “African rice” – one of only two main species of cultivated rice in the world along with Oryza sativa, or “Asian rice”. African rice, native to Sub-Saharan Africa and brought by enslavers on the Middle Passage, was used to feed Senegalese enslaved in the late 1600s, along with the famous “seed from Madagascar,” an Asian variety of rice. Asian rice varieties had spread across West Africa on coastal plantations by the 18th century, thanks to European encouragement, allowing enslavers to supply slave ships with both types of rice in order to feed their colonies in the New World.
Indigenous rice from Africa was brought by enslavers to feed the New World
There was more to the difference between rice in West Africa and rice in the American South than just freedom versus enslavement. Pathogens and parasites, alligators and snakes, and sunrise-to-sunset labour patterns that extended the equatorial 12-hour day were all new threats. Threats of punishment, torture, sale, and separation from loved ones surrounded these agonies. It was bad enough to be in exile, but having social and spiritual ruptures impacting this new existence created an almost constant sense of terror.
While others became extremely wealthy as a result of their labour in producing rice, these men and women’s perseverance was supported by enormous private joy. In their universe, The shared tasks gave the most experienced and hardworking enslaved labourers time away from their “task” or assigned acreage of rice to cultivate their own rice patches and gardens, as well as hunt and fish. They pounded the rice with mortars and pestles in the same communicative musical ways as their African foremothers. They woven baskets, carved pestles, knitted nets to catch fish, shrimp, and crabs, and built coops from palmetto stalks to raise the chickens and guinea fowl that pecked in their yards (also West African arrivals). These animals were served with rice, which was adapted from West African recipes for the plantation world. Everything was a direct challenge to exploitation and assimilation. It was a form of resistance.
During the Revolutionary War, thousands upon thousands of enslaved African South Carolinians escaped to the British line not long after the arrival of the nameless woman (1775-1783). She wasn’t one of them, and she probably had one or two children, which would make it difficult for her to flee. Many would end up in Nova Scotia, Canada, or in her home country of Sierra Leone. As the planters reclaimed control following the revolution, a new variety of rice emerged, ensuring that enslavement would continue until the Confederacy’s surrender: Carolina Gold. Carolina Gold’s origins are still unknown, but genetic research from 2007 suggests it may have descended from Bankoram, a Ghanaian variety with which Carolina Gold shares genes.
Genetic research suggests Carolina Gold may have come from a Ghanaian rice variety
Carolina Gold would eventually entice diners with influences drawn from the indigenous peoples of the South-east US, as well as southern English traditions, French Huguenots, Palatinate Germans, Spanish and Sephardic Jews, the latter two bringing in culinary influences from Moorish Spain and older contributions from the Middle East.
The most important cultures of the Carolina rice kitchen, however, were those who did the majority of the cooking: the Mende, Temne, Fula, Limba, Loma, Bassari, Sherbro, Kru, Balanta, and other West African peoples, as well as the Afri-Creoles of Barbados, Carolina’s mother colony. Parallel to a similar rice tradition established by colonial powers, in this case the French, in southern Louisiana and the Lower Mississippi Valley, it was the culinary experience of centuries in Africa that would shape a cuisine that would come to define the American South.
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Africans introduced the preference that once the rice was steamed, each grain be cooked separately from the others, each on its own, into the rice kitchens of the American South. Only sticky rice was used to make fritters like calas, which were sold hot and fresh on the streets of New Orleans, or to make pudding or any number of breads or sweets. Rice was almost always served with the Afri-Creole “trinity” of tomatoes, onions, and bell or hot peppers, or as a bed for traditional West African staples like okra, peanuts, black-eyed peas, greens, or stews made from a combination of these or starring seafood or chicken. My mother and grandmother, Country Captain (a Southern response to curry-based dishes brought by British traders via India), rice steamed with the trinity, and one-pot meals of smothered chicken and rice were among the recipes passed down to me by my best culinary teachers.