By Peggy McInerny, Director of Communications

Subsistence farming of enslaved Africans creates African foodways in the New World

Using first-person European accounts of plantations, drawings, paintings and oral histories, geographer Judith Carney showed that the subsistence plots cultivated by enslaved people on plantations successfully brought African staples to the Americas.

UCLA International Institute, November 20, 2024 — “I’d like to discuss a distinctive food system that the enslaved themselves forged in the shadow of colonial plantation societies — which were devoted to growing highly profitable export crops such as sugar, tobacco, cotton, rice and indigo — for the enslaved workforce that grew and harvested these commodity crops,” said UCLA geographer Judith Carney at a lecture cohosted by the Fowler Museum and the UCLA African Studies Center on October 29.

The lecture by the UCLA distinguished research professor emerita of geography was preceded by a reception for the 65th anniversary of the African Studies Center at which traditional and diaspora African foods were served.

Winner of such prestigious awards as a Guggenheim Fellowship (2004), the Carl Sauer Distinguished Scholarship Award (2012) and the interdisciplinary Robert McNetting Award (2012), Carney is the author of such acclaimed books as “Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas” (Harvard, 2001) and “In the Shadow of Slavery: Africa’s Botanical Legacy in the Atlantic World” (UC Press, 2009; with R.N. Rosomoff), in addition to numerous journal articles and book chapters.

“Food insecurity was a brutal fact of daily existence [on plantations during the transatlantic slave trade]. Overworked and underfed, the enslaved took to growing their own food in the small yards around their dwellings,” continued Carney. Using first-person European accounts of plantations, drawings, paintings and oral histories, the speaker showed that subsistence agriculture was, in her words, “hiding in plain sight within the plantation monoculture.”

“After the abolition of slavery, this subaltern agricultural strategy evolved into the Afrodescendant, small-holder farming system widely practiced even to this day,” she continued. “A defining feature of this alternative food system is the number of plants that are African in provenance,” she added, including sorghum, millet, yams, okra, the oil palm, cola (of Coca Cola) and black peas.

“All of these food plants were domesticated in Africa. [Certain plants] – notably, taro, pigeon peas and plantains — are actually of Asian origin, but they were adopted into African food systems in pre-history, through ancient Indian Ocean trade networks, and came to the Americas via Africa,” she said. Early Black famers also creolized Amerindian food staples, creating distinctive African diaspora foodways in the New World in which African crops are the “defining culinary feature.”

Food gardens: Sites of agency and resistance

In addition to foodstuffs brought from Europe, Carney pointed out that slavers regularly purchased agricultural products in African ports to feed the enslaved during the Atlantic Crossing, including rice, sorghum and millet. “[We know] that none of these African crops were present in the Americas prior to the arrival of European slavers and enslaved Africans,” she pointed out.

It was precisely because slavers frequently purchased unmilled grains — grains from which the indigestible hulls had not been removed — that African grains ended up being cultivated in the New World. “Any un-milled grain is also a seed,” she explained, “which means that any unmilled grain remaining from a slave voyage could potentially serve as a seed for growing it elsewhere.

“So as Africans arrived in the Americas, so did African food staples. They soon appeared in the food gardens the enslaved established for their subsistence.”

Although the geographer said the written record is silent on how Africans managed to bring seeds of familiar foods to the New World, pictorial evidence indicates that African women were in a position to remove un-milled grains and seed rice from slave ships.

Enslaved peoples planted a combination of African staples and Amerindian crops in the yards surrounding their dwellings, on land (such as steep hills) unsuited for mass commodity production and on provision grounds set aside by plantation owners, who saw the food plots of the enslaved as a way to cut costs.

With subsistence farming also came limited agency, as slaves were given time to grow their own food. “While the arrangement put the enslaved entirely in charge of their own subsistence, it established for them an important convention: time each week exempted from plantation work to tend their food plots,” said Carney. “This modest grant of labor autonomy significantly secured for the enslaved the right to benefit from any surpluses that could be bartered or sold. “

Finally, she observed, “These slave food gardens can also be seen as sites of liberatory practices and resistance, which would prove indispensable in the long struggle for autonomy and freedom. For these food plots provided the seeds and the root cuttings that runaways took with them when they fled bondage in plantation societies where frontiers had not yet closed.”

Oral histories passed down in Maroon farming communities established by escaped slaves in Suriname, for example, recount that women braided rice seeds into their hair as they escaped plantations (see video by ethnobotanist Tinde van Andel).

Alternative agricultural model has enduring relevance

“By bringing together, or creolizing, the plant heritages of tropical Africa and the New World tropics, the enslaved created a distinctive food system in plantation societies ,” said Carney, “[that] emphasized an agro-biodiverse polyculture.

“[B]y polyculture, I am referring to the systematic inter-planting of seeds, tubers, legumes, vegetables and fruit trees. This agricultural strategy mimics the entangled vegetative architecture of a tropical forest, in that a medley of diverse plants growing together offers protection from insect predation, heavy downpours and soil erosion. Planting a polyculture is a proven way of producing food in tropical climates where there are no cold seasons to purge the environment of predators and pathogens.”

“What appears as vegetative chaos is actually a carefully cultivated, highly efficient food garden,” she continued. “The variety of crops strategically spaced horizontally as well as vertically protect and enrich fragile tropical soils by creating and concentrating nutrients in the biomass.”

This model, which remains uncannily relevant today, stood in sharp contrast to the monoculture of the plantations on which the enslaved worked. “[T]he resurgence of large-scale monocultures in tropical lands and reminds us of plantations’ advent in the New World some five centuries ago,” she remarked.

Calling massive plantations “a defining feature of food production in the 21st century,” Carney noted that “[o]il palm plantations are expanding across Colombia, Brazil, Indonesia, Cameroon and elsewhere. Soybeans now cover more than 60 million hectares in South America and plantation agriculture is devastating tropical biomes where the globe’s richest biodiversity is concentrated.” Racial hierarchies of labor have, moreover, been reproduced on these plantations.

Palm oil plantation in Cigudeg, Bogor (Java, Indonesia). Photo: Achmad Rabin Taim via Wikimedia
Commons, 2008; cropped. CC BY 2.0. 

Yet Afrodescendant agricultural practices and food systems continue to exist in these regions. Pointing to contemporary Quilombo (Brazil) and Maroon (Suriname) farming communities, Carney pointed out, “These Afrodescendant farms harbor deep reserves of agro-ecological knowledge, shaped and maintained during centuries of hardship and experimentation. They have been tested under oppressive regimes of slavery and post-slavery histories of black dispossession.”

Unfortunately, these communities — together with Indigenous communities throughout Amazonia — are struggling to survive in the face of (typically illegal) land grabs for such enterprises as mining, timber cutting and monoculture farming.

The lecture and reception kicked off the UCLA African Studies Center’s 65th anniversary. The themes of environment, sustainability and identity will be explored in events throughout the coming year and also highlight new directions in the center’s research and programming.

Published: Wednesday, November 20, 2024