Local Subversions of Colonial Cultures

Commodities and Anti-Commodities in Global History

Harro Maat, Sandip Hazareesingh, Harro Maat, Sandip Hazareesingh, Harro Maat, Sandip Hazareesingh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137381101
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

The book brings together original, state-of-the-art historical research from several continents and examines how mainly local peasant societies responded to colonial pressures to produce a range of different commodities. It offers new directions in the study of African, Asian, Caribbean, and Latin American societies.

1

Rice as Commodity and Anti-Commodity

Paul Richards

Introduction

On the Upper West Africa coast rice belongs to two species – African rice (Oryza glaberrima Steud.) and Asian rice (Oryza sativa L.). African rice was domesticated in the region, perhaps three millennia ago, from a presumed wild ancestor, O. barthii. Asian rice was introduced via trans-Saharan and/or Atlantic trade routes, and belongs to one of two subspecies – japonica and indica. Temperate japonicas are grown widely in the Mediterranean basin, but West African japonicas are tropical types and so are more likely to have been introduced from South East Asia by Portuguese or other European maritime trading activity. A more recent family of West African japonicas, to be discussed in this chapter, may derive from Carolina in the late 18th century.

The skin of the rice grain (revealed once the husk is removed) is known as the pericarp. Pericarp colour is an important criterion in rice trade and consumption. When the pericarp is white, small fragments remaining after milling are much less visible on the cooked grain. World trade accepts only white pericarp rice types.¹ African rice has mainly a red pericarp (some white pericarp African rices have recently been reported).² Nor is red pericarp uncommon in Asian rice, especially in indica varieties. Pericarp colour is controlled by a dominant gene. Most Asian rice would have a red pericarp if seed were not strongly selected.

When grown as a commodity for world trade, rice is obligatorily white.³ Rice grown for household consumption in coastal Upper West Africa varies according to local colour preferences. The red colouring transfers to the starchy endosperm in cooking. Some social groups believe a plate of red rice has better nutritional qualities. Others demand white rice. But farmer rice varieties on the Upper Guinea coast will be wrongly understood if regarded as heritage varieties – selections mandated by localised cultural traditions. Here it will be argued, with supporting evidence from history and agronomy, that they are better understood as the products of a process of resistance to slave-based commodification. As such, these small-farmer emancipatory innovations deserve a name. Here, they will be termed anti-commodities.

‘Red’ rice as a commodity of the Atlantic slave trade

The Portuguese arrived on the Upper Guinea coast in the mid-15th century. The westernmost point at which the tropical forest intersects the coast is a mountainous peninsula the Portuguese termed ‘Sierra Leone’. It overlooks a vast natural harbour – formed by the estuary of the Rokel river – later visited by British, French and Dutch, as well as Portuguese ships trading along the Guinea coast. Initially, the Portuguese visited the vicinity of Sierra Leone from bases in Cape Verde and Cacheu to buy ivory and kola nuts, a trade facilitated by Afro-Portuguese lancados (mainly Cape Verdeans of mixed race who had settled on shore as trade agents).

African farmers appear to have acquired Asian rices during this period of early costal trade with Europeans, perhaps by interaction with the lancados, who needed supplies for their own needs and for victualing the ships of trading partners. One 16th-century Portuguese visitor described a community in the mountains of Sierra Leone where the rice was said to be as white as that at Valencia (possible evidence of an early introduction of white-pericarp tropical japonica types).⁴ In the early 17th century a small Jesuit mission station was established at Sierra Leone. Lasting for about a decade, the mission was served by a priest (Fr Alvares) who compiled an important record of local life and livelihoods, including an account of local rice cultivation.⁵

The Atlantic slave trade from the Sierra Leone portion of the Upper Guinea coast grew in importance from the early part of the 17th century, when the British and French in particular began to supplant the Portuguese. The trade peaked during the mid-18th century, declined during the American Revolution and was finally extinguished in the first decades of the 19th century. A small colony for repatriated British Africans was established by abolitionists in 1787 on the northern end of the peninsula, and was taken over as a British Crown Colony and base for the Royal Navy anti-slavery squadron in 1808, immediately following the passing of the parliamentary act making it illegal for British citizens to engage in the Atlantic slave trade.

The colony’s main town – Freetown – expanded throughout the 19th century, with numbers increased not only by migration from the countryside but also by the release of ‘recaptives’ (captives from the Lower Guinea coast and Angola landed in Freetown from slaving vessels arrested on the high seas by the British Navy). The Freetown harbour was a major British military asset in both World Wars of the first half of the 20th century, and each conflict raised the population levels and food demands of the city. Internal displacement from civil war in the 1990s doubled the city’s population. Today, if its burgeoning suburbs are included, the population is more than a million. Securing rice supplies for Freetown became a leitmotif of government administration across two centuries. The three historical drivers of rice commodification in the region were the slave trade, abolition and war.

The main rice species on the Upper Guinea coast in the period from 1500 to 1800 was African rice. It has a number of varieties adapted to different cultivation ecologies and water regimes. The bulk of the crop was grown on rain-fed uplands. This is sometimes referred to as ‘hill rice’, and indeed some steep slopes are planted. But farmers also cultivated lower slopes and valley-bottom wetlands.

The slave traders took close note of local rice cultivation systems, since part of their business was to acquire supplies for the long Atlantic voyage. One of their number, John Matthews, described rice farming in the following terms:

[ … ] the natives [ … ] at and about Sierra Leone [ … ] cultivate little more rice than is necessary for their own consumption’ with ‘the sides of the hills’ [ … ] generally preferred for their [ … ] plantations.⁶

Another observer, Thomas Winterbottom, doctor to the abolitionist settlement in the 1790s, noted that under the local subsistence system in free villages each community cultivated a large (common) field and shared the harvest, pouring rice to height of the village chief as his portion.⁷

These communal systems of production satisfied local demand, but changes were needed to meet the rising demand from the slave ships. Slave captains sent cutters into the estuaries north and south of Sierra Leone to scour local markets for red rice. White rice was clearly also available at this stage, since some of the slavers claimed that this type of rice caused ‘bloody flux’ (dysentery), perhaps the greatest hazard of the Middle Passage. Red rice, they argued, was the preferred food of slaves. In local perception, ‘red rice’ digests more slowly. Farm labourers can be sustained for a day on one meal, rather than the two they will need if Asian rice is served. Ruthless in all other respects in their treatment of slave cargos, the slave ship captains, mindful of the condition in which their human cargo would be landed, took care to feed the slaves as well as they could, since this would affect prices and the profits of the voyage.

The demand for red rice was increasingly met by organisational changes. Winterbottom, after describing the typical ‘communal’ subsistence system, added that slave-worked private farms were beginning to emerge in the interior.

Though each village and town has its plantation, individuals are allowed to cultivate others for their own private use, and this they frequently do, employing sometimes their own labour, but generally slaves for that purpose. This custom is very prevalent among the Foolas, where land, in consequence, begins to be considered [ … ] private property [ … ] subdivided into particular plantations [ … ]⁸

The area north of Freetown was especially noted for this new slave-based rice production. John Matthews estimated that about three-quarters of the population of this region was enslaved, remarking that:

some of the principal men among the Mandingoes have from seven hundred to a thousand [slaves].⁹

Cultivation of rice on slave plantations began as a temporary expedient. Destined for the Atlantic trade, war captives were put to work while awaiting a ship, to grow their own food. Matthews further commented that:

Every prisoner taken in battle was either put to death or kept as a slave [ … ] those captured before the commencement of the rice season [ … ] were reserved to cultivate the rice-ground; and sold after the harvest to [ … ] tribes bordering the sea [ … ]¹⁰

Plantation agriculture became more regularly institutionalised in the last quarter of the 18th century. In the 1760s, at the peak of the trade, more than 100,000 captives were exported from the region around Sierra Leone, but this number had halved by the 1780s, due to a drop in demand during the American Revolution.¹¹ Mandingo and Susu warlords who lived by raiding the tribes of the forest edge were now forced to devise new forms of work for unsold captives. By the 1790s these slaveholders had begun to diversify into white rice supply for the abolitionist settlement at Sierra Leone.

‘White’ rice as a commodity of abolition

The estuaries of the Atlantic coast north of Sierra Leone was known to early British traders and officials as the ‘Northern Rivers’. Freetown marked the northern limit of the tropical rain forest. The Northern Rivers lay within the savanna vegetation zone. Grassy and seasonally flooded estuarine coastal plains were suitable for production of rice in commercial quantities. This is because more than one crop a year could be cultivated. Matthews recorded that ‘about the Riopongeos [River Pongo] they have three rice harvests in the year; one crop from the hills and two from the plains which [the rivers] overflow’.¹² Part of the intensification of this output seems to have involved the introduction of Carolina rice.

The Rev. Leopold Butscher, a German missionary resident on the River Pongo from 1806 to 1812, stated that Carolina rice had been introduced to the area about ten years before his arrival, and was planted separately on burnt fields of (Guinea) grass. He added that ‘the natives do not think it so nourishing as their own kind [of rice]’.¹³ A likely source for this introduction will have been a small group of American and British slave traders based in Northern Rivers who maintained strong connections with Charleston, South Carolina, one of their principal markets.

Carolina rice had a white pericarp. Today, two types are distinguished: ‘Carolina White’ and ‘Carolina Gold’.¹⁴ Gold was named for the colour of its husk, not its pericarp. Tibbetts suggests the two Carolina rices originated in Indonesia, thus implying that they are probably tropical japonicas. Carolina Gold was harder to grow, since it was tall and lodged easily. Carolina White appears to have been the more widely cultivated variety. The slave trader Theophilus Conneau, originally from Boston, but resident on the Rio Pongo in the mid-1820s, was familiar with this American rice, and reported the grain to be whiter than African rice, though less solid and tasty.

The grain morphology of Carolina rice differs from the typical grain morphology for many japonicas, noted for their rounded grain shape. In the 1930s one expert in the rice trade distinguished three main grain shapes for rice: a ‘long, thin, cylindrical grain, known as Patna’ (indica), a ‘short, stout grain, known as Spanish-Japan’ (that is to say temperate japonica, of a kind found in East Asia, Japan and the Mediterranean), and a ‘relatively long and bold type’ of grain ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Rice as Commodity and Anti-Commodity
• 2. Yellow Tobacco, Black Tobacco: Indigenous (desi) Tobacco as an Anti-Commodity
• 3. Upland and Lowland Rice in the Netherlands Indies
• 4. Anti-Commodity Counterpoint: Smallholder Diversity and Rural Development on the Cuban Sugar Frontier
• 5. ‘Your Foreign Plants Are Very Delicate’: Peasant Crop Ecologies and the Subversion of Colonial Cotton Designs in Dharwar, Western India, 1830–1880
• 6. Sanitising Commercialisation: Health and the Politics of ‘Waste’ in Colonial Punjab
• 7. East African Railways and Harbours, 1945–1960: From ‘Crisis of Accumulation’ to Labour Resistance
• 8. Rice, Civilisation and the Swahili Towns: Anti-Commodity and Anti-State?
• 9. ‘Shun the White Man’s Crop’: Shangwe Grievances, Religious Leaders and Cotton Cultivation in North-Western Zimbabwe
• Index