African waves.
A successful variety of rice called Carolina Gold may have come from Ghana.
Credit: USDA/ARS
Posted on 11/17/2007 2:40:32 AM PST by neverdem
African waves.
A successful variety of rice called Carolina Gold may have come from Ghana.
Credit: USDA/ARS
In colonial America, slaves from west Africa made many a plantation owner rich by growing a particular high-quality variety of rice. Now, genetic research suggests the slaves not only supplied the labor and the agricultural skills they'd gained in their home countries but also may have brought the valuable crop with them.
When slaves were brought to the American colonies from west Africa, they often grew various kinds of rice in small gardens to feed themselves. Rice became a cash crop for plantation owners, however, with the advent of a high-quality variety of rice in 1685. The variety came to be known as Carolina Gold, and for good reason. By 1720, rice was South Carolina's most valuable export. But from where did the key cash crop come?
The first reported import in the New World of what is thought to be Carolina Gold occurred in 1685, when a slave ship from Madagascar unloaded a cargo of rice in Charleston, South Carolina. That suggested that the rice came from that island nation off the east coast of Africa, or that, perhaps, it came from Asia and was picked up at a port on the way to America. Africa has an indigenous rice, Oryza glaberrima, which may have been domesticated about 1500 B.C.E. along the upper Niger River. It spread to west Africa, and when the first Portuguese explorers reached Guinea in 1446, they found extensive fields. Perhaps Carolina Gold descended from this plant.
To trace the origins of the crop, rice geneticist Anna McClung of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in Stuttgart, Arkansas, and molecular geneticist Robert Fjellstrom of the USDA in Beaumont, Texas, searched the USDA Rice Germplasm Collection for varieties with a molecular marker, RM190, for a gene that controls the starch content in Carolina Gold. This marker turned up in fewer than 1% of the varieties.
To narrow the search, they next looked for 43 other molecular markers in Carolina Gold. McClung and Fjellstrom found one variety that shared 42 markers. Called Bankoram, it had been sent to the USDA collection in 1972 from a seed bank in Ghana. "It's nearly a perfect match," McClung says, who presented the results last week at the annual meeting of the American Society of Agronomy in New Orleans, Louisiana. When the researchers grew the Bankoram seed, the plant was very similar to that of Carolina Gold. The finding suggest that Carolina Gold came from west Africa, just like the slaves who cultivated it.
McClung stresses that the research is preliminary. She can't yet rule out, for example, the possibility that Carolina Gold may have been taken back to Africa and wound up in the seed bank in Ghana. "There are a lot of things we need to nail down," she says. But geographer Judith Carney of the University of California, Los Angeles, says a Ghanaian origin of Carolina Gold fits with the idea that Carolina Gold arrived in the colony as food on slave ships and was then planted by the slaves.
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Does this mean we should start paying rice-parations?
What percentage of Africans shipped to the Western Hemisphere came to what is now the United States, the country universally deplored as the cause of slavery?
5%.
Not to mention that many more black Africans were shipped as slaves to North Africa and the Middle East than to the New World. The trade started centuries earlier and laster later. Yet comparatively few people with African ancestry are found in the ME.
Why? Because African slave women were mostly used for domestic drudgery and not allowed to breed. The men were mostly used as soldiers or eunuchs, in neither case being allowed to have families.
Yes, to Condi and Jerry.
Would it make more sense that slaves brought rice to plant for their owners or that merchants doing business in Africa bought the rice from local African merchants.
It breaks my heart to understand history! I have been to Charlestown, SC. The slaves were brought to the USA because the White Race can not tolerate the Heat for extended periods of time which was required in the Rice fields.
They were fed and housed well. It was a better deal than staying in Africa and being killed or straving to death.
We actually have some black professors in the USA that have come out and said that blacks in Africa Volunteered to come to keep from starving in Africa. America only had a tiny percentage of slaves. South America and the Middle East had the slaves
Your are either offering a very poor attempt at humor or you are woefully uninformed about our history.
But, the line about heat tolerance is just asinine.
I think that may have been the thought process at the time (about heat tolerance), but of course, we know better now.
And there were slave owners who kept families together believing the would be more productive and less likely to run. Others were much more heartless. No matter, slavery was a wrong that was righted.
And if the slaves brought seed from their land to ours, how does that differ from what immigrants have long done? If this story is accurate, I have those slaves to thank for the rice pudding simmering on my stove. That’s fine by me.
More accurately, someone (I forget who) once said that, "No man will labor long in the heat who can force someone else to labor in the heat for him."
While ability to stand the heat as such may not have been as big an issue as it was thought at the time, Africans probably did have somewhat greater inherited and acquired immunity to such diseases as yellow fever and malaria, which plagued the colony.
Climate change is a 'weapon of mass destruction', Christians warned
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There is nothing wrong with voluteering to come to the US. We constitutional conservatives believe that all individuals are free to keep the fruits of their labor, free to withhold their labor if they don't like the terms, and free to move on whenever they please. And that is the sad part of this, that human beings thought it ok to enslave others, to expropriate the efforts of their labor, and to traffic in human souls.
And for that they should burn in hell.
Are you talking about the Greeks, Romans, Babaloynians, Egyptians, Meads, Persians, Vikings, Spanish, English, Americans etc.
Are you talking about the Greeks, Romans, Babaloynians, Egyptians, Meads, Persians, Vikings, Spanish, English, Americans etc
Excuse me. I was referring to the modern era, i.e. since the world was understood to be not flat, but that it also included North and South America since 1492, and that the world revolved as it made yearly rotations around the sun.
Your list from ancient history strikes me as somewhat selective in an age when the political discussion can include reparations for slavery in the U.S.
How many other countries had a civil war because of slavery in modern times?
You asked who the first slave dealers were. The abomination of slavery seems to have been endemic to almost all cultures at one point or another whether it was called serfdom or slavery.
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