Why Didn't They Tell You?

Featured Image: Cooked Rice

In south Louisiana, rice is probably the most important staple in the cuisine of this area. We don’t just eat rice with red beans and rice but with many other dishes including greens of all types (collards, mustards, turnips, etc.). And eating gumbo without rice would be like eating ham and eggs without eggs. So how did rice come to Louisiana?

It was introduced from West Africa during the early 1720’s. I quote, “Scholars have learned precisely how rice came to Louisiana, when it arrived, and how, and why. In 1719 and 1721, it arrived in two slave ships, Aurore and Duc du Maine. Each captain had been instructed by the French Company of the West to buy three or four barrels of rice for seed, and to purchase slaves who knew how to cultivate it. It was done and by 1720 African Oryza glaberrima was growing in Louisiana. In the early years, this African staple, with African methods of raising and cooking it, helped sustain a struggling American colony.”  (David Hackett Fischer, African Founders, p. 415).

Since the first Africans brought into Louisiana came from Senegambia (Senegal and Gambia) in the time period from 1719-1721, the seed rice was probably bought in the rice-producing areas of Senegal or Gambia, perhaps from Mandingos who were an important ethnic group in the area. The area from Senegal to around Liberia to the south was known as the Grain or Rice Coast by early European explorers, before it was called the Windward Coast, indicating the importance of rice and other grain production in the area, grains such as sorghum and millet, both native to Africa.

Other eminent scholars such as Peter H. Wood and Judith A. Carney document how rice came from Africa to the Low Country, South Carolina and Georgia, and how knowledge of rice growing, cultivation, and processing spread throughout the Americas (Mexico, Central America, South America and the Islands). Carney’s conclusion touching on this matter is instructive: “Only by understanding West African rice cultivation as an assemblage of integrated component parts can one grasp the full complexity of indigenous knowledge that enabled the crop’s adaption to so many different locales. In planting numerous lowland and upland land environments along a landscape gradient, farmers had at their disposal a rich assortment of techniques that could be adjusted to specific soil and water conditions. Such techniques formed the corpus of a sophisticated knowledge system native to West Africa. Owning its origins to the achievements of African agriculture in the millennia [thousands of years] prior to the Atlanta slave trade, indigenous knowledge of rice culture enabled the crop’s cultivation over s broad area of the Grain or Rice Coast. During the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries this African repository of knowledge would provide the principles and flexibility for adapting race under new conditions in the Americas.” (Carney, Black Rice, pp. 28-29).

The above examples of transfers of material culture from Africa to America is just one of many and is not just an important item of black history but an important item of the history of Louisiana that all Louisianans should be aware of in order to have complete picture of the history our state and nation.