By Kenneth Reginald Otero-Walker
Apr 10 2024
African rice, Oryza glaberrima, has been essential to recognizing the contributions of the African diaspora to global foodways. Previous accounts have held that Europeans introduced rice cultivation to Africa, but before the introduction of Oryza sativa, O. glaberrima had long been a staple on the African continent where it was independently domesticated from O. barthii, African wild rice, over 3000 years ago.
In the book Black Rice, Judith Carney added to the debate on knowledge transfer of rice cultivation by the African diaspora, drawing on sources such as paintings depicting enslaved African woman hulling rice in mortars on the deck of slave ships, to herbarium vouchers of Oryza glaberrima found growing in South America and cultivated by the Maroons of Surinam. This legacy can be traced through specimens of O. glaberrima collected in South American, now stored in herbaria throughout the world.
In collaboration with Maroon women, ethnobotanist Dr. Tinde van Andel and her colleagues were able to identify a variety of black rice still being grown by Maroon communities, genetically similar to a variety grown in Ivory Coast. Matawai Maroon collaborators documented in the words of their descendants the stories of an ancestral Maroon woman, Mama Tjowa, who hid black rice in her hair before making the break for freedom.
But a picture is worth a thousand words, learn more from this herbarium specimen of matu alesi, forest rice.
