Deep Roots

<p>Mangrove rice farming on West Africa's Rice Coast was the mirror image of tidewater rice plantations worked by enslaved Africans in 18th-century South Carolina and Georgia. This book reconstructs the development of rice-growing technology among the Baga and Nalu of coastal Guinea beginning more than a millennium before the transatlantic slave trade. It reveals a picture of dynamic pre-colonial coastal societies quite unlike the static homogenous pre-modern Africa of previous scholarship. From its examination of inheritance innovation and borrowing <i>Deep Roots</i> fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities cultures and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.</p>