Based on the existence of the greatest diversity of wild and domesticated Oryza glaberrima (African rice) varieties and floating, semi-floating and sub-floating varieties with dominant characteristics and on the diversity and distribution of contemporary African rice varieties, botanist Roland Portères identified the Inland Niger Delta in present-day Mali as the site of rice domestication. In the Inland Niger Delta, the inhabitants adapted to their savanna environment by drawing on the largest pool of potential domesticates in the O. glaberrima species.Footnote 2 Archaeologists Roderick J. McIntosh and Susan Keech McIntosh found O. glaberrima in the lowest levels of excavated areas of Jenne-Jeno, dating back to 300 bce to 300 ce. These are the first reliable dates for the domestication of African rice.Footnote 3
However, there is no consensus among scholars on how inhabitants of the savanna domesticated African rice or how farmers adapted African rice to suit other environments. Despite its influence, Portères's work left unanswered questions about the processes by which inhabitants of the savanna domesticated O. glaberrima. Experimentation in uplands and floodplains may not be unrelated to the processes of domestication. Jack Harlan, in particular, diverged from Portères's diffusionist approach. He argued instead that locating a center of cereal domestication in Africa is impossible, because cereal domestication was an ongoing and slow process not a singular event. Based on botanical evidence, Harlan argued that cereal domestication resulted from non-centric experimentation, intensification and manipulation of wild plants by populations in vast expanses of territory and probably over long periods of time.Footnote 4
Cultivation was only the beginning of the domestication process, which resulted in West African farmers adapting O. glaberrima to the diverse landscape gradients where it is cultivated today.Footnote 5 Portères identified two centers of ‘secondary diversification’ where West African cultivators selected traits of O. glaberrima amenable to physical environments with different soils, rainfall levels and vegetation types from the savanna where African rice was domesticated. Inhabitants along both sides of the Gambia River in present-day Senegal manipulated African rice to grow in swampy, salty mangroves. Inhabitants of the mountainous portion of present-day Guinea-Conakry near Macenta and Guéckédou manipulated rice species to grow in rain-fed upland environments.Footnote 6 The location of this study, the coastal littoral of Guinea's Rio Nunez region, falls within an environmental and technological sub-region with Portères's secondary center of diversification along the Gambia River.
The Rio Nunez region of coastal Guinea is one small corner of West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast (Map 1). On the edge of present-day Guinea, the Nunez River and its tributaries cascade to the coast from its point of origin in the foothills of the Futa Jallon mountains in Guinea's interior. Annually, the Nunez River swells with the torrential downpours of the rainy season creating seasonal streams, floodplains and inland swamps. As the Nunez River passes through the highland plateaus bridging the extremes, the mountains and the sea, it deposits rich alluvium in coastal floodplains. The mouth of the Nunez River empties out into the Atlantic Ocean, the tidal flow of which reaches almost seventy miles upriver. Tidal flooding of low-lying areas deposits silt and saline along the river's banks.
Map 1. Atlantic speech communities and studied villages.
Two ethnic groups, the Baga and the Nalu, inhabit the mangrove swamps and floodplains of the Rio Nunez region respectively. In 1993, approximately 40,000 Baga inhabited both banks at the mouth of the Componi River, the Nunez River and along the coastal fringe of Guinea between the Componi River in the north and the Conakry peninsula in the south. Numbering approximately 10,000 in coastal Guinea, the Nalu live upriver on the left bank near the head of the Nunez River. Nalu villages also stretch north into present-day Guinea-Bissau.Footnote 7 These ethnic designations, however, belie a much more complicated reality of linguistic identity among coastal inhabitants.
This study focuses on the ancient past of coastal Guinea's Rio Nunez region, a coastal rice-growing region virtually unexplored by studies of West African rice and rice farmers. It argues that coastal cultivators have adapted mangrove rice-farming systems in situ for approximately the past 1,000 years, a historical period pre-dating the European travelers' accounts on which the current literature heavily relies. Rather than diffusing from the interior, these specialized farming systems grew organically out of coastal land-use systems. The study reconstructs the evolution of paddy-rice farming systems in the coastal region's ancient past by employing new interdisciplinary methods and sources. Using the comparative method of historical linguistics and cultural vocabulary, the study establishes different stages in coastal farmers' experimentation, adaptation and specialization in the coastal environment and approximates historical dates when the different stages occurred. And with botanical and biological studies of mangrove vegetation, the study distinguishes between the softer, spongy roots of white mangroves and hard, twisted roots of red mangroves. The interdisciplinary evidence reveals that knowledge of white mangroves was an early formative stage in coastal cultivators' fabrication of rice-farming systems. Lastly, from an examination of loanwords, the study discusses the important contributions made by Mande groups, who speak the Susu language in the Rio Nunez region, in intensifying mangrove rice-farming systems indigenous to the coast and extending them from zones of white to those of red mangroves. The interdisciplinary methods and sources enable the study to capture localized experimentation and innovation as continuous processes, thereby breaking with the current literature's emphasis on diffusion from the interior to the coast.
WORDS AS HISTORICAL SOURCES AND THE HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS METHOD
Reconstructing the ways in which farmers in the Rio Nunez region developed their rice-growing technology presents the historian with a methodological challenge. On the one hand, the development of the indigenous technology pre-dates the arrival of the first European visitors to the West African region between Senegal and Liberia, and therefore the recording of the region's first written sources. On the other, in the Upper Guinea Coast, archaeological studies are few and far between for coastal regions south of the lower Casamance River.Footnote 8 Botanical studies are few in number as well.Footnote 9 The Rio Nunez region is no exception to these rules.
This study builds on the rich and growing literature of historical studies which use the ‘words-and-things’ subfield of the comparative method of historical linguistics to reconstruct early precolonial African history.Footnote 10 It is the first to apply the methodology of historical linguistics to reconstructing the Atlantic languages of West Africa's coastal region.Footnote 11 In addition to the lack of archaeological studies in the region, the overwhelming majority of Atlantic languages spoken in West Africa's coastal littoral are understudied and poorly documented.Footnote 12 Fulbe and Wolof are the two notable exceptions to this rule. A lack of documentation and description for Atlantic languages has contributed to a debate among linguists about whether the languages in question represent a genetic or merely a typological grouping.Footnote 13 The overwhelming bulk of the historical linguistics research has been conducted on Bantu languages in East, Central and Southern Africa, which in comparison are relatively well documented and studied.
Based on a previously published analysis of ‘core’Footnote 14 vocabulary words which identified regular sound correspondences,Footnote 15 the Atlantic languages spoken in coastal Guinea's Rio Nunez region belong to two distantly related linguistic subgroups,Footnote 16 which I have called ‘Coastal’ and ‘Highlands’.Footnote 17 Coastal languages diverged in situ in the vicinity of the coastal Rio Nunez region, while the migration of Highlands speech communities from the interior to the coast contributed to the divergence of their languages.Footnote 18
The linguistic evidence presented in this article will show that Nalu, Mbulungish and Mboteni, the daughter languages, which descended from the proto-Coastal linguistic ancestor, inherited words for aspects of the coastal environment, such as white mangroves. These inherited cultural vocabularies exhibit regular sound correspondences established in the analysis of core vocabulary words. Although words for rice, rice cultivation and harvesting are conspicuously absent from the inherited vocabularies of Nalu-, Mbulungish- and Mboteni-speakers, words for the coastal environment are evidence of the most ancient roots of coastal rice-growing technology.
This paper will also examine a second category of cognate vocabulary, innovated vocabulary, which does not possess regular sound correspondences. Daughter speech communities internally generate new vocabulary. For different reasons – migration, environmental change, warfare and disease are but a few examples – speech communities choose to break with the past and to create new institutions, practices and material culture. Innovations are important signals for historians of the kinds of change which societies have undergone. Sitem-speaking migrants to the region joined Nalu-, Mbulungish- and Mboteni-speaking indigènes to coin words for key elements in coastal rice-growing technology, such as dikes, bunds, nurseries for rice seeds and wooden fulcrum shovels. Innovated vocabulary words are indicators of the genesis of the coastal rice-growing technology in the Upper Guinea Coast region.
Lastly, in the coastal Rio Nunez region, loanwordsFootnote 19 pertaining to rice-growing technology provide evidence of interaction among Atlantic speech communities in the Coastal and Highlands subgroups, and between Atlantic coastal dwellers and Mande strangers from the interior. Loanwords are also evidence of how speech communities interacted with a physical environment that was ancient to some, unfamiliar to others, and unyielding to all.
Most of the Mande loanwords in Coastal and Highlands languages were borrowed from Susu as a result of the southwestern movement of Jalonke-Susu speech communities, a process which spanned from the eleventh to the nineteenth centuries. In the Rio Nunez region, the ‘Susu-ization’Footnote 20 of Atlantic languages continued and intensified with the arrival of Christian missionaries in the mid twentieth century. Mission schools taught Susu among Atlantic speech communities who spoke different and mutually unintelligible languages to facilitate commerce.Footnote 21 Today, Susu has become the lingua franca of coastal Guinea, particularly in urban centers such as Conakry, Kamsar and Bokè. Up until the present, Susu is still spoken from Guinea's northern border with Guinea-Bissau to the southern border with Sierra Leone in the prefectures of Bokè, Boffa, Fria, Dubreka, Coyah, Kindia, Forecariah, Conakry, and in some villages of Futa Jallon.Footnote 22 It remains mutually intelligible with, and closely related to, Jalonke.Footnote 23 Identifying Susu loanwordsFootnote 24 in Coastal and Highlands languages requires an understanding of Jalonke morphology and phonologyFootnote 25 in order to distinguish words inherited by Susu-speakers from their proto-Susu-Jalonke linguistic ancestors from words innovated by Susu speech communities after their migration to the coastal region. An analysis of Susu loanwords in Atlantic languages spoken in the Rio Nunez region will reveal the knowledge Susu-speakers both inherited from their linguistic ancestors about grain production in the dry, rocky interior region and innovated in the coastal region – their new environment. Susu-speakers also borrowed words related to rice production and the coastal environment from their Nalu-, Mbulungish-, Mboteni- and Sitem-speaking neighbors.
This study employs one more tool from the comparative method of historical linguistics. In the historical field, which deals primarily with written sources and calendar dates, the ability to establish chronology remains the primary challenge of recording history for periods pre-dating written sources. This study of rice farmers in coastal Guinea will reveal the first estimated chronology for the innovation of coastal rice-growing techniques based on glottochronology.
Glottochronology was developed to give absolute dates to linguistic subgroups within a language group's genealogy. This chronological calibration was elaborated on the basis of European languages for which copious written records are available. It measures ‘the patterned accumulation of individually random change among quanta of like properties’.Footnote 26 Glottochronology uses a mathematical constant to measure the cumulative effect resulting from the individually random changes occurring on the vocabulary of a proto-language. From this figure, historians and anthropologists infer an approximate length of time since the divergence of linguistic subgroups.
Since its inception, some linguists and historians have been critical of glottochronology. Some linguists question whether the rate of word replacement could be the same in all of the world's languages from the beginning of time to the present and whether word loss and grammatical change can be measured before a particular linguistic threshold.Footnote 27 Others object to different aspects of the comparative method of historical linguistics – lexicostatistics, cognate counts and family trees. Their argument is that the time depth of language divergence can be overestimated if cognates go unrecognized because of sound change. Conversely, time depth can be underestimated if chance similarities and borrowed words are wrongly identified as cognates. These linguists also continue to question the simplicity of language trees, which do not represent the continued effect languages have on each other after they have technically ‘split’.Footnote 28
Glottochronology has also become a bone of contention among historians of Africa who employ the comparative method of historical linguistics. Among Africanist historians who pioneered the use of the comparative method, the elder statesman Jan Vansina objects to the use of glottochronology and to the premise that words in all languages are replaced at a steady rate. Instead, Vansina advocates using the relative chronology of language divergence which the comparative method itself yields from the genealogy of languages. Language groupings with higher cognate percentages are more closely related and diverged from their linguistic ancestor more recently. Language groupings with lower cognate percentages are less closely related and existed as one language at an earlier period in time. Languages diverge from each other slowly, taking centuries for adjacent dialects to turn into separate languages and to cease being mutually intelligible. Vansina advocates estimating half a millennium between one level of a language's genealogy and the next. These estimates remain unconfirmed.Footnote 29
A second group of Africanist historians, such as Chris Ehret and David Schoenbrun, has continued to use and refine glottochronology. Christopher Ehret in particular demonstrated correlative chronologies from linguistic evidence and pottery traditions in languages throughout Africa. In a recent study, Ehret reviewed empirical linguistic and archaeological data in four language families in four different regions of Africa to test for correlation between dates generated by glottochronology and dates generated by archaeology. Over a 10,000-year period, Ehret found the two methodologies to independently generate similar rough dates. And, over a 1,000-year period of individual random changes, the language families in Africa shared 74 per cent of their retentions.Footnote 30 Critics of glottochronology continue to question the assumptions underlying these findings, because Ehret does not test his findings against a third independently generated chronology.
Despite criticism of the method, dates generated by glottochronology are only one stream of data which must be compared to independent evidence from other sources. Scholars of the Bantu in East and Central Africa who use glottochronology do not use it singularly. They rely on correlations between sequences of change – in the formation and dissolution of language groups, the birth, growth and dissolution of pottery traditions, and in the pace and character of change in vegetation communities and climate regimes – dated by radio-carbon and thermoluminescence studies. Whereas linguistic sources provide indirect evidence of, and relative dates for, ancestral speech communities, archaeological and environmental studies provide direct evidence and absolute dates for the historical developments of ancestral communities,Footnote 31 which would otherwise be unavailable for time periods pre-dating written sources. In East, Central and Southern Africa, this collective body of work reconstructs the social history of a large portion of the African continent for millennia before the recording of the first written sources.
At the current stage of research, the Rio Nunez region of coastal Guinea lacks chronologies from interdisciplinary data sources, particularly archaeology. Hence, strictly speaking, this study can only use relative dating and can only approximate the absolute involved. One way of giving the reader at least an idea of the order of magnitude of the time spans involved is to compare the genealogy of coastal Guinea's linguistic subgroups to the European situation. For this purpose, the study will cite glottochronological estimates. Readers must realize that they are not confirmed dates, but only comparative estimates employed to help readers visualize the time depths involved.Footnote 32 Until independent confirmation is available for the Rio Nunez region from interdisciplinary evidence, the dates generated by glottochronology must be considered provisional.
In addition to linguistic data, the forthcoming narrative presents biological and botanical studies of mangrove ecosystems and coastal land-use change whose utilization is unique to the historical linguistic literature. Together, the two independent streams of interdisciplinary evidence reveal the antiquity of coastal settlement and of coastal land-use systems – of which paddy rice-farming was one part – in the Rio Nunez region, and provide the tools to reconstruct its development. The combination of the two independent streams of evidence makes a unique contribution to an innovative body of historical research.
INDIGENOUS KNOWLEDGE OF THE COASTAL LANDS, INHERITED AND INNOVATED: EARLIEST TIMES TO c. 1000 ce
Reconstructed vocabulary is direct historical evidence of the ancestral speech community, which spoke the Coastal language. Though they did not leave written documents and their artefacts are potentially awaiting archaeological discovery, Coastal-speakers left historical evidence in the words spoken by their Nalu, Mbulungish and Mboteni daughter speech communities.Footnote 33 These words give the historian clues to the knowledge Nalu-, Mbulungish- and Mboteni-speakers inherited from their linguistic ancestors about exploiting micro-environments along the swampy and salty coast.
Proto-Coastal-speakers innovated *-yop'Footnote 34 for two species of mangroves (Avicennia africana and Laguncularia racemosa) found along the coastal littoral. With glottochronology, we can estimate that proto-Coastal-speakers innovated *-yop before the divergence of their common ancestral language, c. 3000 to 2000 bce. These shards of linguistic data are direct evidence of the antiquity of knowledge possessed by proto-Coastal-speakers about white mangroves, an important feature of coastal micro-environments. *-Yop is a unique innovation of the Coastal subgroup, because no other Atlantic language from Senegal to Sierra Leone possesses a cognate to the word. The presence of this unique innovation in the Coastal subgroup is not evidence of speech communities north and south of the Rio Nunez region lacking knowledge of white mangroves. It may, however, reflect the highly localized nature of mangrove ecosystems. Reconstructed vocabulary for red mangroves is conspicuously absent from early proto-Coastal-speakers' arsenal.
Prior to the eighteenth century, descriptions of coastal dwellers cultivating rice in mangroves are conspicuously absent from the travelers' accounts. However, as early as the sixteenth century, European travelers' accounts described white mangroves playing a critical role in food security along the coast. In the Rio Nunez region and along West Africa's coast as far north as present-day Senegal, coastal dwellers cured mangrove seedlings by soaking or cooking them in water. If not cured properly, the seedlings remained poisonous. But once cured properly, mangrove seeds could be and were eaten during periods of famine. Among the Baga in Cape Verga, André Donelha described the germinated seeds, propagules, of Avicennia africana,Footnote 35 reporting: ‘their food is rice, funde [fonio], seeds of white mangroves – which they cure like lupines but under the mud in rivers’.Footnote 36 A second Luso-African observer, André de Álmada who traveled to Sierra Leone in 1582, described red mangroves and nicknamed them ‘oyster trees’ – ‘trees growing by the waterside with the stalkes full of oisters, and great periwinkles and crabbes amongst them [sic]’ – because the environment was home to hordes of shellfish.Footnote 37 The region's first written documents describe coastal dwellers possessing knowledge of white and red mangroves.
According to biological and botanical research on mangrove ecosystems, in coastal Guinea, red and white mangrove forests once occupied different zones along the coast – red mangroves (Rhizophora racemosa) bordered the estuary channels. A mixture of white mangroves (Avicennia africana) and Rhizophora followed, with a layer of Avicennia situated behind.Footnote 38 In coastal Guinea, mature mangrove forests exhibited a classic pattern of zonation from the riverbank to dry land: ‘Rhizophora, dense Avicennia, clear Avicennia, Avicennia and Laguncularia, prarie to Philoxerus and Sesuvium’. Footnote 39
Biologists and botanists attribute patterns of mangrove zonation to several factors. The different species' ability to adapt to waterlogged soils with high levels of salinity is a contributing factor. A. africana typically occupy zones closer to dry land, because their roots – pneumatophores – are not equipped to flourish when submerged under water for long periods of time.Footnote 40 Unlike the aerial roots of R. racemosa, pneumatophores are equipped with lenticels and gas spaces to procure oxygen from underground. But these pneumatophores can only obtain adequate oxygen from shallow waters.Footnote 41 Thus, the location of white mangroves growing in sandy soils closer to dry land enables them to take in oxygen from the atmosphere.
Patterns in independent linguistic, biological and botanical evidence diverge. The earliest European travelers recorded descriptions of both white and red mangroves. According to linguistic evidence, it is likely that coastal dwellers first encountered white (A. africana) mangroves growing in sandy soils closest to their villages and only later gained knowledge of red (R. racemosa) mangroves closer to coastal estuaries and salt water.
In the linguistic sources there is an absence of evidence of coastal first-comers cultivating rice at the earliest settlement of the coastal Rio Nunez region. Instead, the interdisciplinary sources reveal coastal dwellers laid a foundation for agricultural innovation which can be traced back to their earliest settlement of the coastal region. By incorporating white mangroves into their subsistence regimes, coastal dwellers exposed themselves to an entire ecosystem, rich in flora and fauna. This knowledge was critical to the development of coastal land-use strategies, particularly the development of tidal rice-growing technologies.
GAINING MASTERY OVER COASTAL LANDS: NALU-, MBULUNGISH- AND MBOTENI-SPEAKERS, TO c. 1000 ce
As the owners of the land, Nalu-, Mbulungish- and Mboteni-speakers inherited knowledge of white mangroves. After the divergence of Proto-Coastal, Nalu, Mbulungish and Mboteni speech communities gained more intimate knowledge about their coastal environment. They innovated words which are historical evidence of the lessons they learned. Gaining mastery over the challenges of the coast represents the next step in the development of tidal rice-growing technology.
The words coined by Nalu, Mbulungish and Mboteni daughter speech communities cannot be reconstructed to the Coastal ancestral language, because they do not meet two basic criteria: present-day Nalu and Mbulungish languages – the two Coastal non-contiguous speech communities separated by the greatest distance and least likely to have had contact – do not retain cognates; the words found in present-day Nalu, Mbulungish and Mboteni languages are not cognates, because they do not possess regular sound correspondences. Instead, they are ‘areal innovations’, evidence of language contact between intermediate linguistic subgroups, the daughter languages of proto-Coastal. Areal innovations often occur among language speakers whose villages are located in close proximity. Yet, Sitem-speakers, who also live in close proximity and whose languages are distantly related to Nalu-, Mbulungish- and Mboteni-speakers, do not possess these vocabulary words.
Like all forms of historical evidence, areal innovations are limited in their value as historical sources. For example, it is impossible to use glottochronology to date the entrance of areal innovations into a language, because they do not adhere to regular sound correspondences.Footnote 42 In these cases, the areal innovations entered Coastal languages after the divergence of Proto-Coastal c. 3000 to 2000 bce. Because the Sitem language does not share the terms, they likely entered Coastal languages before the migration of Sitem-speakers into the Rio Nunez region c. 1000 ce.
Though a word for red mangroves, R. racemosa, was conspicuously absent from the proto-Coastal language, two of its daughter communities innovated -mak after the divergence of their common linguistic ancestor.Footnote 43 Mbulungish- and Mboteni-speakers gained knowledge of marigots, seasonal streams created by the collection of rainwater in low-lying areas.Footnote 44 In addition, Mbulungish and Mboteni coined a new word for mosquitoes which are prevalent in the stagnant water pools produced by the rainy seasons torrential downpours.Footnote 45 By 1000 ce, Nalu- and Mboteni-speakers had acquired knowledge of additional aspects of the coastal region which cannot be reconstructed to the proto-Coastal ancestral language.
In addition, Mbulungish and Mboteni learned about shellfish, an important part of the mangrove ecosystem.Footnote 46 In the interdisciplinary sources, associations between red mangroves and shellfish are abundant. For example, in her archaeological research of Senegal's lower Casamance region, Olga Linares found mangrove oysters growing on the aerial roots of R. racemosa in archaeological deposits dating back to 200 to 300 ce.Footnote 47 By c. 1000 ce, the language evidence suggests that in the Rio Nunez region red mangroves were also becoming a key micro-environment for supplying other sources of critical nourishment in coastal dwellers' arsenals for food security.
The shards of linguistic evidence reveal the antiquity of a coastal land-use strategy. In addition to the absolute chronology generated by glottochronology, the linguistic evidence reveals an important relative chronology for the history of the coastal Rio Nunez region. Knowledge of white mangroves is the most ancient component of the coastal land-use system, subsequently followed by knowledge of red mangroves, shellfish and seasonal streams. Words for ‘rice’ cannot be reconstructed to the Coastal language or its daughter speech communities. Rice, whether it was grown in the mangroves, floodplains or uplands, is conspicuously absent from the earliest languages spoken in coastal Guinea.
COLLABORATION ACROSS THE SWAMPS: AREAL INNOVATIONS FOR RICE-RELATED TERMS AMONG NALU-, MBULUNGISH-, MBOTENI- AND SITEM-SPEAKERS
In the Rio Nunez region, both rice-growing technology and rice terminology were born after the two separate linguistic subgroups – Coastal and Highlands – diverged into daughter speech communities. By c. 1000 ce, the Highlands dialects spoken in the forest-savanna region of Guinea, west of the Konkouré River, were differentiating into daughter speech communities. Highlands dialects spoken in the forest-savanna and along the coast of Sierra Leone became the Temne language. Dialects spoken further north in the forest-savanna of Guinea became the Landuma language. And finally, dialects spoken along the coast of present-day Guinea became the Sitem, Mandori, Kakissa, Koba and Kalum languages. Cognate percentages and glottochronology support this settlement chronology.Footnote 48
After the divergence of the Coastal and Highlands ancestral languages, the daughter speech communities found themselves in the same proverbial boat. Nalu-, Mbulungish- and Mboteni-speakers had the benefit of inherited knowledge about the region. After c. 1000 ce, they were joined by Sitem-speaking villagers who migrated into coastal terrain and found similar conditions in their fields. Though they spoke distantly related but mutually unintelligible languages, they often lived in nearby villages and potentially worked together to design technology uniquely suited to conditions in their micro-environments.
By c. 1000 ce, most of the region's languages were distantly related; Coastal and most Highlands speech communities could no longer understand one another. Coining unique terminology to name the fruits of their collective labors was a product of coastal dwellers communicating as they exchanged their newly fabricated technology. The terminology pertaining to coastal inundated rice-growing technology coined by Nalu-, Mbulungish-, Mboteni- and Sitem-speakers of the Rio Nunez region cannot be reconstructed to either Coastal or Highlands. These areal innovations spread throughout micro-environments in the Rio Nunez region.
After c. 1000, the inhabitants of the Rio Nunez offer us the first glimpse of a coastal rice-growing technology. Based on the existence of new terminology, they also learned how to trap fresh water in low-lying fields in the floodplains.Footnote 49 Together Nalu-, Mbulungish-, Mboteni- and Sitem-speakers coined a new term for ‘sowing seeds with finger’ in moist soils. Coastal and Highlands speech communities also used their new word to refer to transplanting and to seedlings.Footnote 50
Coastal cultivators in the Rio Nunez region did not stop here. Together, Nalu-, Mboteni- and Sitem-speakers fabricated a key piece of material culture, the ‘fulcrum’ shovel.Footnote 51 Speech communities north of the Rio Nunez region named it ma-kumbal Footnote 52 and Mbulungish-speakers south of the Rio Nunez region coined a separate term. Cultivators on both sides of the Nunez River found subtle differences in the quantity of rain water and the quality of weeds in their fields, warranting different terminology and subtle variations in technology designs.
The existence of an indigenous word for the fulcrum shovel in Atlantic languages in the Rio Nunez region raises the question of its origins among Atlantic languages. The noun class marker suggests it is a Nalu word. However, the possibility of ma-kumbal being a Sitem word cannot be completely ruled out.Footnote 53 Thus, the current evidence suggests that Nalu and Sitem speech communities along the Nunez River separately innovated the word ma-kumbal. Mboteni speech communities likely borrowed it from the Nalu or the Sitem.
Mbulungish speech communities use a fulcrum shovel almost identical in appearance to ma-kumbal. But, they have coined their own terminology to name it.Footnote 54 Mbulungish villages are located south of the Nunez River and south of Nalu, Mboteni and Sitem villages. Of the villages where I conducted fieldwork, the Mboteni village of Era and the Mbulungish village of Monchon appear to be the closest in proximity. But Era's micro-environment is closer to that of the Sitem village of Kawass. Present-day Nalu, Sitem, Mboteni and Mbulungish farmers all named the Mbulungish village of Monchon as one of the few locations in coastal Guinea where African rice, O. glaberrima, still grows. They also described the rice fields in Monchon as possessing more water and weeds than the other villages.Footnote 55 The environmental variations may explain subtle differences in how coastal cultivators in Monchon designed their fulcrum shovels in comparison to cultivators in the other villages studied.
Throughout the coastal littoral of West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast, farmers adapted versions of the fulcrum shovel to the ecological niches in their micro-environments. Variations in the shape and size of the shovel's scoop – flatter or more curved, larger or smaller – depended on land features, such as quality of soil, quality and quantity of weeds, amount of fresh water collected in the fields, and land preparation tasks. The shovel scoop is attached with vines or chords to a long handle measuring the height of its user. The handle height enabled male farmers to rest the tool on their knees when lifting heavy loads of mud. Jola farmers in present-day Senegal use kayendo or kajandu to build bunds around, and ridges and furrows within, their low-lying rice fields.Footnote 56 Balanta farmers in Guinea-Bissau use a similar fulcrum shovel, which they call kebinde, to cultivate paddy-rice in coastal lowlands.Footnote 57 Even today, farmers throughout the coastal littoral of West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast use fulcrum shovels to carve fertile rice fields out of the mangrove swamps.
In oral narratives, present-day coastal farmers have testified that their ancestors cultivated rice with fulcrum shovels which lacked iron blades affixed to their edges, before coastal inhabitants had access to iron.Footnote 58 According to a Mboteni elder in present-day Guinea:
There are three kinds of bêche [fulcrum shovel]. When our ancestors began this work [rice cultivation], they worked only with their strength, because the first bêche did not have a blade. At a certain moment, God made it so that we found iron that was not worked by blacksmiths.
They worked that metal in place of the blade. After that time, there were blacksmiths here. And we began to go to the blacksmiths to make the blades for the bêche. Footnote 59
And according to a Balanta elder, ‘Since Balanta did not possess iron, the kebinde did not have an iron end. The kebinde without iron was for farming areas where Balanta cultivate paddy rice’.Footnote 60 The independent streams of linguistic evidence and oral narratives collected from elders in coastal Guinea and Guinea-Bissau exhibit similar patterns. The fulcrum shovel was indigenous to the coast and was not an introduction from the interior. The ingenuity behind its design and its fabrication were part and parcel of a continuum of experimentation, innovation and collaboration by speech communities inhabiting the coast since ancient times and those which migrated relatively recently to the coastal region. Both took place centuries before coastal dwellers had access to iron through trans-Atlantic trade.
BORROWED RICE-GROWING TECHNOLOGY AND TERMINOLOGY: LOANWORDS FROM SUSU-SPEAKERS, c. 1500 TO 1800
Language contact between coastal dwellers who speak Atlantic languages and Susu strangers has roots in population movements in the seventeenth century when large numbers of Susu began moving out of Futa Jallon towards the coast. Prior to the seventeenth century, some Susu settled on the coast as itinerant caravan traders. Luso-African trader Andrè Alvares de Álmada described Susu and Jalonke traders bringing indigo dye, cloth and clothing from Futa Jallon to the Rio Pongo region in the sixteenth century and traveling in caravans from Futa Jallon to sell dyes in the Rio Nunez region.Footnote 61 Álmada also reported the establishment of Susu villages west of Futa Jallon, sandwiched between the coastal littoral and the Futa Jallon mountains and situated beyond the (Baga) Sitem villages on the Kapatchez River in coastal Guinea.Footnote 62 As coastal Guinea was drawn into trans-Atlantic trade, Susu-speaking strangers settled on the sparsely inhabited coast among the Nalu-, Mbulungish-, Mboteni- and Sitem-speakers.
As a result of the settlement of Susu traders in the Rio Nunez region, coastal dwellers borrowed Susu words for technology, institutions and practices resonating with their ancient strategies for surviving and flourishing in the coastal environment. Susu-speakers extended some of the vocabulary words developed in their savanna homeland to strategies they employed in the coastal region. In addition, they created new vocabulary for the phenomena that they found on the coast. This cultural vocabulary is an important historical source for the interaction between Susu strangers and Nalu, Mbulungish, Mboteni and Sitem owners of the land in the development of coastal rice-growing technology, particularly mangrove rice-growing technology.
Susu-speakers in the Rio Nunez region inherited two sets of vocabulary from their Mande linguistic ancestors before their migration in the c. 1500 to 1800 period. First, Susu-speakers brought a wealth of knowledge about cereals, fonio and sorghum, in addition to rice, to the Rio Nunez region.Footnote 63 Even though Susu-speakers possessed knowledge of diverse cereals grown in dry climates, the linguistic evidence is clear: it was not ‘Susu’ knowledge. These are not Susu words. They are Mande words – or in the case of ‘fonio’, loanwords borrowed into branches of the Mande language group – which were inherited by Susu-speaking daughter communities and subsequently borrowed into Atlantic languages spoken in coastal Guinea. Like the root word for ‘rice’, words for other cereals may have been borrowed by language groups throughout West Africa at different stages in the language history of the region. In contrast, Susu-Jalonke words for moundsFootnote 64 are evidence of knowledge which Susu-speakers inherited from their more immediate linguistic ancestors prior to the c. 1500 to 1800 period.
Though the current literature on rice in West Africa portrays the Mande predominantly as innovators, in the coastal Rio Nunez region they also played the role of extending coastal Atlantic speech communities' indigenous agricultural technology. The fulcrum shovel is a perfect example. The previous section presented evidence of indigenous terms for specialized material culture – the fulcrum shovel – which spread areally among Nalu, Mboteni and Sitem speech communities. Susu-speakers borrowed a second term for the shovel from the Mbulungish.Footnote 65 They also coined a generic term to describe the tool whose length and weight coastal farmers customized to fit the quality of the weeds and depth of water in their rice fields, in addition to their own stamina and physical strength.Footnote 66Kɔp is only one of many words used by present-day coastal farmers to name this important aspect of their agricultural material culture. This article has presented evidence that Nalu, Mbulungish, Mboteni and Sitem speech communities possessed specialized vocabulary related to coastal rice production which Atlantic speech communities in the Rio Nunez region innovated.
Though Atlantic farmers throughout West Africa's Upper Guinea Coast designed and fabricated the sculpted wooden shovel based on their intimate and extensive knowledge of the coastal environment, linguistic evidence reveals that, in the Rio Nunez, Susu-speakers' iron-working technology fashioned the metal blades.Footnote 67 The linguistic evidence of coastal Guinea mirrors a pattern established by Walter Hawthorne in Guinea-Bissau prior to the arrival of Portuguese traders. The Balanta in Guinea-Bissau traded in salt, dried fish and molluscs for iron tools and weapons with traders from the interior. With the advent of trans-Atlantic trade, Luso-African and European traders demanded captives in exchange for iron.Footnote 68 Among Susu-speakers, making iron edges for coastal agricultural implements represented an innovation that was unique to the coastal region and not inherited knowledge from Susu-Jalonke or Mande linguistic ancestors.
Having traced the origins and spread of words for the key aspects of the coastal rice-growing technology, there are a host of other words which cannot be traced. This specialized terminology falls outside the categories for inherited vocabulary, areal innovations and loanwords. This is because individual coastal speech communities – Nalu, Mbulungish, Mboteni and Sitem – individual villages and, in some cases, individual families have adapted their own strategies for managing the variable conditions found in their rice fields. For example, in each village coastal farmers perform countless actions associated with field work. In some villages, the actions include walking on the weeds to bury them into the earth, turning the soil for the first and second times with the fulcrum shovel, catching the earth, and packing it into place with one's hands. The same is true for the actions, implements and rituals associated with clearing a new mangrove field, transplanting rice seedlings, surveying fields as the rice matures, harvesting and processing the rice.Footnote 69 Throughout the region, coastal farmers' technology varies slightly. And in each community, in each micro-niche, in each village and sometimes in each family, coastal farmers call their actions by different names. These highly specialized and localized vocabulary words are direct evidence of Rio Nunez farmers uniquely adapting rice technology and terminology to micro-niches and micro-environments along the coast.
CONCLUSION
In Guinea's Rio Nunez region, the multiple roots of coastal rice-growing technology resemble the sprawling roots of mangrove trees, penetrating either the surface or the depth of the soil, depending on their antiquity. Though the introduction of iron-edged tools was an important addition to coastal dwellers' land-use strategies, it did not define coastal rice-growing technology. Rather, the technological innovations of the c. 1500 to 1800 period were driven by the ingenuity of coastal dwellers experimenting in, and adapting to, their environment since antiquity. The accumulated linguistic evidence – the inherited vocabulary, areal innovations and loanwords – attests to the indigenous nature of this coastal farming system, uniquely adapted to the daunting challenges of the region by the groups which had inhabited it since ancient times. The introduction of iron improved the effectiveness of coastal rice-growing technology.
This study has examined patterns in several independent streams of evidence, particularly linguistic sources and biological and botanical studies of mangrove ecosystems. In spite of the paucity of documentary sources and archaeological studies for the Rio Nunez region, the interdisciplinary evidence reveals the highly localized and continuous nature of coastal dwellers' agricultural innovation. Conducting more archaeology in the Upper Guinea Coast region and comparative linguistic studies among speech communities speaking Atlantic languages will increase our understanding of the processes of agricultural innovation. Future study in the coastal region may challenge scholars to further re-think notions of agricultural technology diffusing from ‘cradles’ of domestication to the rest of the African continent.
