Deep Roots: Rice Farmers in West Africa and the African Diaspora (Blacks in the Diaspora)

Like many of the other reviews stated, this book's narrative begins long before the African Diaspora, with only the last chapter covering that. From my own personal readings of African and African American history, narratives often begin and focuses on slavery. Although the impact of slavery is discussed, I appreciated the treatment of a strong interdisciplinary relationship to these African people and their relationship to the environment around them, showing African history in a light that harmonizes it with nature rather than the bleak political and economic forces that often dominate African and African American history. By the author's careful linguistic and agricultural analysis, it provides a much "deeper" understanding these West Africans' value and innovation, creating more impact for the final chapter and what these West Africans brought across the Atlantic.

Edda Fields Black contributes such rich and through knowledge to Black historiography with this book. It’s a must read for folks interested in disapproval Black studies and pre-colonial histories of Western Africa.

nice book

Highly recommended for anyone interested in west African and diaspora history. The author uses a multi-disiplinary approach to go beyond the limits of written history to show the antiquity, nature and varieties of rice-growing techniques in coastal west Africa, focusing on a small area in what is now the Republic of Guinea. She also shows how the knowledge bases of these people (and some of the people themselves) were transplanted in the New World. It is particularly refreshing to see that, in addition to having an excellent command of the literature in a wide range of relevant topics (including such unusual things like Mangrove botany), she has also directly collected ethnographic and linguistic data and has even worked alongside African rice farmers in leech-infested water fending off swarms of mosquitoes.