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, Deep Roots fashions a theory of cultural change that encompasses the diversity of communities, cultures, and forms of expression in Africa and the African diaspora.

Much of the research and study of the formation of Sierra Leone focuses almost exclusively on the role of the so-called Creoles, or descendants of ex-slaves from Europe, North America, Jamaica, and Africa living in the colony. In this book, Joseph J. Bangura cuts through this typical narrative surrounding the making of the British colony, and instead offers a fresh look at the role of the often overlooked indigenous Temne-speakers. Bangura explores, however, the socio-economic formation, establishment, and evolution of Freetown, from the perspective of different Temne-speaking groups, including market women, religious figures, and community leaders and the complex relationships developed in the process. Examining key issues, such as the politics of belonging, African agency, and the creation of national identities, Bangura offers an account of Sierra Leone that sheds new perspectives on the social history of the colony.

"The story of six children who were stolen from their homes in Africa and sold into slavery across the Atlantic in 1839. They were transported by ship from West Africa to Cuba to the United States, and after protracted legal struggles they returned to Africa to restart their lives"--