Palm Oil Diaspora: Afro-Brazilian Landscapes and Economies on Bahia's Dendê Coast

Abstract

This is an extraordinary and timely study of both the history and contemporary circumstances concerning the African oil palm in Brazil, where enslaved Africans and their descendants applied ancestral knowledges of dendê (the Afro-Brazilian term for palm oil) to create Bahia's agroecologies of resistance, subsistence economies, and distinct cultures. In Palm Oil Diaspora, Case Watkins makes novel theoretical and empirical contributions to the rich historical scholarship on the circulation of plants, peoples, and African knowledge systems in the making of the Atlantic World. He demonstrates how the transatlantic transfer of African oil palm marked not simply the movement of an important crop across the Atlantic and the relocation of cultures, but also led to the growth of sustainable agroforest landscapes and a subaltern Afro-Brazilian dendê economy that still exists today.Watkins's innovative methodology draws on archival materials, ethnographic sources, geospatial mapping, and statistical data to analyze the complex relationships between Black communities, socio-environments, and power. He also bridges literatures on Black geographies, Afro-Brazilian and Atlantic studies, political ecology, and decolonial theory and praxis to examine the power and potential of Bahia's Afro-Brazilian dendê economy. The author interprets Brazilian landscapes to bring to light very human stories of Afro-descendant ingenuity and resilience. One of the most intriguing of these stories is that of Benta, a woman born into Brazilian slavery in the eighteenth century. By cultivating African oil palm with other food crops on provision grounds, Benta improved her conditions and participated in socioecological resistance or cultural-environmental change—that is, patterning polyculture landscapes to counter colonial monoculture plantations.As the title suggests, Watkins argues that the Bahian oil palm landscapes and economies are largely the result of Afro-Brazilian agency, creativity, and resistance. Enslaved Africans and their descendants are recognized here as environmental agents responsible for the proliferation of dendezeiros or African palm groves, contrary to the colonial canon that disparages the agricultural skills of Afro-descendants. For centuries, they transferred, adapted, and blended botanical species to create biodiverse palm groves, which were illegible to authorities. They also carved out an economy of subsistence—a complex system of cultural, ecological, and economic reproduction. Even in the 1960s, when the military dictatorship backed hybrid oil palm plantations that threatened to replace African oil palm landscapes and displace the dendê economy, Afro-Brazilian smallholders adopted new technologies to transform their production processes in ways that defied the predictions of state agronomists. They continued to produce dendê for the culinary and cultural markets, both of which became central to Afro-Bahian identities. Despite the economic potential of these markets, Watkins argues that governments have consistently refused to invest in the Afro-Brazilian dendê economy because they prefer plantation-style monocultures as the model for modern agricultural development and because of anti-Black racism that has long permeated state institutions.The book is clearly written, very well structured, and consists of seven chapters plus an epilogue. The introductory chapter outlines the book's arguments and positions them in relation to broad debates, before introducing key concepts and the Bahia case study. The rest of the chapters are arranged chronologically. In chapter 2 through chapter 4, Watkins analyzes the entangled history of landscapes, cultures, and economies linking Africa and its diaspora in Brazil. He traces palm oil from its emergence in western Africa to biodiverse groves and cultures in northeast Brazil. During the transition from slavery to legitimate trade, the Bahian capital Salvador became the Atlantic hub for the transshipments of African palm oil in the South Atlantic as chapter 5 lays out. Chapter 6 examines how those transatlantic exchanges intensified demand for domestically produced dendê and led to the expansion of dendezeiros in nineteenth-century Bahia. By the early twentieth century, the government had recognized the profitability of palm oil production and imposed a top-down modernist agroindustrial campaign. Chapter 7 is an insightful account of the public-private collaborative development of dendê monoculture plantations, resulting in the downgrading of the Afro-Brazilian dendê economy by the mid-twentieth century.One of the key strengths of Palm Oil Diaspora is how Watkins carefully interprets recent national agrarian censuses to illustrate the continuing invisibility of Afro-Brazilian dendê production. He argues that the exclusion of Bahia's small-scale dendê producers from official datasets is by design, denying their economic value and agricultural contributions. As long as they are invisible in public datasets, they are also barred from most forms of public support. However, a curious omission in the book is an account of the economic importance of the dendê economy to Afro-Bahian livelihoods and Black communities today. In the epilogue, Watkins suggests that dendê production is economically significant for these communities, but provides no data to support that position. This omission notwithstanding, Palm Oil Diaspora is a rich and rigorous study that offers fresh perspectives on how we understand dendê landscapes, the role of Afro-Brazilian agency, and agrarian development in Brazil.