Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900

Abstract

Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves: Transformations along the Guinea-Bissau Coast, 1400-1900. By Walter Hawthorne. Portsmouth, N. H.: Heinemann, 2003. Pp. xvi, 259, illustrations. $24.95 paper. In Planting Rice and Harvesting Slaves, Walter Hawthorne examines the social and economic effects of the Atlantic trade system on the coastal communities of Guinea-Bissau, with special attention to the Balanta ethnic group. He begins with a macro analysis of the region and then turns to the Balanta communities in the last portion of the book. He draws on ethnographic and historical sources, administrators' and travelers' memoirs, Portuguese and Guinean archival sources, and oral testimony. It is one of the few English language historical studies of the precolonial history of Guinea-Bissau and the first historical study with a focus on the Balanta during the era of the Atlantic slave trade. Hawthorne is particularly concerned with the role of or stateless societies in the Atlantic slave trade. He challenges Walter Rodney's thesis, which emphasized the role of centralized states as active participants in the raiding for and selling of slaves and the role of dominant social groups in organizing such activities. Hawthorne provides substantial evidence that decentralized and relatively unstratified societies, like the Balanta, were not simply victims of predatory states but were active participants themselves. Hawthorne demonstrates the ways in which small, decentralized communities successfully engaged in slave raiding and trading, to procure a steady supply of iron to fashion weapons to defend themselves and to make farm implements that could increase food production and sustain larger and more defensible communities. He provides a convincing argument that Balanta reliance on local intermediaries in the slave trade and the fear of early European traders to operate in Balanta areas accounts for the paucity of written records of Balanta involvement. Of particular interest is an oral narrative that Hawthorne recounts of a type of ant that lived in large colonies and attacked smaller groups, which were likened to the large Balanta community of Filim, which raided smaller and weaker neighbors for slaves and sold them into the Atlantic trade networks. The thrust of his argument is persuasive, but it could be strengthened through comparisons with existing literature, including my own work on Diola or Felupe involvement in the slave trade. Rodney specifically mentions the Diola as well as the Balanta as examples of communities that lacked slave-trading elites and were primarily victims of neighboring states. Such comparisons would have provided detailed materials on the social and religious consequences of decentralized societies' participation in the slave trade. Still, Hawthorne outlines a number of significant social and agricultural changes in Balanta societies. Increasing physical insecurity in scattered upland settlements, known as moranca, led Balanta to move into lowland areas and form larger settlements (tabancas) protected by mangrove swamps and thick forest areas. …