‘With Grains in Her Hair’: Rice in Colonial Brazil

Most people associate rice with Asia. But rice is also of African origin. Among the two dozen species of the Oryza genus only two were domesticated, one in Asia (Oryza sativa), the other in West Africa (Oryza glaberrima). While Asia has long been synonymous with the culture of rice, Africa has not. However, a notable exception occurs in isolated communities of north-eastern South America where descendants of slaves and maroons commemorate rice as part of their African heritage. From Suriname to Cayenne and across the Amazon to the Brazilian states of Amapá, Pará and Maranhão, an oral tradition claims that an African woman introduced rice by hiding grains in her hair. The precious seeds escaped detection and this, they explain, is how rice came to be planted. Even the rice plantation economy of colonial South Carolina suggests a similar account. In 1726 Swiss correspondent, Jean Watt, noted that ‘it was by a woman that rice was transplanted into Carolina’. The oral narrative presents a contrasting perspective on the transoceanic seed transfers that took place between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. It substitutes the usual agents of seed dispersal celebrated in Western accounts – European navigators, colonists, and men of science – with an enslaved African woman whose deliberate effort to sequester grains of rice in her hair enabled her descendants to survive in plantation societies. The oral history links seed transfers to the transatlantic slave-trade, African initiative, and the subsistence preferences of the enslaved. This view of rice introduction is established across a broad region where three European powers created plantation economies. It sharply contrasts with written accounts that credit European mariners with bringing the seed from Asia. The only shared perspective between the two versions is that rice was introduced to the Americas.