Enslaved Africans were chosen for their skills they rarely were taught them!
(Part 1 The Rice Industry)
Slave labor made it profitable to mine for precious metal and to harvest sugar, indigo, and tobacco; slaves taught whites how to raise crops such as rice and indigo. Before 1820, the number of Africans outstripped the combined total of European immigrants by a ratio of 5 to1.Slaves engaged in at least 250 shipboard rebellions over 90 percent of slaves from Africa were imported into the Caribbean and South America as a matter of fact nearly half the pirates of the Caribbean were black as pirates recruited from captured slave ships. Not until the fifteenth century was slavery associated primarily with people of African descent. Although Europeans did engage in some slave raiding; war was the most important source of enslavement; it would be incorrect to reduce all of these wars to slave raids.
European planters thought Africans would be more suited to the weather conditions than their own countrymen, as the hot climate resembled that the climate of their homeland in West Africa they would e less likely to succumb to heat and malaria. About half the Africans who reached the Americas had known defenses against multiple types of malaria that routinely killed white farmers especially in the Carolinas! Rice plantations shaped and reshaped the low country geography and economy, making Charleston one of the richest cities in the world, but it was a wealth built primarily on slave skills as much as labor. From the 1720s to the early 1860s, no other commodity was remotely as important to the region. Indigo, cotton, forest products, and manufacturing never came close to matching the riches that planters drew from their rice estates.
With rough tools, slaves cleared immense wooded swamps. Then they constructed massive hydrological systems—dams, dikes, and floodgates (called “trunks”)—used to irrigate rice fields where they sowed and weeded the grain. Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans were brought and Carolina planters learned how to cultivate rice effectively in swamps from their African prisoners. West Africans, like the Mende' after all, had grown rice for thousands of years. The technology of cultivating Carolina rice, was been “black” in its origins. The enslaved---and women in particular, selected the seeds, men prepared the land, constructed the canals and trunks necessary for irrigation, planted and tended the fields despite the harsh climatic conditions, harvested and processed rice, whether Oryza Glaberrima, the African variety of domesticated rice, or Oryza Sativa, its Asian counterpart that Africans had brought to Asia. The history of rice cultivation in the Americas is the story of a transfer of knowledge and of African knowledge, intervention and skill.
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