| With the 1938 publication of Tell My Horse, Zora Neale Hurston made an
important contribution to the burgeoning debate about the relationship (or lack thereof)
between West African cultures and the cultures created by people of African-descent in
the New World. Hurston’s ethnography identifies the structure, logic, and multiplicity of
forms inherent to Haitian voodun practices. Deep Roots argues that historians of the
Diaspora have been unwilling and unable to recognize the multiplicity of cultural forms
which are the West African roots of many New World cultures, in large part because of a
lack of sources and methodologies for reconstructing Africa’s history which pre-dates
written sources. This paper will introduce the comparative method of historical
linguistics and use historical linguistics to reconstruct the development of West Africa’s
coastal rice knowledge systems more than 500 years before both African rice and rice
farmers became valuable commodities in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. |