Because rice was not indigenous to the Americas and plantation owners had no knowledge of how to grow it, enslaved Africans were brought to fuel its husbandry, feeding the US' eastern seaboard, Britain and provisioning many parts of the British Caribbean.

Between 17, the bulk of more than 50,000 enslaved Africans were kidnapped from the aptly named Rice Coast, the traditional rice-growing region between Guinea and Guinea-Bissau and the western Ivory Coast where part of my African forebearers are from, and whose heart is in modern-day Sierra Leone and Liberia. The journey of rice to the US is the journey of the people whose labour and knowledge led to its successful cultivation. It waited at Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone estuary, bobbing in the water, waiting for supplies and a cargo of 'choice healthy slaves' that would be sold at auction by scramble on the deck or by the wharf when it landed at its final destination: the swampy, moss-draped Carolina Lowcountry. The ship on which she was brought started its journey in Liverpool or London and made its way south along the upper Guinea Coast. Her back bore the letters 'R.A.C.E.' – Royal African Company of England – seared into her flesh with a brand. She was a member of the Mende people of Sierra Leone. Just before the American Revolution, a woman whose name I may never know disembarked a ship in the harbour of Charleston, South Carolina, destined for a rice field.

Michael twitty rice