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Slaves and food: Remembering gory tales of the Caribbean
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| Food & Flavour , By VIKRAM DOCTOR |
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Economic Times-19 march 2007 |
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APART FROM cricket, India might not seem to have much connection with the West Indies today. But this wasn’t always the case and the reason for that is also being remembered this year. Unlike cricket though, the root cause here is grim since it has to do with slave trade. After European invaders had mostly killed off the native inhabitants of the Caribbean, they repopulated the islands with slaves shipped over from Africa. This year marks the 200th anniversary of the British Parliament’s passage of the Abolition of Slave Trade Act, the first real victory won by anti-slavery forces, which would ultimately result in complete emancipation of the slaves.
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What does this have to do with India, or with food? Quite a lot really, since food concerns were intrinsic to the slave trade. Slaves have been used since ancient times in many ways, but sending them to the Caribbean was overwhelmingly for one reason – to make sugar. Sugarcane was first cultivated in India, and the sugar making process was developed in India or Egypt. Production was low and sugar was a rare commodity, treated like a spice, but as more people developed a craving for its pure sweetness (unlike other sweet foods, crystallized sugar is almost pure sucrose – like the crack cocaine of sweetness), merchants started looking for ways to make it on a larger scale.
The tropical islands of the Caribbean, newly conquered, more easily controllable than the mainland and with natives decimated by European introduced diseases were the obvious choice for such ventures. The triangular trade soon emerged – African slave traders sold slaves to Caribbean plantation owners who sold the molasses they produced to North America merchants to make into sugar and rum which was traded for commodities like salt cod from the huge North Atlantic fisheries which had a market in West Africa. So deeply was slavery linked to sugar that anti-slavery activists promoted the world’s first consumer boycott, of sugar. Ironically this was supported by the East India Company, hardly known for enlightened labour practices, as a way to sell its India produced sugar as ‘sugar not made by slaves’. |
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Food wasn’t just the end product of the slave trade, it was needed as an input as well. Slave traders and holders could deny their slaves of almost everything, but the one thing they had to give them – at least those who were able bodied and still productive – was food. They weren’t exactly lavish with this, especially during the notorious ‘middle passage’, the journey from Africa to the West Indies, when it was assumed a large portion of the ‘cargo’
Would die.one survivor remembered:” we had nothing to eat but yams, which were thrown among us at random- and we had scarcely enough to support life. More than a third of us died on the passage..”
But it as evident that reasonably nutritious and cheap food was needed on the Caribbean plantations or in the parallel plantations and slave markets that existed on Africa ‘s gold cost. Slavers looked for solutions and found them in fast growing plants, both in Africa and Americas. A dubious tradition says that seeds for African plants like Okra , watermelon, oil plams nad sesame went to the Americas in the ears, hair and clothing of slaves. Its more likely they were imported by marginally more compassionate or practical traders who realized that slaves would work better with foods they were familiar with. A reverse flow took a bounty of American plants to Africa , including Maize peanuts , Cassava , potatoes , tomatoes , pineapples , papayas guavas, chillies and cashew nuts.
All this was part of the great transfer of food products between old and new worlds known as the Columbian Exchange. This was driven by more than the slave trade, of course: tomatoes nad potatoes, for example , were soon popular in Europe too.what could be said is that the slave tradewas a catalyst for the exchange tropical plants, particularly those like maize,peanuts and cassava that could serve as staples for slaves. its not easy either figuring out when and why these plants came to the indian subcontinent. Some like okra and watermelon, which have seem to have established sanskrit or urdu names , probably predate the slavetrade,brought over by Arab tradersriding the mansoon winds. but peanuts are surprisingly recent imports not recorded in india before the mid-19th century and it does seem likely they got a lift over on the Portuguese slave trade between Brazil and Africa, which would then sail further east to Goa. we are now the world,s largest producer.
Even once the plantation were established food continued to play a subtle role in the development of slavery. Since being fed was the one right more less conceded to slaves they slowly built on that. There’s interesting research from Antigua, where some of the worldcup matches will be played, that show how slaves were allowed to plant kitchen gardens for themselves , in order to feed themselves and how they slowly started insisting on Sundays off – cleverly also appealing to the Christian instincts of their masters- in order to maintain them.when the mastersbelatedly realised what was happening and tried taking possession of both the gardens and the sundays, the slaves would get violent and threaten revolt." Slaves have (or , which is the same , think they have) some rights and privileges of which they are as tenacious as any Freeman upon Earth can be of theirs."
wrote one aggrieved slave owner in 1730.
This may not seem much , since the slaves were still their masters property but it was a small crucial shift from seeing them just property,to seeing them as personalities, human beings in their own right. those kitchen gardens sowed a seed that would eventually result in emancipation in the British colonies in 1834. At which poit many slaves simply refused to work on the plantations any longer, gorcing the british to bring in a new labour force- indentured labourers from india which is a whole new story and the start of whole new cooking tradition in the Westindies.It may all seem far removed from the worldcup, but as you sit watching the matches , munching on your peanuts, give a thought to the complex ways that the food and history can work.
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