The Search for the Kayendo: Recovering the Lowcountry Rice Toolkit

Abstract

On a wintery day in 1916, African American workers on the Mulberry Plantation outside Charleston, South Carolina, used a peculiar, hand-carved wooden shovel with a paddle-like blade to clear ditches around rice fields. This article explores the origins and proliferation of that shovel, from the fulcrum shovel of West African rice farmers, to the long-handled scoops that enslaved rice workers used in the Lowcountry in the 1840s and 1850s, to the artifacts kept in museums in South Carolina today. While many questions about the evolution of the wooden shovel remain to be answered, this exploratory essay uses a wide array of sources to examine the transmission of a vital piece of material culture from the subsistence farms of West Africa to the massive rice labor camps of the South Carolina Lowcountry. As the article demonstrates in this journey through the archives, the historiography, museums, and even the old rice fields of Mulberry, the shovel fills a gap: from ditching to sowing, harvesting, and processing, historians now have evidence of West African origins of every stage of rice’s life cycle in the Lowcountry.

Amplifying the Archive: Methodological Plurality and Geographies of the Black Atlantic

“…Thus, one central contribution of Black Rice was its inclusive and judicious assembly of methods and sources, moving far beyond documents housed in colonial archives. To be clear, the book was certainly not the first to employ morethan-textual methods in historical research, an approach long common among geographers and one that continues to gain momentum among historians (Bray et al 2015;Grego 2021;Hawthorne 2010a). Black Rice was, however, the first to fully embrace methodological plurality to recover the agency of enslaved Africans in the landscapes and economies of colonial risiculture.…”

“…Recent work on the material culture surrounding the cultivation of rice in the Americas continues to bolster the Black Rice thesis. Historian Caroline Grego (2021) describes a mud‐lifting shovel innovated from the kayendo —a specialised farm implement developed in West African mangrove rice fields—that was still in use on plantations in lowland South Carolina in the early 20 th century. She blends analyses of historical photographs with field visits, oral histories, archives, and other sources to demonstrate a West African provenance for the shovels as well as other prominent components of Carolina’s rice culture, including various landscape modifications and housing designs.…”