STOLEN KNOWLEDGE
When talking about the advances that arose during the “Age of Enlightenment,” it is important to give credit where credit is due. After all, many of these innovations and “discoveries” had been used by Indigenous and African peoples for centuries. Like the “discovery” of the Americas, much of Western history has continued its racist stance that it’s not “discovered” until the Europeans “find” it.
This section highlights some examples of Indigenous and African ingenuity, wisdom, and skills during colonial reign that forever shaped life as we know it today.
PLANTS AS FOOD & MEDICINE
CINCHONA (PERUVIAN BARK)
“For 300 years, until it was replaced by synthetic anti-malarials, Cinchona provided the only effective treatment for malaria known to the West.” (1)
In the 1630s, Countess of Chinchon contracted malaria in Peru. According to legend, she was cured by a concoction that Jesuit priests made her from the bark of an Andean tree. This tree would later be named “cinchona” in her honor and its bark widely referred to as “Jesuit bark.”
But as legends often flatter the storytellers, historians today are acknowledging what was left out—or, rather, who was left out.
“The effectiveness of the bark of the small evergreen cinchona trees (Cinchona spp.) for curing fevers was known to native South Americans long before Europeans reached the continent. When Jesuit missionaries working in Peru at the beginning of the 17th century began to fall ill with malaria, native doctors, with their vast knowledge of local medicinal plants, used cinchona bark to treat them.” (2)
“Quinine [a derivative of cinchona bark] was already known to the Quechua, the Cañari and the Chimú indigenous peoples that inhabited modern-day Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador before the arrival of the Spanish,” said Natalay Canales, Peruvian native and biologist at the Natural History Museum of Denmark. “They were the ones that introduced the bark to Spanish Jesuits.” (3)
Evolutionary Biologist, Nataly Canales, examines the biodiversity of cinchona bark from contemporary and historical collections:
Cinchona saved countless lives. However, it must be stressed that once Europeans got their hands on this remedy, it became key to colonial expansion and takeover…
“…cinchona was especially used by the Dutch in Indonesia; by the French in Algeria; and most famously, by the British in India, Jamaica and across South-East Asia and West Africa. In fact, between 1848 and 1861, the British government spent the equivalent of £6.4m each year importing cinchona bark to store for its colonial troops. As a result, quinine is frequently cited by historians as one of the major “tools of imperialism” that powered the British Empire. (3)”
“to England, with her numerous and extensive Colonial possessions, its [cinchona bark] is simply priceless; and it is not too much to say, that if portions of her tropical empire are upheld by the bayonet, the arm that wields the weapon would be nerveless but for Cinchona bark and its active principles.”
-George Bidie, Surgeon-Major of the British Army, 1857 (4)
The Indigenous remedy shared with the colonizers, was the very thing that made the extent of colonization possible.
In more modern times, quinine has inspired synthetic drugs chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine in the treatment of malaria. (5)
In this video, Carolyn Roberts discusses the medicinal knowledge and practice of enslaved Africans:
POTATO
“The humble potato was domesticated in the South American Andes some 8,000 years ago and was only brought to Europe in the mid-1500s, from where it spread west and northwards, back to the Americas, and beyond…” (6)
“There are over 4,000 edible varieties of potato, mostly found in the Andes of South America. Potato is the third most important food crop in the world after rice and wheat in terms of human consumption. More than a billion people worldwide eat potato, and global total crop production exceeds 300 million metric tons.” (7)
Cooking often breaks down toxic compounds found in wild potatoes, but some are unaffected by heat. After observing how the “guanaco and vicuña (wild relatives of the llama) lick clay before eating poisonous plants,” Andean peoples began to “dunk wild potatoes in a “gravy” made of clay and water.” This allowed the toxins to stick—more technically, “adsorb”—to the fine clay particles…passing through the digestive system without affecting it.” (8)
From the Inca empire to present day, Chuño (freeze dried potato product) enabled Andean households to overcome periods of food shortage:
“In 1532, the Spanish invasion brought an end to the Inca, but not to the cultivation of potatoes. The invaders took tubers (the underground parts of the plant we call potatoes) across the Atlantic, as they did with other crops such as tomatoes, avocados and corn, in what historians call the Great Columbian Exchange.” (6)
KNOWLEDGE OF CULTIVATION
RICE CULTIVATION
“In an era of scientific racism and colonialism, the denial of African accomplishment in rice systems provides a stunning example of how power relations mediate the production of history. As a result, researchers ignored African rice history until well into the twentieth century.” (10)
HOW RICE CAME TO AMERICA…
“Most of North Carolina’s economy is based on rice production. This grain used to be called the “Carolina Gold,” but the real story of how it arrived in the Americas is very interesting. During slavery, people were plucked from rice-producing regions. Casamance, a region in the South of Senegal where my parents are from originally, is one of them. There were several raids there to find slaves who knew how to cultivate rice and they were shipped to the Carolinas or Mexico. The grain never existed in these regions before the arrival of slaves. There are two “families” of rice in the world. One of them is from Asia and the other from Africa. The African rice, whose scientific name is oryza glaberrima arrived in the Americas on the slave ships...” (11)
- Chef Pierre Thiam
“Historically, rice (Oryza sativa) has been described as originating in Asia. More recent research has shown that another species of rice (Oryza glaberrima) has a long history of cultivation in Africa. The Portuguese introduced Asian rice to Africa in the 1500s, and this led to the African variety being overlooked […] It was only in the 1970s that it was agreed two different types of rice had originated independently in two different parts of the world…” (12)
“Oryza glaberrima [African rice] was first domesticated in the Inland Delta of the Upper Niger River, in what is today Mali, [approx] 2,000 or 3,000 years ago.” (13)
“The South Carolina planters were, at first, completely ignorant of rice cultivation, and their early experiments with this specialized type of tropical agriculture were mostly failures. They soon recognized the advantage of importing slaves from the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa [and] ultimately adopted a system of rice cultivation that drew heavily on the labor patterns and technical knowledge of their African slaves.” (14)
“Between 1730–1774 …rice export grew from 17 million pounds of rice annually to 66 million pounds, [which] resulted in the economic transformation of Low Country colonies. Between the 1720s and the 1760s, the white population had a 2.0 to 2.2 percent annual growth in per capita income from [Oryza glaberrima or] “South Carolina Gold,”… For the enslaved African people, particularly the women upon who successful rice production depended; there was an accompanying increase in hard labor and physical disability.” (15)
Surinamese women show how enslaved ancestors braided rice into hair for survival:
Sources
Walker, Kim; Nesbitt, Mark; Just the Tonic: A Natural History of Tonic Water. Kew,
Lewington, Anna. Plants for People. Eden Project, 2003.
Traverso, Vittoria. “Travel - The Tree That Changed the World Map.” BBC, BBC, 28 May 2020,
www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200527-the-tree-that-changed-the-world-map
Brockway, Lucile H. “Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens.” American Ethnologist, vol. 6, no. 3, 1979, pp. 449–465.
Langlois, Jill. “'Hydroxychloroquine Tea' Is Being Peddled as a Coronavirus Cure in Brazil. It's Fake.” National Geographic, 4 June 2020, www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/06/hydroxychloroquine-tea-peddled-coronavirus-cure-brazil-is-fake/
Ortiz, Diego Arguedas. “Travel - How the Humble Potato Changed the World.” BBC, BBC, 3 Mar. 2020,
www.bbc.com/travel/story/20200302-the-true-origins-of-the-humble-potato
International Potato Center, “Potato,”18 June 2020
Mann, Charles C. “How the Potato Changed the World.” Smithsonian Institution, 1 Nov. 2011
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-the-potato-changed-the-world-108470605/
Kernan, Sarah Peters. Foods of the Columbian Exchange. The Newberry
https://dcc.newberry.org/collections/foods-of-the-columbian-exchange
Carney, Judith A., Black Rice: the African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, Harvard University Press, 2009.
Sambira, Jocelyne. “Slave Trade: How African Foods Influenced Modern American Cuisine | Africa Renewal.” United Nations, United Nations,
Natural History Museum (UK). “Slavery and the Natural World.” Chapter 9: Transfer and exploitation of knowledge. 2008
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/files/pdfs/assets/chapter-9-transfer-of-knowledge.pdf
Linares, Olga F. “African Rice (Oryza Glaberrima): History and Future Potential.” PNAS, National Academy of Sciences, 10 Dec. 2002,
Opala, Joseph A., “South Carolina Plantations,” The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leon-American Connection. The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition.
https://glc.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/South%20Carolina%20Rice%20Plantations.pdf
National Parks Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, “NPS Ethnography: African American Heritage & Ethnography.”
https://www.nps.gov/ethnography/aah/AAheritage/lowCountryD.htm