“The mangrove preserves life”: Habitat of African survival in the Atlantic world

Abstract

Mangroves emerged a crucial habitat for Africans and their descendants during the transatlantic slave trade. Europeans avoided mangroves because of the deadly fevers that frequently claimed the lives of those who ventured there. Many were felled by lethal falciparum malaria, against which Africans alone carried genetic resistance. The transatlantic slave trade spread the disease‐causing plasmodium to New World Anopheles mosquitoes through infected bloodstreams, extending African mangroves’ pestilential reputation to the Neotropics. On both sides of the Atlantic, an environment Europeans feared provided Africans food, basic necessities, and sometimes, refuge from slavery.

In Neotropical mangroves Africans largely replaced declining Amerindian populations, who were also immunologically vulnerable to the introduced plasmodium. Today, African descendants in Old and New World mangroves demonstrate longstanding human use of this ecosystem. Comparison of shellfish gathering and gendered collection patterns in mangroves recognizes Amerindian and African influences in Neotropical mangroves and illuminates the connections to transatlantic diasporic history.

The discussion considers how a more‐than‐human geography shaped “place‐based knowledge” of mangrove swamplands that remained marginal to European territorializing during the colonial period. African and Afro‐descendant place‐making underscores the ways people, plants, insects, microbes, shellfish, and tides framed geography and diasporic identity at the periphery of the Atlantic world.

Key words:

• mangroves
• slavery
• falciparum malaria
• gendered shellfish collection
• place‐based knowledge
• more‐than‐human geography

The Senegambia fieldwork was supported by National Geographic Society grant no. 9598‐14. This article has benefited considerably from generous conversations with Bob Voeks, Case Watkins, Ulrich Oslender, and Richard Rosomoff. The author is also grateful to three anonymous referees for insightful comments and suggestions.

The Senegambia fieldwork was supported by National Geographic Society grant no. 9598‐14. This article has benefited considerably from generous conversations with Bob Voeks, Case Watkins, Ulrich Oslender, and Richard Rosomoff. The author is also grateful to three anonymous referees for insightful comments and suggestions.

Notes

The Senegambia fieldwork was supported by National Geographic Society grant no. 9598‐14. This article has benefited considerably from generous conversations with Bob Voeks, Case Watkins, Ulrich Oslender, and Richard Rosomoff. The author is also grateful to three anonymous referees for insightful comments and suggestions.

1. Another fever of African origin was transmitted by Aedes egypti, which arrived in the Americas aboard slaving ships. Unlike falciparum malaria, yellow fever's vector bred not in mangrove swamps but in freshwater containers and casks (McNeill 2010, 41).

2. The author has not encountered any research to date on the historical geography of runaway slave communities and mangrove forests even though this preliminary sketch suggests that they are a key habitat for understanding African freedom from enslavement in both Africa and South America.

3. The West African oyster has been identified in locations from French Guiana to southern Brazil (São Paulo state) but is concentrated in the Maranhão‐Pará coastal region. C. gasar was originally thought to have been another native New World oyster until genetics research showed otherwise (Lapègue and others 2002). C. rhizophorae, the New World cousin of C. gasar, also drew European commentary. When he arrived in Trinidad in 1595, Walter Raleigh wrote: “In the way between both [ports] were divers little brooks of fresh water, & one salt river that had stor of oisters upon the branches of the trees, & were very salt & wel tasted. Al their oisters grow upon those boughs and spraies, and not on the ground” (Whitehead 1997, 131).

4. The public organization charged with official quilombo certification in Brazil, Fundação Cultural Palmares, registers a total of 2,474 quilombo communities in its most recent report (http://www.palmares.gov.br/wp-content/uploads/crqs/quadro-geral-porestado-ate-23-02-2015.pdf). However, the federal registration of quilombos lags far behind the number listed by individual states. For instance, Maranhão registers 858 communities as quilombos while the figure for Pará is 414 (Araújo dos Anjos 2009, 167). Based on a report from the National Coordination of Rural Black Quilombola Communities (CONAQ), Crepaldi and Peixoto (2010, 38) note that “Brazil currently has more than 4,000 communities that can be considered Quilombola communities.”

5. The quilombo land registration program has been hailed as an ambitious effort for slavery reparations since Brazil imported more slaves from Africa between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries than any other country in the Americas: nearly 40 percent of the total. However, even with federal certification of 2,474 quilombos, less than 10 percent of these communities have been granted legal titles to their lands (Futemana and others 2015)).

6. Colombia in 1993 made a more substantive effort to acknowledge African‐descended settlement of the Pacific mangrove coast. Law 70, as it is known, established the legal framework to place 5,000,000 hectares—fifty percent of the Pacific lowlands—under communal ownership by rural black communities. But as Oslender (2016) vividly details, land seizures by economic interests (and especially oil palm expansion) continue despite the legislation's intent.

7. In colonial regimes mangroves also supplied tannin for leatherworking, mortar for construction, and charcoal.

8. Surprisingly, there is no mention of cockle collection by Amerindian populations of lowland Colombia in the historical record (Oslender, pers. com., 1/05/16).

Additional information

Funding

National Geographic Society

Notes on contributors

Judith Carney

Dr. Judith Carney is a professor of geography at the University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095‐1524; [[email protected]].