What is Afro-Agrarianism?

We have a responsibility to forge healthier relationships with our lands.

Our society is dividing ecosystems up with development, eliminating farmland and killing off species whose vitality helps us maintain the careful ecological balance created long before humans inhabited what we now call North America. And the wisdom of peoples of another continent, Africa, as well as indigenous peoples who migrated here millenia ago offer us important practical paths forward.

Enslaved West Africans, particularly those from the “Rice Coast" (Senegal through Liberia), were fundamental to the early American economy due to their deep agricultural knowledge. They were skilled agriculturists who had long cultivated rice using sophisticated tidal irrigation, dike systems, and floodplain management.

Enslavers specifically sought out this expertise, which made rice and indigo—the largest exports from South Carolina in particular—highly profitable. Moreover, women were central to West African agriculture, often serving as the primary cultivators of rice and the keepers of seed knowledge. History documents that women specifically braided rice grains and other vital seeds into their hair before capture or during transport. This act of resistance ensured familiar food ways could take root in the new landscape.

This botanical knowledge introduced essential crops to South Carolina, including okra, black-eyed peas, rice, yams, and sesame (benne). Other key plants brought from the African Coast included millet, sorghum, watermelon, guinea melon, and medicinal plants like coneflower (Sampson root). Indigo production also relied heavily on African knowledge systems for planting cycles and processing techniques.

Afro-agrarianism is the belief that reclaiming the practices of Africans, including the diaspora of Black people living around the world, will help us create a more sustainable world. The just distribution of land ownership and knowledge of sustainable farming practices will help us feed people healthier (and tastier foods) to restore our health.

Our organization is helping Mae’s Garden Project in South Carolina get its start so that we can bring everyone in the community around Donalds and Abbeville together to learn African agrarian traditions and start growing our own food.

Some practical applications include:

The Three Sisters Polyculturing

Like us, crops did not develop and specialize over millennia to live in isolation from other plants. The Iroquois people living in what is now the Northeastern U.S. would raise squash, beans, and corns together. After the last frost, corn would be planted in mounds until the stalks were six inches tall. Then beans would be planted at their base. Then squash would be planted between the mounds. In this sense, the corn stocks offered a trellis for the bean vines, the bean would gather nitrogen from the soil for her sister crops, then the squash’s leaves would maintain shade for the other two plants so the soil would stay moist.

Deep Planting

In particularly dry biomes, such as the arid Colorado Plateau where the Hopi people live, it is important to plant strategically. The Hopi people would identify sites where there was naturally greater rain runoff during the infrequent rainfalls, then plant ten corn seeds at a far deeper level than normal: about four to six inches deep. That practice ensured greater moisture around the root zone.

Tide Beds

Enslaved peoples from Senegambia (ie. Senegal and Gambia in modern terms) brought to the Carolinas and Georgi the practice of use river hydrology instead of pumps. This mean constructing dikes and a wooden gate to allow tidal waters to flood rice fields at high tide and then drain back again at low tide. This technique would drown weeds and also maintain a specific depth for the growth of the plants.

Vegetative Chaos

Enslaved peoples known as the Akan and Yoruba from what is now modern Nigeria and Ghana would mimic the ecology of a forest’s edge by planting intensively managed gardens near their homes. Basically, “vegetative chaos” or “yard garden” technique vertically layers ground covers, vegetables of mid-height and taller sorghum to keep the soil from eroding, retain moisture, and reduce the number of insects eating the crops.

Composting

Indigenous people in the Sonoran Desert known as the Akimel O’odham enriched their planting beds by gathering leaves and wet plant matter from seasonal wetlands and mix it into the soil they used for planting. More specifically, they would ensure this layer of amended soil was above a coarse sand base so that it was suspended and could drain excess salt. This specific form of composting was critical given the aridness of their soils.

Celebrate our Ancestors

These practices, adapted to local conditions around the world and wherever people were forcibly brought or migrated, contributed to the rich knowledge base of agriculture we have today. Simply imagine a world where the average person tended to a neighborhood garden or food forest with these and other principles, rather than relying on the monocultured and pesticide-heavy crops we are sold today.

We have so much to reclaim and apply, and we should celebrate the achievements that our ancestors forged during times that were far more resource-constrained and oppressive than our own. If they could do it, so can we. And our power should never be doubted.

Let us learn from our planet and see ourselves as an extension of nature, living in a balance that would make our ancestors proud.