Westmacott perused accounts and photos of western Africa from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, searching for similarities between historical African gardens and current African-American gardens in the rural South.  Western Africa is a diverse area, ranging from rainforest to subtropical desert, and the agricultural heritage of west Africans is similarly diverse.  Some people were nomadic herders, others had grain-based diets much like our own, while still others practiced what Westmacott called "vegeculture" but which I would call forest gardening --- edible trees, roots, vines, and grains all mashed together into one space.

West Africans who grew what we now consider traditional gardens typically clustered their houses into fenced compounds.  They grazed any livestock they might happen to have outside during the day, but took the animals in at night.  Crops were grown outside the village compound in intensively tilled and manured land, while trees with edible fruits (like bananas, coconuts, and mangos) were planted within the village for shade.

As you can probably guess from my previous lunchtime series on Chinese and Central American traditional gardening practices, I was intrigued by this look into traditional African agriculture.  But very few of the African practices seemed to carry over to the United States.  Shade trees are ubiquitous in African-American yards in the South, but the trees are not edibles, and there is no sign of forest gardening.

The one aspect of the southern gardens that Westmacott felt confident tracing back to Africa was the swept yard.  Although inexpensive motorized lawnmowers are now pushing swept yards into history, many of the old timey African-American families in Westmacott's study stuck to the traditional bare earth yard.  The families spent time every day hoeing weeds out of the yard, then sweeping every bit of trash and debris out of the living space.  The result was an area where children could play and adults could easily sit and talk, without danger of snakes or ticks.  The practice can be clearly traced back to Africa, not only because Africans still keep up swept yards, but also because bare earth yards just don't work in more temperate climates.  In areas without long dry seasons a swept yard will turn to mud and become impassable for a large portion of the year.  I guess we won't be making a swept earth yard here!

This post is part of our African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: African-American Gardens and Yards in the Rural South African roots of current African-American gardens Keeping pigs and chickens for self-sufficiency Influences of poverty on African-American gardens African-American gardens are extensive

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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