Rice as Resistance: The Significance of Saraka in the Global Diasporic Observance of the Third Pillar

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

African Islam, the version of Islam brought by and retained by enslaved Africans and their descendants, disappeared as conscious practice before the eve of the American Civil War. Despite this, remnants of Islamic beliefs and practices were captured through oral histories collected by the Georgia Writer’s Project in the 1940s in the sea islands of Georgia. Those same remnants have been documented in other areas of the diaspora, including Brazil, Trinidad, and Grenada. The practice of saraka (sadaqa and/or sakara), or almsgiving, involved the preparation and offering of rice cakes, mainly to children on Fridays. The practice demonstrates the concerted effort of enslaved African Muslims and their descendants to retain their beliefs and to intellectually resist their enslavement by Christian enslavers. This paper traces the significance of rice in Georgia and South Carolina's sea islands and its use as a form of resistance to white supremacy and racial oppression.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023   •
• Africa’s Discovery of the World from Archaeological Perspectives: Revisiting Moments of First Contact, Colonialism, and Global Transformation

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow