In his masterpiece tale of imperialism and resilience, Things Fall Apart, Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe invoked palm oil as a powerful symbol of West African cultures, ecologies, and politics. Discussed as a source of food, medicine, wine, domesticity, kinship, and collective wisdom, the African oil palm, along with the staple yam, fuse the ancestral socioecological connections that order village life and politics in the novel. In an oft-cited passage demonstrating the prominence of orality in Igbo culture, Achebe quipped, “proverbs are the palm oil with which words are eaten.”Footnote ² A landmark in modern African literature and postcolonial critique, Things Fall Apart relies on palm oil to conjure indigenous West African cosmologies linking ancestors and environments.Footnote ³ While Achebe’s magnum opus revolves around just one African nation – the Igbo, concentrated in the Niger Delta in South-Central Nigeria – its treatment of palm oil as a ubiquitous and versatile cultural, nutritional, and economic resource holds true for a multitude of peoples and landscapes in West and Central Africa, and beyond. The tree Western scientists call the African oil palm emerges from complex cultural and environmental histories on the African continent.

Weaving primary accounts with botanical and ecological analyses, this chapter demonstrates how oil palm cultures, landscapes, and commerce emerged in western Africa and eventually helped to integrate an Atlantic World. It details human-oil palm relationships in West and Central Africa over the previous five thousand years, and applies complexity sciences to understand the formation and proliferation of complex, biodiverse groves permeating more-than-human communities and secondary forests. It places palm oil and kernels as early goods of trade on the inter-biome routes and later with European ships journeying down African coasts, and describes how palm oil supported the transatlantic slave trade as both sustenance and medicine. Finally, it culminates by following the oil palm’s diffusion throughout the Caribbean and the mainland American tropics during European colonial expansion. Tracing the longue durée of African oil palms and their transatlantic dispersal, this chapter reveals how a promising model of human-environmental collaboration and ingenuity became subsumed in the transatlantic slave economy and its horrendous crimes against humanity.

Emergence

Native to West Africa, the African oil palm now flourishes on much of the continent south of the Sahara. Its range extends from approximately 16° North near St. Louis, Senegal, around the Gulf of Guinea, and southeastward through the equatorial rainforests of the Congo. From there sparse, isolated colonies dot East Africa until approximately 20° South on the island of Madagascar. The densest groves of African oil palms roughly correspond with the lowland forest zones of West and Central Africa, from contemporary Sierra Leone into the Congo, between approximately 7° North and 7° South (Figure 2.1). The palm thrives in optimal conditions of at least 2,000 mm (80 in) of annual rainfall evenly distributed throughout the year, mean temperatures between 22° and 33° C (72°–90° F), 5–7 hours of sunlight per day, in altitudes below 300 meters, and in alluvial soils overlaying clays. Nevertheless, the tree adapts in less productive states to areas experiencing seasonal drought, lower temperatures, less sunshine, altitudes up to 1,300 meters, and other soil types.Footnote ⁴

Figure 2.1 Distribution of Elaeis guineensis in the South Atlantic with major regions of transatlantic slave embarkation, 1500–1850.

Sources: African distribution adapted from Corley and Tinker, Oil Palm, 3, fig. 1.1 Transatlantic slave trade place names and locations from Eltis and Richardson, Atlas. Distribution of isolated stands in Brazil adapted from Bondar, O dendêzeiro and updated with author’s fieldwork and geospatial analysis, 2009–2019.

Various sources and methods confirm the oil palm’s long history in western Africa. The palynological record places the African oil palm in West Africa over the past several million years.Footnote ⁵ Archaeobotanical findings suggest West Africans cooked with palm oil no later than five thousand years ago.Footnote ⁶ Linguistic analyses indicate early and widespread human use of the African oil palm and its products, especially in its densest concentrations across West and Central Africa.Footnote ⁷ Those and other analyses associate early oil palm groves with human communities, hunting camps, and migratory routes in West Africa’s Gulf of Guinea region. As humans harvested palm fruit and processed oil from its mesocarp, they derived and distributed viable seeds, thereby propagating the palm through mutually beneficial, socioecological processes. Scientists thus recognize groves of oil palms growing in forested areas as evidence of prior human settlement.Footnote ⁸

The oil palm requires high levels of sunlight and moisture, and therefore thrives neither under the shade of rainforest canopy nor in the drier savanna. Botanists and archaeologists have therefore deduced that the species emerged from the forest-savanna ecotone, along riparian openings, and in and around gallery forests. To transition from those liminal landscapes and into the rainforest biome, where it now flourishes, the African oil palm relied yet again on human intervention.Footnote ⁹ Beginning around seven thousand years ago, the advent of polished stone tools allowed West Africans to clear rainforest quickly and efficiently, which they transformed into mosaics of mixed polycultures.Footnote ¹⁰ Using a swidden-fallow system of shifting cultivation, farmers cleared rainforest to plant impermanent fields of food crops, in West Africa based primarily on varieties of yams (Dioscorea spp.). Following a brief period of cropping – usually no more than three harvests – cultivators would abandon the swidden, allowing it to regenerate into secondary forest during a cycle of fallow.Footnote ¹¹

As farmers on West Africa’s savanna ecotone began clearing forest for planting they often spared productive African oil palms, prized for cooking oils, wines, construction materials, and many spiritual and medicinal applications.Footnote ¹² This process likely began as the simple “protection” of oil palms and gradually developed into something botanists could consider “arboriculture.”Footnote ¹³ After one or two harvests of yams (or other vegetables), farmers would leave the field fallow, allowing the soils and forest biodiversity to rejuvenate. In low-intensity swidden regimes fallow periods would ideally last fifteen to twenty years. Where human populations were relatively dense, such as southeastern Nigeria, pressures on the land were greater and fallow periods were much shorter, sometimes as little as three years. In any case, oil palms would thrive and propagate as a pioneer species in the opened canopy.Footnote ¹⁴

Returning to clear secondary growth forests, farmers would spare oil palms yet again, selecting the most productive or otherwise preferred palms to grow above yams and other food crops. In areas allowing longer fallows, a few tall palms would remain productive, but without sustained management by humans the reemerging secondary forest would eventually suppress the development of dense groves. In systems of shorter fallows, dense and productive groves could form, providing an array of beneficial resources from only minimal human efforts at cultivation. Processing the fruit into oils served also to produce and distribute seeds in and around villages and dooryard gardens, which could develop eventually into biodiverse groves predominated by oil palms. Following those patterns, West and Central African communities variously transformed tracts of rainforest into oil palm-tuber agroecologies and dense biodiverse groves of African oil palms and other species.Footnote ¹⁵ Dutch agronomist Anton Zeven classified seven types of African oil palm groves, depending on densities of palms per hectare. These are, moving from least to most dense, secondary rainforest with oil palms; palm bush; dense palm grove / farmland with palms; thinned grove; sparse grove; village grove; and peasant’s plantation.Footnote ¹⁶ While Zeven derived his categories from observations in the mid-twentieth century, the resulting typology is nonetheless steeped in premodern systems of human-oil palm collaboration and proliferation.

Though farmers only rarely planted African oil palms in those traditional systems, uncultivated groves produced sufficient yields without a burdensome investment of time and effort, thereby precluding any need for full domestication.Footnote ¹⁷ Ethnographies and oral histories collected among Bantu-speakers in the mid-twentieth century nevertheless told of ancestors planting and extending the palm’s range as they migrated south into the Congo, reports corroborated by archaeological and linguistic evidence.Footnote ¹⁸ A focus on the question of planting, however, elides the complexity of human-oil palm relationships in western Africa. Botanical evidence suggests that some West African societies distinguished, selected, and managed specific phenotypic varieties of Elaeis guineensis based on communal preferences. Due to variations in the fruit form, harvesters generally prefer the sterile homozygous pisifera and the heterozygous tenera fruits for processing oil, and tap the homozygous dura exclusively for wine.Footnote ¹⁹ These management techniques manifest in the genetic composition of the groves. While natural selection would generally favor the homozygote, repeated tapping slows its reproduction and sometimes kills trees, thereby favoring an anthropogenic expansion of the heterozygote in managed groves.Footnote ²⁰ Surveys of emergent palm groves in the mid-twentieth century found high proportions of tenera palms, from 20 to 50 percent of the stands, in eastern Nigeria, the Seles region of Angola, and the Kasai province of present-day Congo.Footnote ²¹ Such managed groves endure in western Africa as a “specialized though casual system of tree cropping.”Footnote ²²

The socioecological morphology and dispersal of African oil palm landscapes therefore resist rigid scientific classifications that insist on separating “wild” natures from domesticated human societies. Unable to disentangle a purely “natural” provenance or habitat from anthropogenic influence, botanists describe western Africa’s oil palm groves with equivocations such as “semi-wild,” “semi-domesticated,” and most frequently, “subspontaneous.”Footnote ²⁵ As such, the compositions and distributions of African oil palm landscapes remain simultaneously biological, physical, and social. Western Africa’s ancestral oil palm ecologies therefore represent compelling exemplars of what Sarah Whatmore deems hybrid geographies – fluid socioecological assemblages formed from the coalescence of plants, people, technologies, and cultures.Footnote ²⁶ And as products of relationships benefiting both humans and plants, those traditional landscapes emerge from interactions ecologists describe as “mutualism.”Footnote ²⁷

In contrast to competition, mutualistic interactions rely on forms of cooperation to provide “mutual aid” for distinct species in a given ecosystem.Footnote ²⁸ Mutualism occurs when each of the interacting organisms receive a net gain (despite any detriments) from their interactions.Footnote ²⁹ Just when and where mutualism occurs is subject to interpretation. As ecologist Judith Bronstein explains, “Humans are undeniably attracted by the idea of cooperation in nature. For thousands of years, we have been seeking explanations for its occurrence in other organisms, often imposing our own motivations and mores in an effort to explain what we see. Spectacular natural history stories abound; some of them are even true.”Footnote ³⁰ As I lay out this true story of human-oil palm cooperation, I strive to offer a balanced and holistic environmental analysis that avoids the pitfalls of both anthropomorphism – attributing human characteristics to plants or other non-humans – and anthropocentrism – inappropriately privileging human agency at the expense of non-human influence. Rather than a binary of either-or, oil palm landscapes proliferate via coalitions of both-and.

Traditional oil palm landscapes benefit humans (in the form of nutrition and domesticity) and palms (in the form of seed dispersal and enhanced growing conditions), while incurring only minimal costs to the interacting species (harvesting and management in the case of humans) and the multiscalar ecosystems, from local to global, in which they are embedded. Together, western Africa’s premodern communities of humans and oil palms created collectives of mutual benefit that enhanced the prospects of survival and reproduction for each species. Here the theoretical insights and conceptual tools of complexity thinking become particularly helpful for comprehending such integrated assemblages of people, plants, and biophysical environments. Resulting from the synergies generated through mutualistic interactions, biodiverse groves of oil palms and other plants materialize as emergent properties of complex socioecological systems. I therefore use the term “emergent groves” to describe the biodiverse oil palm assemblages that botanists label “subspontaneous.”Footnote ³¹ Emergent groves and the values of human-environmental cooperation they represent are key for comprehending the socioecological continuity and change of palm oil landscapes across the Atlantic World.

African Agroecologies

Along with deliberate planting related to migration, the shifting cultivation of multiple crops – i.e., mixed swidden-fallow polycultures – diffused African oil palm groves across much of the continent, from the tidewater mangrove forests of the Senegambia deep into the Congolese forest zone.Footnote ³² Indigenous African agroforestry systems combined oil palms with varieties of yams, pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum), African rice (Oryza glaberrima), plantains (Musa spp.), cocoyam or taro (Colocasia esculenta), various legumes, and occasionally livestock in vigorous polycultures.Footnote ³³ Pearl millet was historically the most important crop in the drier savannas at the northern margins of the oil palm belt, but moving toward the Atlantic and into the wetter areas of the Senegambia, millet gives way to rice cultivation. Both systems complemented staple starches with scattered groves of oil palms.Footnote ³⁴ In parts of tropical Africa isolated from trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness), such as the Jos Plateau of Northern Nigeria, farmers practiced oil palm silvopastoralism by grazing livestock such as goats, cattle, and sheep beneath oil palms and other tree crops, and applied manure to regenerate soil and fertilize palms and other plants.Footnote ³⁵

African oil palms were most abundant, however, as part of the oil palm-yam complex beginning just south and east of the rice belt running from Lower Guinea across the derived savannas of the Dahomey Gap and through the Niger Delta.Footnote ³⁶ From there oil palm cultivation extended deep into the Central African rainforests where swidden farmers spared and managed palms within their plots of yams, cocoyams, plantains, legumes, and other crops, and where dense rainforest alternated with emergent oil palm groves.Footnote ³⁷ Long disparaged by some Western scientists and environmentalists as “slash-and-burn,” ecological research since the mid-twentieth century has demonstrated the efficacy of such ancestral systems, linking traditional swidden-fallow landscapes with enhanced floral and faunal biodiversity, higher returns on labor investment, food security, nutritional balance, and overall resilience and reliability, especially when compared to monocultures.Footnote ³⁸ Throughout western Africa, oil palm agroforests helped to nourish human communities by contributing to food security and balanced diets, complementing carbohydrate-rich tubers and grains with fats, provitamin A carotenoids (mainly α- and β-carotenes), and vitamin E.Footnote ³⁹ The source of fats is particularly important within the broad swath of sub-Saharan Africa where the voracious tsetse fly (Glossina spp.) and the trypanosomiasis pathogens it carries make livestock husbandry virtually impossible.Footnote ⁴⁰

In complement to African foodways, the African oil palm and its many versatile products have long filled medicinal, spiritual, and domestic needs. Diverse groups of West and Central Africans valued the palm for its fruits, oils, fibers, heart, and sap, which when fermented provides a popular wine. The oil palm also provided various raw materials valuable in West African domestic life. People commonly use its oils for illumination; fronds for thatching and basketry; stalks as walls and fencing; fibers for “cabbage,” woven mats, cordage, garments, and fish traps and lines; and miscellaneous biomass from empty fruit bunches, shells, and fronds as fuel, garden mulch or fertilizer, and as a base for soaps.Footnote ⁴¹ Ethnopharmacologists list a range of uses of palm oil including as a topical ointment, analgesic, and vulnerary treatment, and as a remedy for cancers, headaches, and rheumatism. A modern compilation of common names for Elaeis guineensis on the African continent lists 332 distinct appellations, indicating widespread and multiethnic affinity for the palm.Footnote ⁴²

Numerous communities and linguistic groups across West and Central Africa integrated the oil palm into their ecological, spiritual, and economic systems, thereby reinforcing its prevalence and productivity within the cultural landscapes of western Sub-Saharan Africa. A selection of some of the more populous and influential groups linked to the palm illustrates its profound cultural and historical significance on the continent. Pointing out cultural groups and their ancestral relationships with the oil palm also allows us to make connections with African-descended communities and ecologies in the New World.

Drawing on more than two thousand years of cultural history, West Africa’s Yoruba-speaking peoples regard the oil palm as the “tree of life,” and consider the palm and its products spiritually potent and fundamental in their cosmology.Footnote ⁴³ Yoruba religious cultures revere a pantheon of deities known as the òrìşàs, as well as a sacred system of Ifá divination, both of which employ palm oil and kernels as fundamental sacraments.Footnote ⁴⁴ The òrìşàs and their devotees polarize around palm oil. Some, especially the temperamental gatekeeper Esu, relish the oil in ritual offerings, while others, including the powerful creator of humans Ọbàtálá, refuse it as taboo.Footnote ⁴⁵ In Ifá divination rituals first witnessed by Europeans in the seventeenth century, Yoruba clergy toss exactly sixteen palm kernels on an ornate tray to discern the fortunes of supplicants.Footnote ⁴⁶ Women remain the central arbiters of these spiritual traditions, as they account for the majority of traditional religious leaders throughout Yorùbáland.Footnote ⁴⁷ For the Yoruba, palm oil represents the nourishing “blood of the Earth.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Palm oil is essential in the preparation of many ritual and mundane foods, as well as ọsẹ dúdú, a powerful black soap used in practical and ritual cleanses.Footnote ⁴⁹ In an extensive survey of the use of plants in Yoruba society, ethnographer and polyhistor Pierre Verger cataloged the practical and spiritual applications of the oil palm. In his compilation of 447 “medicinal and magical formulae,” 58 (or roughly 13 percent) employed seeds, fronds, fibers, or oils from the African oil palm, and he recorded 31 distinct names for varieties of the palm in the Yoruba language.Footnote ⁵⁰ Those 31 designations indicate an extraordinary ethnobotanical intimacy between the Yoruba and the African oil palm.

Aja groups, speakers of Gbe languages including the Ewe and Fon peoples, have long histories of palm oil production as well as cultural and commercial exchange with the Yoruba, especially the sub-group of Fon speakers known for their nineteenth-century kingdom of Dahomey in contemporary Benin.Footnote ⁵¹ Aja groups share the Yoruba’s profound affinity for the oil palm, as evidenced by its integration in their spiritual practices.Footnote ⁵² Captain Thomas Phillips described an offering of palm oil and other goods to Hu, a Fon vodun (deity) of the sea, ordered by the King of Ouidah in the 1690s.Footnote ⁵³ Devotees of the vodun Sakpata have used palm oil in ritual cleansings for centuries, and Europeans traveling through Ouidah in the early eighteenth century described a palm kernel divination ritual called Fa similar to its Yoruba counterpart Ifá.Footnote ⁵⁴ Cohabitation with the African oil palm helped to define Aja settlement patterns into the twentieth century, with one African historian noting the “cluster[s] of hamlets generally scattered in the bush of wild oil palm trees.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Communities in and around the Niger Delta, notably the Igbo and their Nri Kingdom and the Edo and their Benin Empire, cultivated vast premodern palm agroforests interspersed and rejuvenated with cycles of yam swiddens. Those groups processed palm oils and wines for culinary and other cultural uses, and traded surpluses on the regional and intercontinental markets.Footnote ⁵⁶ In a review of African plant origins, archaeologist Thurstan Shaw surmised, “there is probably a quite simple explanation for the density of population in Iboland [sic] – the antiquity and effectiveness of yam cultivation and the exploitation of the oil palm.”Footnote ⁵⁷ After Europeans began sailing down the West African coasts and up the Niger Delta in the fifteenth century, Igbo, Edo, and proximate groups became prominent suppliers of palm oil in transatlantic markets.Footnote ⁵⁸

Human use of the African oil palm was widespread, too, in premodern Central Africa. Beginning up to three thousand years ago, the Bantu expansion brought metal tools and shifting cultivation to the region’s vast rainforests.Footnote ⁵⁹ Swiddens of yams and other crops were followed by relatively long periods of regenerative fallow, encouraging nascent stands of oil palms and other plants to disseminate throughout the equatorial forests of the Congo Basin.Footnote ⁶⁰ Archaeobotanical and linguistic evidence place palm oil as a key cultural resource for proto-Bantu groups over at least the past two thousand years.Footnote ⁶¹ Bantu-speakers and others living in and around present-day Angola relied on the oil palm for fruit, cooking oils, wines, ointments, soaps, textiles, lubricants, lamp oil, and a flour ground from its kernels.Footnote ⁶² Operating in the sixteenth century, Portuguese merchant Duarte Lopes documented several uses for palm fruit in the Kingdom of Kongo, including as a bread made from ground kernels, a type of butter, and as a medicinal unction mixed with an aromatic sandalwood powder.Footnote ⁶³ Portuguese officer and historian Captain António Cadornega considered the oil palm “the most useful tree in the Kingdom of Angola,” and devoted an entire chapter of his seventeenth-century tome to its cultivation and various uses.Footnote ⁶⁴

Each of those West and Central African cultures, and many others, divided forms of labor related to the oil palm among gendered distinctions. Men and boys typically managed landscapes and harvested fruit, using climbing belts to ascend palms reaching up to 30 meters (98 feet), while processing palm oil was traditionally the domain of women, who used two general methods for extracting the oil.Footnote ⁶⁵ Pounding fruit with a wooden mortar and pestle was most common, but some women used their feet to trample fruit in canoes or special wooden troughs to press the oil from the fruit.Footnote ⁶⁶ Their surpluses supplied markets throughout western Africa as well as inter-biome trade routes across the continent. Palm oil, kernels, and other produce thus enhanced many women’s social and economic power and prospects while helping to integrate a continental economy.Footnote ⁶⁷

Archaeological and historical evidence places palm oil and kernels in the West African and trans-Saharan trades that linked the Senegambia and the Niger Delta with the Maghreb and the Nile.Footnote ⁶⁸ Archaeologists unearthed remains of oil palm nuts dating to 5,300 ybp along the Nile near Khartoum, suggesting to some that the climate in that area was wetter 2,500 years ago, to others that oil palm nuts were a well-traveled early commodity.Footnote ⁶⁹ Writing in the fifth century BCE, Greek historian Herodotus claimed that Egyptians used palm oil in their embalming processes.Footnote ⁷⁰ While nineteenth-century archaeological findings at Abydos appeared to corroborate his claim, subsequent analyses disagreed.Footnote ⁷¹ Trade networks and migrations had carried the oil palm across the continent as far as Kenya, Madagascar, and the Zanzibar archipelago by the tenth century, and likely much earlier.Footnote ⁷²

Sundiata, legendary king of the Mali Empire in the thirteenth century, moved the seat of his domain to Niani in the extreme northeast of contemporary Guinea. Aside from political and military reasons for the move, the new capital sat along the rainforest ecotone and therefore within source areas of kola nuts, gold, and palm oil, all vital inter-biome trade items of the day.Footnote ⁷³ It was along that zone of ecological transition where numerous Arab travelers encountered the African oil palm in their medieval journeys through West Africa, beginning with geographer al-Dimashqi in the ancient kingdom of Samaqanda (in present-day Senegambia) in the early fourteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁴ Modern botanists suspect that the oil palm spread to the easternmost reaches of the continent aboard Arab caravans.Footnote ⁷⁵ While never reaching the economic significance of gold or iron, palm products did contribute to the development and integration of precolonial western African societies and commerce, linking the forest zone with more arid regions across the continent, over the past several millennia.Footnote ⁷⁶

Transatlantic Slave Voyages

Europeans encountered the African oil palm and its products during their first forays down West African coasts. Venetian sailor Alvise da Ca’ da Mosto, in service to Henry the Navigator from 1455 to 1457, journeyed south of the Senegambia to the mouth of the Geba River in contemporary Guinea-Bissau where he witnessed Africans drinking palm wine “as sweet as the sweetest wine in the world” and cooking with “a marvelous” palm oil. He documented “a species of tree bearing small red fruits with black eyes in great quantity,” and admired “a kind of oil, used to season their foods, with three properties: the scent of violets, the flavor of our olive oil, and a color like saffron, but more polished.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Various traveler’s accounts collected by German-Portuguese publisher Valentim Fernandes show the African oil palm deeply integrated into West African societies from the Senegambia to Sierra Leone around the turn of the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁸ In one of these accounts, Portuguese traders witnessed an elaborate Banyun (or Bainuk) religious ceremony involving both palm oil and palm wine near the Cacheu River.Footnote ⁷⁹ Connected to those early traders, a class of Afro-Portuguese go-between merchants, known as lançados, emerged to mediate commerce between European ships and African producers. Human chattel, kola nuts, and palm products were among their earliest and most prominent currencies, ensuring access for European traders and markets for African producers.Footnote ⁸⁰ By the 1480s Portuguese merchant-explorers had begun procuring captives along the Bight of Benin, also a site of intense palm oil production and trade.Footnote ⁸¹ At the rise of the intercontinental slave trade, first to Europe and later to the Americas, palm oil had become a primary commercial medium linking Europeans and West Africans.

Following the European encounter with the Americas in 1492, the African continent entered into an integrated network of Atlantic exploration and trade. Between 1506 and 1508, Portuguese explorer Duarte Pacheco Pereira documented a Luso-African trade in “slaves, cotton textiles, animal skins, and palm oil” linking the Niger Delta town of Warri on the Forcados River with São Jorge da Mina Castle on the Gold Coast in contemporary Ghana.Footnote ⁸² Working in Angola and the Congo during the 1570s and 1580s, Duarte Lopez documented the Portuguese trades in “ivory, wax, honey, palm oil, and negro slaves” that moved between São Tomé and the Gabon estuary near the equator.Footnote ⁸³ A report from Portuguese colonizer and transatlantic slave trader Garcia Mendes Castelo Branco confirms a recurring palm oil trade on the Bight of Benin in the 1570s. “With our friend the King of Arda, near the Mina Coast, we send to trade for slaves, ivory, cotton textiles, palm oil, and many vegetables like yams and other foodstuffs. Every year one or two ships leave this port filled with those goods.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Castelo Branco goes on to list six more monarchs, from the Mina Coast to the Niger Delta, participating in a by then bustling Luso-African palm oil trade.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the transatlantic slave trade had come to dominate traffic between the Old and New Worlds. Ships and crews trafficking in humans became primary vectors in the Columbian Exchanges of biota and ideas, disseminating countless crops, weeds, pathogens, and animals throughout the Atlantic World.Footnote ⁸⁵ Palm oil was ubiquitous in that system. The major ports of slave embarkation roughly corresponded with the premodern distribution of African oil palm landscapes, and from its beginnings, the transatlantic trades in human chattel integrated palm products into their commercial networks (Figure 2.1).Footnote ⁸⁶ Though palm oil had earlier symbolized African cultural-environmental ingenuity and innovation, in the slave trade it facilitated the cruel bondage and suffering of those caught in its grip.

Uses of palm oil in the transatlantic slave economy were quite diverse. Portuguese slave traders in Angola as well as their English counterparts at Cape Coast typically mixed palm oil into the rations fed to captives in coastal holding sheds, often called barracoons.Footnote ⁸⁷ Slave factors on the African coasts fortified and promoted human chattel by rubbing their bodies with palm oil before offering them for sale to ship captains. The glistening unguent worked to conceal some of the exhaustion and abuse suffered during their apprehension and confinement.Footnote ⁸⁸ Following purchase, palm oil was sometimes part of a gruesome branding procedure.Footnote ⁸⁹ As a Dutch surgeon reported in 1692, “The slaves that were taken were made to kneel, twenty or thirty at a time; the right shoulder was greased with palm-oil, and it was branded in the middle with an iron.”Footnote ⁹⁰ An account from Dahomey in the mid-nineteenth century shows that vile practice continued even after the official prohibition of the transatlantic trade.Footnote ⁹¹

Palm oil accompanied enslaved Africans on board ships bound for the New World. From the sixteenth century, slave ships routinely stocked African palm oil and peppers, especially melegueta (Aframomum melegueta), to flavor and enrich the various gruels that sustained human cargoes through the Middle Passage.Footnote ⁹² Flemish botanist Carolus Clusius described palm oil as a seasoning aboard Portuguese slave ships departing São Tomé in 1598.Footnote ⁹³ A century later, British slaver Thomas Phillips spiced gruels fed to captives aboard his ship “with a little salt, malagetta, and palm oil, to relish.”Footnote ⁹⁴ By then he could point to many options for procuring palm oil. One could find “some” in Cape Coast, “but it is cheaper at [Ouidah], tho’ the island of [São Tomé] is the cheapest place, and where there is most plenty of it.”Footnote ⁹⁵

A widespread assumption that familiar diets improved captives’ chances of survival on the Middle Passage reinforced the practice of provisioning slave ships with African foods and flavors.Footnote ⁹⁶ Preferred foods varied by region of embarkation, according to the general geographies of dominant staple crops. Alexander Falconbridge, a British surgeon charged with overseeing the health of captives aboard slave ships explained, “Yams are the favourite food of the [Igbo or] Bight [captives], and rice or corn, of those from the Gold or Windward Coasts; each preferring the produce of their native soil.”Footnote ⁹⁷ Regional differences reflected not only local preferences but also commercial availability.Footnote ⁹⁸ Moving from north to south respectively, rice prevailed in the Senegambia and Upper Guinea, millet and maize held sway near the Gold Coast, yams dominated from the Bight of Benin to the Niger Delta, and Luso-Brazilian slaving outfits in Angola and elsewhere in Central Africa preferred manioc.Footnote ⁹⁹

Native to the Americas, maize (Zea mays) and manioc (Manihot esculenta and Manihot spp.) reached African shores aboard Portuguese ships sometime in the sixteenth century. Portuguese slavers were provisioning ships with maize at São Tomé by 1534, and by the end of the century the grain was already becoming a foodstaple on the Gold Coast. Manioc arrived sometime after the mid-sixteenth century, and by the early seventeenth, had become abundant in West Central Africa and on São Tomé.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ As a tropical root tuber, manioc grows remarkably similar to the West African yam, but is more adaptable, drought-tolerant, and durable. By the late sixteenth century, both maize and manioc flour had become principle victuals aboard slave ships, and thereafter spread throughout Africa where farmers readily adapted the crops to diverse landscapes.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Their swift integration into African agroecologies and economies speaks to the resourcefulness and dexterity of African farmers as well as the magnitude of the multidirectional exchanges within the Atlantic World, even in its earliest stages.Footnote ¹⁰²

Following that line of thinking, French Dominican friar and Caribbean sugar planter Jean Baptiste Labat suggested that investments in palm oil and other foodstuffs could ensure a profitable return on a slave ship.

Of course those expectations were rarely realized, and even when using regional foodstuffs to feed captives, slaving operations often lost as much as half of their human cargo to inhumane conditions. After carefully provisioning their ship, French slavers James Barbot and John Grazilhier reported, “All the ships that loaded slaves with the Albion Frigate at Kalabar lost, some half, others two-thirds of them, before they reached Barbados; […] so that above fifty percent of the capital was lost.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The widespread commitment to African staples and seasonings nevertheless ensured that palm oil and other African products regularly traversed the Middle Passage. An order from Danish authorities in 1725 dictated the “weekly allowance for each slave consisted of 1/2 lb. pork, 2 qts. beans, 2 qts. barley, 2/3 qt. millet, 1/4 pint brandy, 2 oz. tobacco, 1 pipe, 1/8 pint palm oil”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ A “bill for refreshments” tendered to the slave ship Fredensborg listed twenty-six jars of palm oil for its journey from the Gold Coast to the Danish West Indies.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Brazilian trafficker Bento de Arousio de Souza traded for sixty-five enslaved Africans and their provisions, including “80 chests of corn, 50 pounds of malaguetta, 4 bushells of salt, 30 gallons of palm oil” on the Gold Coast in 1724.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ British “sea-surgeon” Thomas Aubrey suggested that sailors pass cups of palm oil and pepper during all meals and allow captives to partake as much as they like. Failure to do so he warned could result in loss of appetite, sickness, and often death.Footnote ¹¹⁰ No matter the region, no matter the associated foodstaples, slaving operations from the Senegambia to Angola regularly seasoned their concoctions with peppers and palm oil making those African products indispensable throughout the vast geographies of the transatlantic slave trade.Footnote ¹¹¹

A Danish priest stationed at Ghana’s Christiansborg Castle in the early eighteenth century extolled the homeopathic and healing properties of palm oil.

Admiring West African medicinal prowess, Rask concluded that “[Africans] are much better suited than we are, as regards their health care.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

Commanding the final legal slaving operation to leave Liverpool in 1807, English Captain Hugh Crow defended the conditions on his ship in part by claiming his crew “allowed [captives] to use palm oil, their favourite cosmetic.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Finally, as their ships approached New World shores, sailors would routinely rub enslaved bodies with palm oil yet again to disguise the suffering of the Middle Passage and prepare them for sale.Footnote ¹²⁰

Thus palm oil – used to sustain, brand, promote, heal, and finally commodify human chattel – followed the transatlantic slave economy through Africa, at sea, and on arrival in the Americas. These accounts show how European traffickers relied on Africans and their botanical-pharmacological knowledges to prevent, diagnose, and treat disease. The slavers merely supplied Africans with basic materials from their homelands to prepare and administer their own treatments. In this way, the transatlantic slave trade appropriated African agricultural and medical knowledges and practices to maintain human cargoes and generate profits.Footnote ¹²¹

While transatlantic slavers procured palm oil and other provisions for their maritime operations, planters in the New World sought native and exotic trees and plants to feed and heal the workers enslaved on their stolen grounds. Colonial documentation, along with contemporary linguistic and ethnographic evidence, links the diffusion of the African oil palm in the early modern Neotropics with the transatlantic slave economy. From the mid-seventeenth century, colonial documents referred to palm oil in the West Indies, framing the palm and its oil as unequivocally African. Sugar planter Richard Ligon described a “Negro-oil” in Barbados in the 1640s, a curious remedy that “when they feel themselves ill, they call for some of that, and anoint their bodies, as their breasts, bellies, and sides, and in two days they are perfectly well.”Footnote ¹²² Irish naturalist Hans Sloane identified Ligon’s unguent as palm oil, and himself observed African oil palms in Jamaica two decades later. He used the passive voice to claim the palm “was brought over with some others from Guinea in tubs water’d by the way, and then planted by Colonel Colbeck in his plantation.”Footnote ¹²³ By the end of the century Thomas Phillips discussed selling West African palm oil on Barbados, suggesting it had become integrated into local economies.Footnote ¹²⁴

African oil palms grew on at least one English plantation in Antigua by 1729, presumably as a source of subsistence and medicine for the laborers enslaved there.Footnote ¹²⁵ Writing in the 1760s on the nearby island of St. Kitts, Scottish planter and physician Dr. James Grainger recommended “if [newly arrived slaves] have brought with them any palm oil, they should be permitted to anoint their bodies therewith.”Footnote ¹²⁶ His medical opinion demonstrates how colonizers appropriated African knowledge and practices to at once subjugate and sustain enslaved workers in the New World.Footnote ¹²⁷ It also offers up, rather curiously and without clarification, the possibility that enslaved Africans sometimes crossed the Middle Passage and arrived in the Caribbean with palm oil, and perhaps other personal possessions, of their own.

Dutch botanist Nikolaus Jacquin bestowed the palm with its scientific binomial in 1763 based on observations, not in its native Africa, but rather on Martinique in the French Antilles. Having never visited Brazil he could claim, “nowhere in the Americas have I seen this plant growing wild.”Footnote ¹²⁸ He identified the origin of the palm as “Guinea” – hence its Latin name – and claimed it was by then distributed throughout the Americas; yet he remained silent on the peoples or processes responsible for its diffusion. Five years later, Philip Miller claimed in the eighth edition of his Gardener’s Dictionary that African oil palms were “first carried from Africa to America by the negroes. […] Now the trees are in plenty in most of the [West Indies], where the negroes are careful to propagate them.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Despite its otherwise vile and bigoted predispositions, Edward Long’s colonial narrative detailed the extensive culinary and medicinal uses of palm oil in Jamaica, effectely ceding the island’s palm oil economy to Afro-descendants.”Footnote ¹³⁰

Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Haiti and Cuba around the turn of the nineteenth century, French physician and botanist M. E. Descourtilz wrote that the “Avoira de Guinée […] grows spontaneously in Africa and Cayenne [French Guiana], and is cultivated in the Antilles.” People throughout the Caribbean, he claimed, used its oils for cooking and food preparation, as a fuel, and as a versatile medicine. The physician endorsed palm oil as a soothing emollient and as a remedy for ear infections, rheumatism, ringworm, enteritis, and dysentery, as well as a palliative for infants and post-partum mothers served in a broth of chicken or beef.Footnote ¹³¹ Reverend Abiel Abbot wrote of 100 “Guinea palms” yielding wine and “palm oil, which constitutes an important article in African commerce, and African food” on a sugar plantation in Camarioca, Cuba, in 1828. The 170 enslaved Africans and their Creole children held at the mill, he claimed, “prefer it to butter.”Footnote ¹³²

Known in Cuba as corojo de guinea, African oil palms have long been incorporated in Afro-Cuban religious expressions and continue to flourish there, notably in Havana’s Parque de la Fraternidad Americana that flanks the National Capitol Building.Footnote ¹³³ Elsewhere in the circum-Caribbean, including Dominica, Guadeloupe, Puerto Rico, Suriname, Trinidad, Venezuela, and Garifuna Central America, emergent African oil palms continue to grow in small but intriguing numbers, and ethnographic, botanical, linguistic, and historical analyses confirm centuries of management and use by Afro-descendants and others.Footnote ¹³⁴

Socioecological networks of people, plants, and power proliferated the African oil palm through the forests and villages of western Africa over the past several millennia. Agrarian communities across the continent cooperated in complex agroecological systems to generate cultural-environmental change and abundance. With the arrival of Europeans and the advent of Atlantic economies, palm products and related knowledges played fundamental and tragic roles as accessories to the transatlantic slave trade. As sailors, ships, captives, and colonizers traversed the Atlantic beginning in the late fifteenth century, the African oil palm and its products diffused throughout the Caribbean and South America as early African contributions to the Columbian Exchange. Frenetic, fluid, and relational networks distributed botanical species and associated knowledge systems to lay the socioecological foundations of the Atlantic World. By focusing on relationships, we see how African botanical and medicinal knowledges supported both the transatlantic slave economy and African resilience; how palm products served to both enforce and alleviate human suffering; and how people of both African and European descent are implicated in the diffusion of palm oil, of systematic torture, and of resistance. Yet despite the widespread distribution of the palm and its products in Atlantic economies, written evidence of the African oil palm’s arrival in Brazil, like other Atlantic outposts, remains fragmentary and often ambiguous. The next chapter nevertheless pieces together the diffusion of Elaeis guineensis and other botanical forms from Africa to Brazil to reveal some of the intertwined cultural, ecological, and economic processes that coalesced to shape the early modern Atlantic World.