Plot to freedom

By Vonnie Roudette 13.APR.07

Cultural events such as lectures, poetry readings, music and dance performances have all played a vital role recently in teaching us about our history and cultural identity which can also be built up through cultural education. The artists, historians, the poets, writers and musicians keep culture alive and must support each other as custodians and promoters of national culture.{{more}}

Yet there’s an even more important aspect of culture that kept our ancestors alive and created our heritage- that is the practice of growing food.

In the race to become modernised this practice, once a central focus of life, is now barely visible in our communities. Yet not so long ago each family grew all the food they needed and exchanged surplus within the community. This practice, and the knowledge that came with it, amounts to a national treasure of proportions that few fully understand. Self-reliant farming built community integrity and gave rise to all forms of authentic Caribbean culture.

Picture the scene on a typical plantation- slaves were forced to work in the fields 14 hours per day 6 days a week. They had but one day per week to provide their own food from a small cultivation plot called a provision plot, freedom plot or ‘yam piece’. It not only provided food, but became a place where the enslaved were free to be creative in their actions, with no one watching over them. These plots were difficult to access, as the best land was reserved for the estate crops. The farming methods were different from those on the cane or cotton plantation, the provision plots became carriers of indigenous culture and knowledge, passed down from generation to generation. The same plot was endlessly productive without any artificial fertilisers, hosting a healthy mixture of plants-vegetables, medicinal herbs, fruit trees and root crops. The fore-parents intuitively practiced rotation cropping. They had a cattle patch that supplied natural fertiliser. They made functional objects from many of the raw materials. On the long walks to the plots they told stories, sung songs and rhythms while they worked. These plots of land, the source of their physical and mental health became centres of African cultural preservation.

Through the provision plot, an indigenous communal culture was built up and preserved throughout the most prolonged period of inhumane suffering throughout world history.

The freedom plot and its descendant, the humble kitchen garden, was created and maintained through close observation and understanding of nature, using the same principles of natural farming that modern agriculturalists in the industrialised world term ‘agro forestry’, ‘permaculture’, or ‘forest gardening’. But centuries before these systems were even thought of, our fore-parents had developed an energy-efficient sustainable system of food production that supplied whole families from only one days’ work per week.

These plots sustained communities and later expanded into the provision export market known as trafficking. The story of the freedom plot is one of creativity, resourcefulness, community building and commerce. It is a story about a culture that sustained itself beneath the force of oppression.

As Oscar Allen writes in his recent booklet “ We want to become Wise” The freedom plot was like another life with African crops, African work ways, African market skills and management and mobility and socialising. Under all of that the provision plot promised to be the land of the future. The provision plot was a seed that would outgrow the plantation. “

So as we educate ourselves about historical events, let’s bear in mind how and why we survived to this point. Let’s remember how, trapped in the plantation system and monetary poverty, our fore-parents managed to be creative and cultivate community values. It is the most amazing and awesome cultural phenomenon that amidst the conditions of slavery, a rich African heritage was preserved through working the freedom plot.

So as we recognise National Heroes, and individual heroes throughout black history, heroic too are the efforts of those who built culture through adversity.

The idea that freedom and a deep understanding of our culture lies within the soil is at odds with the squeaky clean, hands off, ostentatious culture we’ve inherited from England and America- reflected in the fact that we now value lawns and decorative landscaping more than the food productive garden.

How sad that those who sustained our survival without fanfare, who carry the remnants of noble culture, who have the knowledge that our youth need to save the land- pass on neglected, stigmatised, even themselves conditioned to believe that an educated professional with no cultural awareness or understanding, is superior to a humble person of the soil and community.

Within the context of educating ourselves on matters of culture and history, I would argue that the humble gardener/provider was not only a custodian of a precious heritage but also a cultural revolutionary for within their world of natural cultivation, they kept the vision of freedom alive for their descendants to make reality.

The freedom plot did outgrow the plantation, but it succumbed to another form of imperialism- the imported consumer culture.

A legacy where a fraction of the population could feed everyone else with one days’ labour per week and have surplus for trade is surely the most valuable of cultural forms well worth preserving. For once again in the future, the art of resourcefulness is sure to be our only means of survival.