that speak a thousand words
"Tough Stuff"
There is so much going on here, I pretty much can’t stand it.
We are in Liberia again. The year is 1984 and it is time to plant rice. You rice people might ask, “Where’s the swamp?”
Fair question. Rice needs water. Lots of it.
But not here. This is upland rice. Liberian rice. Country rice.
It’s dry season. Dry season means it might rain once a day instead of all day. But it’s dry enough to burn the mountain forest and that is the first step when you grow country rice. You slash and you burn.
Here’s how it works. The village males get together at the start of dry season, sometime mid-December or so, and decide which parcel of surrounding jungle is meant for whom. Once that is settled, they get to work and knock it down.
Then they torch it.
Notice the burnt branches and felled saplings in the background? The men came through here some weeks earlier and did their business. Use your imagination and expand this frame out. The entire mountainside is slashed and blackened bush.
They do the slashing with a cutlass. Think machete. I tried the slashing part once. Attacked a small bush with rookie fervor and when it finally dropped, so did I. No joke. Almost had to carry me home.
The jungle eat all, as they say.
Hundreds of years doing it this way. At some point after the fire dies down, it’s rice planting time. The women take over and if I convinced you that the slash and burn part was nasty hard, it doesn’t touch this next step.
There are several men in the background, two shuffling about, moving branches, one sitting, his head barely visible. He is beating a drum. Think the 1984 version of iTunes without ear buds. Keeping a beat for the planters, of which this woman is one. There are other planters, other drummers, as this is a group effort. On this day, there were maybe a dozen women working the ground. Some older, some younger. Some pregnant with last year’s baby strapped on their backs.
This one has a pet monkey. Not a common sight, but I suppose neither are bare footed women planting rice on a burnt-out mountain side. I have no idea what purpose the monkey served. Most monkeys I saw were in butcher shops.
Her tool of choice is a hand hoe, hewn from a forked tree branch with a forged metal blade attached to the short end of the branch. In her other hand is a snail shell. Yes, they grow them big in the jungle. The shell holds the rice seed. Look closely and you see her hand tenderly cupping the shell, her fingers poised to deliver a precious rice seed in the next slash of earth. Her back foot is just leaving the ground to move forward.
With the drums providing the beat, she moves forward: slash, plant, step; slash, plant, step. I remember it as a purposeful dance move. Slash, plant, step. Her waist not wavering from what, maybe a 105, 110-degree angle? Knees slightly bent. Slash, plant, step. You can’t see it, but as she climbs forward, she adds a slight bounce to her movement. That was the dancing part. Slash, plant, step, bounce, bounce.
And on she went. Up the hill. All day. My quads are on fire just remembering it. Exercise apps on YouTube hold no candle to this seed plant move. Oh yeah, did I mention her arms?
That’s the photo part. The visual. The village invited me to join them this day; watch, take a photo, have a laugh, drink some cane juice. The only hard part was to break away from watching and bouncing to raise my camera. What she was doing was what she had to do. What the village rice planting dance event was all about, was survival. That hillside had to be slashed, had to be burned, had to be planted every year. Every dry season. You don’t take a year off or you go hungry. Tough stuff.
And if you didn’t plant enough rice or store enough rice, you fell into hungry season. Hungry season meant you ate casava root. Believe me, not a good option.
I lived with the rural Liberians for two years and went through two planting seasons. I write “I lived” with them for two years, but it was more like visiting with them. Clearly, I would not be able to live with them. To clear the brush or plant the rice like them to survive, I wouldn’t last a week.
As stated above, the year was 1984. Even then, there were efforts to introduce and popularize different rice seed varieties to reduce the environmental impacts of slash and burn farming. For you rice people, it’s bring it back to the swamp.
But that type of transition and development effort takes resources. This was Grebo tribe country. This mountainside was in the most remote region of the country. Down this way, passable roads were hard to come by. There were no resources. No agricultural extension agents. No development plans. Grebo people do slash and burn. Forty years later in 2024, same.
So, if you are visiting rural Maryland County, Liberia in mid-November some-day soon, take a moment, grab your iPhone and look around the mountain sides between the port town of Harper and a small village about 50 miles north. If you have the wherewithal, look for smoke and stroll towards the faint sounds of a rhythmic jungle drum. I promise you that if you keep your boots on, you will eventually encounter a hillside just like this one.
You won’t see her. Maybe her daughter, or granddaughter. But you will hear the beat and see the burned field, the hoe, the shell, the bare feet.
Slash, plant, step. And if your quads are good, I wouldn’t be surprised if you felt like giving a go at the bounce part.