Sweetgrass Baskets and the Senegambian Rice Coast

Along the road north of Charleston, near Mount Pleasant, women sit at stands selling baskets. The baskets are made of sweetgrass, bulrush, pine needles, and palmetto fronds, coiled and stitched in a technique that has been continuous for more than three hundred years. The designs are not decorative inventions. They are functional objects with a specific history that runs directly from the rice fields of Sierra Leone to the rice fields of South Carolina and across that border to today.

The Mende and related peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia have practiced a coiling basket tradition using identical techniques and producing nearly identical forms. This is not coincidence. Carolina rice planters in the colonial period placed advertisements in Charleston newspapers specifying that they wanted enslaved people from the "Rice Coast" of West Africa, from the Senegambia region, because of those people's expertise in wet-rice cultivation. They were purchasing specific knowledge. The people who arrived carrying that knowledge also carried the material culture that went with it.

The fanning baskets used in the rice fields, wide flat-bottomed trays used to winnow rice by tossing grain to let the wind separate it from the chaff, were a specific form brought from the Upper Guinea coast. The technique works. Enslaved women used it on the Carolina rice plantations. The technique survived emancipation. The form was adapted. The sweetgrass basket markets continued. The craft passed from mother to daughter for generations that extend to the women selling baskets on Mount Pleasant Road today.

The baskets sold there are not souvenirs. They are the continuation of something that was never fully broken, even when everything around it was.