Reaping

We’ve been in the rice business now for close to a decade. Our business model is based on buying rice from small holder farmers. Over the years, we’ve bought from thousands of rice farmers, from dozens of cooperatives and farming communities. Less than ten percent of our purchases have been from women. Invariably, when someone says “I have a rice farm”...that someone is a man.

Pretty early on, I had noticed that when it came to doing the actual work on the rice farm, it was women who were in charge...from planting to harvesting. No one said so, but I surmised that it was culturally inappropriate for the men to actually work on the rice farm, once they’d done the heavy lifting of clearing, brushing and burning the farm. Note that I have not yet seen a woman doing any of that. Especially where power tools or mechanical equipment are used, that is the domain of men.

Judith Carney’s informative book “Black Rice”[1] mentions that “Female labor is central to the cultivation of rice throughout West Africa, either as a crop that women alone grow or through the specialized agricultural tastes that they alone perform.” In fact, according to Carney,

“...The Deola [people] of Casamance, Senegal, refer to rice cultivation as a “woman’s sweat”.

Here in Liberia, cultural tradition indicated that it is the women who select the seeds, sow, weed, harvest, process (in the mortar, with a pestle), clean and cook the rice. Farmers from seed to plate, as it were. So when it came time to work on the rice farm, I was gratified to see men getting involved; or agreeing to do “women’s work”.

Granted the first set of men were Fabrar staff doing it under some sort of duress, because our warehouses were seasonally empty and our mills were uncharacteristically quiet. Then there was the Mamba Point crew who came out to help plant and harvest the farm. I guess those men, used to city ways, didn’t know any better or weren’t going to say no to me. So on our farm, women were not alone in the planting, or now, in the harvesting. And to give everyone their props, we were all enthusiastic about harvesting rice. Everyone enjoyed being involved so no role barriers shone through.

Or at least that’s what I thought: that the men were helping with the harvesting. Turns out that most of the men, especially the Kakata crew, played the role that men traditionally play in the rice farm: they were the reapers. They gathered and packed the rice in the fields, toting the 5-8kg bunches to the truck or -on our memorable first day, to the wagon of the John Deere tractor that came complete with farmer attached. But let me not get sidetracked.

 Men clear and brush the land for rice farming; they see to the burning of the debris and haul away the heavy sticks. They lay out lowland plots and they source the seeds. During harvests, they go behind the women and “reap” the harvested rice from the women’s hands or from the ground.

Reaping is fascinating to watch. It is multi-layered and well-organized. It starts with stripping the bark off young acacia trees to make the “rope” that they use to tie the bunches. One man, or two, as it happened the day I was there, will use a paring knife to scrape long strips of bark from young acacia branches. I guess in some places they would use palm thatch but this is what I observed that day.

 Another one or two men walk up and down the line of women harvesting and collect handfuls of rice from them, putting them together in a bunch until it reaches a certain size. It takes about seven to eight good sized bunches to thresh through to a 25 kilogram bag full.

Phillip is a great reaper. He sang songs to encourage the women and yelled out “Put it together! Put it together!” in between stanzas. He worked along with Robert, putting it together in bunches and tying them off as needed.

 I noticed a blue t-shirt on the ground and wondered if that had been placed there as a marker for later collection...some pumpkin or squash that someone wanted to be sure not to miss. But that is another story (see the blog on predators).

 Abraham and Varney, in their orange factory gear, toted the finished bunches to the collection spot.

 Later on, as the women tied up their bundles and put away their knives, all six guys converged to load up the truck with the sheaves of rice, commonly called bunches.

The reapers of what was sown.

[1] Black Rice: The African Origins of Rice Cultivation in the Americas, Judith Carney. Harvard University Press (June 30, 2009).