The Wolof people of Senegambia (present-day Senegal and Gambia) and the neighbouring Mandinka, Serer, and Lebu peoples were the originators of the West African rice cultivation tradition that transformed the American South. Historian Judith Carney's landmark work Black Rice (2001) established definitively that the rice cultivation systems of the Carolina and Georgia Low Country were brought by enslaved Africans from the Senegambian "Rice Coast" — and that the planters specifically sought to purchase enslaved people from rice-growing regions because of their agricultural knowledge.
The Wolof/Senegambian culinary tradition and the rice knowledge that built the American South.
Ethnic Source Tradition