Students of West African rice agriculture (cf. Dresch 1949, Mohr 1969) often distinguish between the Upper Guinea coast, where wet rice has been grown for centuries in permanent swamp fields recovered from the mangrove, and a more extensive area further inland, where the predominant form has been dry or mountain rice grown by shifting agriculturalists (fig. 1). The Diola of Senegal (Pélissier 1966, Linares 1970), the Balanta of Guinea Bissau (Espírito Santo 1949), and the Baga of coastal Guinea (Paulme 1957), belong to the first category. They transplant rice in inundated fields that are desalinated, diked, ridged and irrigated. In contrast, the Mande-speaking peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia are mostly ‘upland’ farmers. They broadcast rice on rain-fed fields that are rotated and fallowed.

It is thought that African rice (Oryza glaberrima), domesticated from the annual wild rice Oryza barthii, a plant of savanna river valleys and water holes, may have been first cultivated along the valley of the upper and middle Niger (Portères, 1970; Harlan, 1975). Cultivation under high rainfall conditions in the forest zone followed the development of ‘upland’ cultivars. Today, farmers in the drier savannas continue to depend on the seasonal rise and fall of flood water in valley bottom land for rice cultivation, and on occasion, this has developed into fully-fledged ‘irrigation’ agriculture (Linares de Sapir, 1970; Loquay, 1980), but elsewhere in the West African rice zone rain-fed ‘upland’ cultivation techniques now predominate. Where rainfall is more reliable ‘upland’ cultivation tends to be preferred because of its greater efficiency of labour use, but, as in ancient times, the occasional supplementary use of swamp to cope with bad years is not uncommon. This paper focuses attention on rice farming systems in Sierra Leone. Rice cultivation probably reached this area several thousand years ago (Atherton, 1979). Although in a few instances regular use of swamp land dates back to the later part of the nineteenth century (e.g. in the Bumban valley and the tidal swamps of the Scarcies estuary: Fyle, 1979, Carpenter, 1978) ‘upland’ cultivation still retains its former importance over large parts of the country.

Les études de cas ont été effectuées par les auteurs de cet article en pays malinke, guro, gbã (ou gagu) et bete à l'ouest du Bandama, baule à l'est. Ces études ne sont pas toujours exhaustives et homogènes eu égard au sujet du présent article, et, de plus, elles concernent essentiellement les parties forestière et préforestière de la vallée du Bandama.

Contemporary texts on West African crops usually note that rice is grown in areas west of the Tano: southern Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone, Gambia and Liberia grow a considerable quantity of rice and in recent years there has been much attention given to improving both crop type and cultivation techniques. Northern Ghana has also seen the introduction of wet rice cultivation on a large scale. But there are areas in eastern Ghana, to the east of the Volta, where rice is grown. The rice is the indigenous glaberrima type; cultivation techniques owe nothing to the developers and rice-growing has a nodal place in local culture.

The area occupied by the Igbo-speaking people of eastern Nigeria ranks high among West Africa's yam producing zones. Whereas the yam is the Igbo food crop par excellence there is nevertheless considerable local variation in local farming practice and land-use systems. This paper describes three farm units in different parts of Igbo country, indicating the role of yam in the cropping system. The material is derived from surveys undertaken in 1977, but in two of the three cases it has been possible to compare the information with similar surveys undertaken by the author in 1964, prior to the Nigerian civil war. Three case-study farms cannot constitute a sample in any statistical sense and no generalization is possible. The material is presented because the profound changes experienced in the last fifteen years ensure that any time series data, however patchy, are of great intrinsic interest, and because it serves to indicate the extent to which land use systems at the micro-level may differ, even though the basic set of crops may be broadly similar. The three farms studied are representative of their ecological zone: the first reflecting conditions in the zone of highest population density and greatest land shortage; the second, in the more open land on the Nsukka plateau, conditions in an area where land shortage is not yet so great as to have obliterated the distinction between intensively farmed compound land and more extensively ‘bush-fallowed’ land; and the third, conditions of relative land-plenty in southern Igboland, where farming systems show marked continuity with conditions before the civil war. The paper stresses the role of yam in the fanning systems concerned, and the subtle interplay of social, economic and ecological factors involved in its continued cultivation.

The subject of this paper is the ceremonies which the Ohafia of south-eastern Nigeria perform in connexion with their major farm crop, yams (Dioscorea spp.). These relate both to the annual agricultural cycle and to the taking of yam-related titles which express status in Ohafia society at large. The special place yams occupy in Ohafia culture as the prestige crop, associated particularly with men, cannot be explained simply as an effect of the material importance of yam and its cultivation in the Ohafia economy. For whatever may explain the origin of yam's ritual importance, the Ohafia economy in both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has depended on other important bases too, and Ohafia men have combined farming with other activities: warfare and trade. Indeed, the agricultural economy itself has been more dependent on female labour. Nonetheless, ‘yam-values’ remain of central symbolic importance to the ideals of individual and communal success promoted by Ohafia culture.