Staple Crops of the Gold Coast
Farmers of the Gold Coast have historically relied on crops like yam, millet, guava, plantains, cotton, and palm for their livelihoods, as recounted here by Henry Meredith in 1812.
Location: Ghana
Note: This article has been excerpted from a larger work in the public domain and shared here due to its historical value. It may contain outdated ideas and language that do not reflect TOTA’s opinions and beliefs.
From An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa: With Brief History of the African Company by Henry Meredith, 1812.
The vegetable productions of the coast consist of Maize, Millet, some Rice, Yams, Casada, Potatoes, Pulse, Plantains, Bananas, Guavas, Chillees of all kinds, and other Tropical fruits. A mucilaginous vegetable is plentiful in the country, and much used by the natives in their soups, etc. Called by the Fantees, Encrumah; the same is known in the West Indies by the name of Ockra; and it is called by botanists Heluscus Esculentus.
Another fruit of a mucilaginous nature, and likewise much used, is called Enteraba: there is a variety of it; some of the shape and as large as the largest sized onion; it grows something like the Egg-plant. European Cabbage and Eschallots are cultivated with much attention in some places. The Sugar-cane grows spontaneously, and to a tolerable size; and the Black-pepper has been discovered inland. The Indigo-plant is common to many parts of the coast, and the Cotton-shrub may be seen in a wild uncultivated state. The Silk-cotton is found in every part of the coast: the tree is the most remarkable in the country, and from it canoes are made. It grows to a majestic size; the branches project some distance from the trunk, and they form with it, as it were, right angles.
The country yields a variety of excellent timber; some of it calculated for ship-building and other important purposes. The Palm-tree is very profitable to the natives; the trunk produces an agreeable and intoxicating liquid, called Palm-wine. The fruit yields an oil of great delicacy, which is generally used in all their dishes. Of the leaf they make rope and thread, which they convert to fishing-lines, nets, etc.; a finer thread is procured from the filaments of the leaf of the wild Aloe and Pine-apple.
Henry Meredith, An Account of the Gold Coast of Africa: With Brief History of the African Company (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1812).
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