# Where can Africa be found on the 'other side'?  
The most evident answer to this question has often blended into the landscape. It was 'inscribed' in the very materiality of the crops produced or consumed - from the kola nuts of the Martinican mornes to African rice, Oryza glaberrima, which was transported in the same boats as were its farmers in order to feed Brazil and the United States of America. The voyage of the Aurore, in 1718, was a prime example of the plundering of human resources and forced technological transfer. Any cultural materiality involves sociality: Kola nuts were associated with cultic sacrifice, and rice drew upon inventive know-how and all its ceremonial aspects. This rarely went without the oldest invention in the world - language - and its great diversity in Africa attests to its applicability in this context (Blench, 2015).  
Indeed, the posters from Saint Domingue also reflect another aspect of the world of plantations, that of the languages and social practices that governed employment. In 1777: 'Three new Negroes, from the Chateaudun habitation, named César, Lafleur and Mathieu, unable to speak any French, branded with the ship's stamp, LIM, on their right arms'. Wanted, for a reward.  
However, enslaved people did not come to America dumb (nor did they arrive 'naked', as some of the literature would suggest). The visible ties binding the 'other side' to Africa go hand in hand with other ties that, although invisible, still echo on in the phytonymy of rural South America and the Caribbean region: gumbo, gandu peas, malanga (Del Castillo Mathieu, 1985). They also echo on in the words of 'oralitures', often sung in new languages.  
Thus, in the same way that many Cuban songs alternate Efik and Spanish, Jamaican Kumina songs from the parish of St. Thomas still have Kikongo as their linguistic background, underneath their obvious creolization. They also reflect the practical situation of a point of no return:  
I am a Guinea bird-eh / wah me da go do / poor me Guinea bird-oh / wah me da go do / oh me wan go home-eh