Joseph Opala
Encyclopedia
Joseph A. Opala is an American historian
who documented the "Gullah Connection," the historical link between the Gullah
people in South Carolina
and Georgia, and the West Africa
n nation of Sierra Leone
. He has also done extensive research on the Bunce Island
slave castle in Sierra Leone.
Opala's research resulted in three historic African-American homecomings to Sierra Leone: the Gullah Homecoming (1989), the Moran Family Homecoming (1997), and Priscilla’s Homecoming (2005). Opala helped produce documentary film
s that cover these events and the many historical, cultural and language connections between Sierra Leone and the Gullahs. These homecomings are chronicled in Family Across the Sea (1991), The Language You Cry In (1998), and Priscilla's Homecoming (in production).
and is of Polish
descent. His father was long-time Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Marian P. Opala
, who fought in the Polish resistance during World War II and emigrated to the United States in 1947. Joseph Opala's interest in anthropology and his leadership skills were in early evidence as anthropology club he founded became the first high school club to become an official member of the Oklahoma Anthropological Society. Joseph Opala studied anthropology as an undergraduate and graduate student, before turning his attention to historical research.
His interest in Sierra Leone began after college when he served in the U.S. Peace Corps
from 1974 to 1977. He worked as an agriculture advisor with rice farmers in a rural area of Sierra Leone, and later joined the staff of the Sierra Leone National Museum in Freetown
, the country's capital city. After returning home from Africa, he served as an historical consultant to the Seminole Freedmen
community in Oklahoma in 1979. He returned to Sierra Leone in 1985, and stayed there until 1997 when he left during the country's civil war
.
to a Gullah community in South Carolina. Later, he organized three "Gullah homecomings" to Sierra Leone that were all officially recognized by the country's government, and all of which received a great deal of international publicity. He worked with filmmakers to document these events. The documentary "Family Across the Sea" (1990) -- based on the first Gullah homecoming—won several awards and was broadcast on PBS stations throughout the U.S.
Opala lectured at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College
from 1985 to 1992, teaching in the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Linguistics and African Languages. He was also active in the pro-democracy movement in Sierra Leone. He was a co-founder of the Campaign for Good Governance
, Sierra Leone's largest pro-democracy and human rights NGO
.
In 2004 Opala was a fellow at the Gilder Lehrner Center
at Yale University
. In 2005 he was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
in Germany. Opala taught in the Department of HIstory at James Madison University
in Virginia
from 1999 to 2010. He recently moved back to Sierra Leone to act as the "coordinator" of the Bunce Island preservation project.
s are African Americans who live in the Low Country region of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Living for many generations in isolated rural communities on the coastal plain and the Sea Islands
, they have preserved more of their African cultural heritage than any other black community in the United States.
In 1989, Opala worked with the Sierra Leone Government to bring a group of Gullah leaders led by Emory Campbell
, a well known community organizer. The Gullahs were excited to learn of Opala's research on 18th-century slave trade
links between Sierra Leone and South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullah Americans were hosted by Sierra Leone's president on a state visit and featured in all the country's media. This first historic visit by Gullah people to Sierra Leone was called the "Gullah Homecoming."
In 1990, Opala and two other scholars, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and linguist Tazieff Koroma, located a Gullah family in coastal Georgia that has preserved a song in the Mende
language of Sierra Leone. The family passed it down from mother to daughter for over 200 years. The 5-line song, an ancient Mende funeral hymn, is probably the longest text in an African language known to have been preserved by a black family in the United States. Working in Sierra Leone, Opala and his colleagues found a Mende woman living in a remote rural area who knows a similar song today. Their discoveries led to the "Moran Family Homecoming" in 1997 when the Georgia family and the Sierra Leonean woman were brought together in Africa. These events resulted in the documentary film "The Language You Cry In."
In 2005, Opala brought to Sierra Leone a Gullah woman from South Carolina, named Thomalind Polite, who is linked to that country by an unbroken 250-year document trail. Records show that Polite is the direct descendant of a 10-year-old enslaved child—later called "Priscilla" -- who was taken from Sierra Leone to Charleston, South Carolina
in 1756. Polite's family may be the only black family in the United States of slave descent with a continuously documented history starting with the records of an enslaved ancestor in Africa.
Polite's family history was first researched by Edward Ball
, author of the prize-winning book Slaves in the Family (1998). Ball uncovered the family's history through detailed plantation
records that reveal Priscilla's descendants in America for eight generations. But Opala later completed the story when he found the records of the slave ship
Hare that brought Priscilla from Sierra Leone to Charleston, and the slave auction accounts that record her sale to a South Carolina rice planter. These discoveries led to "Priscilla's Homecoming" in 2005 when Polite travelled to Sierra Leone at the invitation of that country's government. Opala organized the visit and helped develop a website on "Priscilla's Homecoming," maintained by Yale University. He also curated an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society
called "Finding Priscilla's Children: The Roots and Branches of Slavery." He is now working on a documentary film on this subject.
, the British slave castle in Sierra Leone. He was the first scholar to recognize that Bunce Island has stronger links to North America than any other West African slave trading base. He showed that Bunce Island sent slave ships to Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia
on a regular basis in the mid- and late 18th century. American planters in those colonies were eager to have the skills of enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone and other areas of the West African “Rice Coast.” Opala calls Bunce Island “the most important historic site in Africa for the United States.”
Opala has devoted decades to promoting popular awareness of Bunce Island's importance for African Americans. He took Colin Powell
to Bunce Island in 1992. After visiting the castle, Powell was emotionally moved. He later described the experience in his autobiography, My American Journey. He said: “I am an American...But today, I am something more..I am an African too...I feel my roots here in this continent." Opala is prominent in the campaign to preserve the ruins of Bunce Island, a project that will ultimately cost millions.
Opala and computer artist Gary Chatelain are now working on a 3-D computer model
of Bunce Island, to show how the castle appeared in the year 1805, two years before the slave trade ended there. In 2007, African American TV actor Isaiah Washington
donated $25,000 to the project. Washington has traced his own ancestry to Sierra Leone through DNA testing. Opala and Chatelain's computer model will be used to explain the castle to visitors when the site is finally preserved. The computer model is also featured in a traveling exhibit on Bunce Island that Opala recently created. The exhibit has gone to colleges and museums in the U.S. and Canada, and will go to Sierra Leone in 2011 when the country celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Independence.
Opala is the director of the Bunce Island Coalition (US), a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of the slave castle. In October, 2010, Opala's group and their partner organization, the Bunce Island Coalition (SL), announced the start of the Bunce Island preservation project, a five-year, $5 million effort to preserve the ruins at Bunce Island and to build a museum in Freeetown, Sierra Leone's capital city, devoted to the history of Bunce Island and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in Sierra Leone. The project is gaining international attention, and in October, 2011 Opala guided Britain's Princess Anne
through the ruins, explaining his project's goals for preserving the island and telling its history.
.
. The British promised them freedom in return for military service and resettled them in Nova Scotia
, Canada
. They were called Black Loyalists. Later, British philanthropists established a colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone, and arranged transportation for nearly 1200 Black Loyalists from Canada to Sierra Leone in 1792.
Opala says that about a quarter of the Black Loyalists, or "Nova Scotian" settlers as they were called in Sierra Leone, were originally Gullahs from South Carolina and Georgia. He says that these black Nova Scotians were "really African Americans." Some Gullahs also migrated directly from the United States to Sierra Leone in the early 19th century, including Edward Jones, a free black man from South Carolina. He became the first principal of Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College
.
This two-way connection means that many Sierra Leoneans have family ties to the Gullahs in South Carolina and Georgia. People from Sierra Leone's indigenous tribes
-- the Mende
, Temne, Limba
, etc.—were transported as slaves to the rice plantations in the Low Country. But many of the Nova Scotian migrants who came back to Sierra Leone later on were Gullah people, and some of them had actually been born in Sierra Leone. The descendants of these migrants, who live today in Freetown, the capital city, are known as the Creoles
(or Krios). So, both Sierra Leone's indigenous peoples and the Krios can claim family ties to the Gullahs.
In 2011, Kevin Lowther, another former Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Sierra Leone, published a groundbreaking biography of John Kizell, a man of the Sherbro tribe
of Sierra Leone who was transported to slavery in South Carolina. Kizell completed the full-circle, escaping slavery in Charleston, serving with the British army during the Revolutionary War, taking part in the evacuation of black troops to Nova Scotia, and then returning to his native land in Sierra Leone with the "Nova Scotian" settlers in 1792. Opala's foreword to the book calls attention to this two-way connection between Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs exemplified by Kizell's long and eventful life.
The "Gullah homecomings" also generated extensive publicity in South Carolina and Georgia. The documentary films based on those events have been broadcast repeatedly on local TV and shown in schools and colleges. Many Gullahs have now visited Sierra Leone. During Sierra Leone’s civil war
, Gullah civic leaders lobbied the U.S. Congress, asking for help for their “ancestral homeland.” Sierra Leonean immigrants in the U.S. have also taken a strong interest in the Gullah Connection, forming an organization called the “Sierra Leone-Gullah Heritage Association” to nurture the relationship in the United States. Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs now come together frequently at cultural festivals in the Low Country.
Historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...
who documented the "Gullah Connection," the historical link between the Gullah
Gullah
The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and Georgia, which includes both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands....
people in South Carolina
South Carolina Low Country
The Lowcountry is a geographic and cultural region located along South Carolina's coast. The region includes the South Carolina Sea Islands...
and Georgia, and the West Africa
West Africa
West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of the African continent. Geopolitically, the UN definition of Western Africa includes the following 16 countries and an area of approximately 5 million square km:-Flags of West Africa:...
n nation of Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone
Sierra Leone , officially the Republic of Sierra Leone, is a country in West Africa. It is bordered by Guinea to the north and east, Liberia to the southeast, and the Atlantic Ocean to the west and southwest. Sierra Leone covers a total area of and has an estimated population between 5.4 and 6.4...
. He has also done extensive research on the Bunce Island
Bunce Island
Bunce Island is the site of an 18th century British slave castle in the Republic of Sierra Leone in West Africa....
slave castle in Sierra Leone.
Opala's research resulted in three historic African-American homecomings to Sierra Leone: the Gullah Homecoming (1989), the Moran Family Homecoming (1997), and Priscilla’s Homecoming (2005). Opala helped produce documentary film
Documentary film
Documentary films constitute a broad category of nonfictional motion pictures intended to document some aspect of reality, primarily for the purposes of instruction or maintaining a historical record...
s that cover these events and the many historical, cultural and language connections between Sierra Leone and the Gullahs. These homecomings are chronicled in Family Across the Sea (1991), The Language You Cry In (1998), and Priscilla's Homecoming (in production).
Early life and education
Opala was born in 1950 in Oklahoma City, OklahomaOklahoma City, Oklahoma
Oklahoma City is the capital and the largest city in the state of Oklahoma. The county seat of Oklahoma County, the city ranks 31st among United States cities in population. The city's population, from the 2010 census, was 579,999, with a metro-area population of 1,252,987 . In 2010, the Oklahoma...
and is of Polish
Polish American
A Polish American , is a citizen of the United States of Polish descent. There are an estimated 10 million Polish Americans, representing about 3.2% of the population of the United States...
descent. His father was long-time Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Marian P. Opala
Marian P. Opala
Marian Peter Opala was a Polish-American lawyer and jurist who served as a Justice of the Oklahoma Supreme Court for thirty-two years. Opala was appointed to the State's highest court in 1978 by Governor of Oklahoma David L. Boren...
, who fought in the Polish resistance during World War II and emigrated to the United States in 1947. Joseph Opala's interest in anthropology and his leadership skills were in early evidence as anthropology club he founded became the first high school club to become an official member of the Oklahoma Anthropological Society. Joseph Opala studied anthropology as an undergraduate and graduate student, before turning his attention to historical research.
His interest in Sierra Leone began after college when he served in the U.S. Peace Corps
Peace Corps
The Peace Corps is an American volunteer program run by the United States Government, as well as a government agency of the same name. The mission of the Peace Corps includes three goals: providing technical assistance, helping people outside the United States to understand US culture, and helping...
from 1974 to 1977. He worked as an agriculture advisor with rice farmers in a rural area of Sierra Leone, and later joined the staff of the Sierra Leone National Museum in Freetown
Freetown
Freetown is the capital and largest city of Sierra Leone, a country in West Africa. It is a major port city on the Atlantic Ocean located in the Western Area of the country, and had a city proper population of 772,873 at the 2004 census. The city is the economic, financial, and cultural center of...
, the country's capital city. After returning home from Africa, he served as an historical consultant to the Seminole Freedmen
Black Seminoles
The Black Seminoles is a term used by modern historians for the descendants of free blacks and some runaway slaves , mostly Gullahs who escaped from coastal South Carolina and Georgia rice plantations into the Spanish Florida wilderness beginning as early as the late 17th century...
community in Oklahoma in 1979. He returned to Sierra Leone in 1985, and stayed there until 1997 when he left during the country's civil war
Sierra Leone Civil War
The Sierra Leone Civil War began on 23 March 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front , with support from the special forces of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia , intervened in Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow the Joseph Momoh government...
.
Career
Opala lived in Sierra Leone for a total of 17 years, doing extensive research on the Atlantic slave trade. During that time, he carried out several high-profile public history projects to publicize the family links he discovered between Sierra Leone and the Gullahs. In 1988 he organized a visit by Sierra Leone's President Joseph Saidu MomohJoseph Saidu Momoh
Major General Joseph Saidu Momoh was the President of Sierra Leone from November, 1985 to April 29, 1992.- Biography :...
to a Gullah community in South Carolina. Later, he organized three "Gullah homecomings" to Sierra Leone that were all officially recognized by the country's government, and all of which received a great deal of international publicity. He worked with filmmakers to document these events. The documentary "Family Across the Sea" (1990) -- based on the first Gullah homecoming—won several awards and was broadcast on PBS stations throughout the U.S.
Opala lectured at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College
Fourah Bay College
Fourah Bay College is the oldest university college in West Africa. It is located atop Mount Aureol in Freetown, Sierra Leone...
from 1985 to 1992, teaching in the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Linguistics and African Languages. He was also active in the pro-democracy movement in Sierra Leone. He was a co-founder of the Campaign for Good Governance
Campaign for Good Governance
The Campaign for Good Governance is democracy-supporting NGO in Sierra Leone. CGG promotes the building of democratic institutions, transparency and accountability in government, active citizen participation in the political process, voter education, human rights, and the rule of law. CGG also...
, Sierra Leone's largest pro-democracy and human rights NGO
Non-governmental organization
A non-governmental organization is a legally constituted organization created by natural or legal persons that operates independently from any government. The term originated from the United Nations , and is normally used to refer to organizations that do not form part of the government and are...
.
In 2004 Opala was a fellow at the Gilder Lehrner Center
Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance and Abolition is part of The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale University. The center was founded in November 1998 by David Brion Davis and funded by Richard Gilder and Lewis Lehrman and the...
at Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. In 2005 he was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
Max Planck Society
The Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science is a formally independent non-governmental and non-profit association of German research institutes publicly funded by the federal and the 16 state governments of Germany....
in Germany. Opala taught in the Department of HIstory at James Madison University
James Madison University
James Madison University is a public coeducational research university located in Harrisonburg, Virginia, U.S. Founded in 1908 as the State Normal and Industrial School for Women at Harrisonburg, the university has undergone four name changes before settling with James Madison University...
in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
from 1999 to 2010. He recently moved back to Sierra Leone to act as the "coordinator" of the Bunce Island preservation project.
Sierra Leone connections
Opala has documented many specific links between Sierra Leone and the Gullah people. The GullahGullah
The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of South Carolina and Georgia, which includes both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands....
s are African Americans who live in the Low Country region of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Living for many generations in isolated rural communities on the coastal plain and the Sea Islands
Sea Islands
The Sea Islands are a chain of tidal and barrier islands on the Atlantic Ocean coast of the United States. They number over 100, and are located between the mouths of the Santee and St. Johns Rivers along the coast of the U.S...
, they have preserved more of their African cultural heritage than any other black community in the United States.
In 1989, Opala worked with the Sierra Leone Government to bring a group of Gullah leaders led by Emory Campbell
Emory Campbell
Emory Campbell is a renowned community leader among the Gullah people, African Americans who live in the coastal low country region of South Carolina and Georgia...
, a well known community organizer. The Gullahs were excited to learn of Opala's research on 18th-century slave trade
Atlantic slave trade
The Atlantic slave trade, also known as the trans-atlantic slave trade, refers to the trade in slaves that took place across the Atlantic ocean from the sixteenth through to the nineteenth centuries...
links between Sierra Leone and South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullah Americans were hosted by Sierra Leone's president on a state visit and featured in all the country's media. This first historic visit by Gullah people to Sierra Leone was called the "Gullah Homecoming."
In 1990, Opala and two other scholars, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and linguist Tazieff Koroma, located a Gullah family in coastal Georgia that has preserved a song in the Mende
Mende people
The Mende people are one of the two largest and most dominant ethnic group in Sierra Leone, along with the Temne. The Mende make up 30% of Sierra Leone's total population or 1,932,015 members...
language of Sierra Leone. The family passed it down from mother to daughter for over 200 years. The 5-line song, an ancient Mende funeral hymn, is probably the longest text in an African language known to have been preserved by a black family in the United States. Working in Sierra Leone, Opala and his colleagues found a Mende woman living in a remote rural area who knows a similar song today. Their discoveries led to the "Moran Family Homecoming" in 1997 when the Georgia family and the Sierra Leonean woman were brought together in Africa. These events resulted in the documentary film "The Language You Cry In."
In 2005, Opala brought to Sierra Leone a Gullah woman from South Carolina, named Thomalind Polite, who is linked to that country by an unbroken 250-year document trail. Records show that Polite is the direct descendant of a 10-year-old enslaved child—later called "Priscilla" -- who was taken from Sierra Leone to Charleston, South Carolina
Charleston, South Carolina
Charleston is the second largest city in the U.S. state of South Carolina. It was made the county seat of Charleston County in 1901 when Charleston County was founded. The city's original name was Charles Towne in 1670, and it moved to its present location from a location on the west bank of the...
in 1756. Polite's family may be the only black family in the United States of slave descent with a continuously documented history starting with the records of an enslaved ancestor in Africa.
Polite's family history was first researched by Edward Ball
Edward Ball (American author)
Edward Ball is an American writer of non-fiction, best known for his book Slaves in the Family . The book tells the story of the author's family, slave-owners in South Carolina for 200 years, and recounts his search for and meetings with descendants of his family's slaves...
, author of the prize-winning book Slaves in the Family (1998). Ball uncovered the family's history through detailed plantation
Plantation
A plantation is a long artificially established forest, farm or estate, where crops are grown for sale, often in distant markets rather than for local on-site consumption...
records that reveal Priscilla's descendants in America for eight generations. But Opala later completed the story when he found the records of the slave ship
Slave ship
Slave ships were large cargo ships specially converted for the purpose of transporting slaves, especially newly purchased African slaves to Americas....
Hare that brought Priscilla from Sierra Leone to Charleston, and the slave auction accounts that record her sale to a South Carolina rice planter. These discoveries led to "Priscilla's Homecoming" in 2005 when Polite travelled to Sierra Leone at the invitation of that country's government. Opala organized the visit and helped develop a website on "Priscilla's Homecoming," maintained by Yale University. He also curated an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society
New-York Historical Society
The New-York Historical Society is an American history museum and library located in New York City at the corner of 77th Street and Central Park West in Manhattan. Founded in 1804 as New York's first museum, the New-York Historical Society presents exhibitions, public programs and research that...
called "Finding Priscilla's Children: The Roots and Branches of Slavery." He is now working on a documentary film on this subject.
Bunce Island research
Opala began his research in the 1970s with an investigation of Bunce IslandBunce Island
Bunce Island is the site of an 18th century British slave castle in the Republic of Sierra Leone in West Africa....
, the British slave castle in Sierra Leone. He was the first scholar to recognize that Bunce Island has stronger links to North America than any other West African slave trading base. He showed that Bunce Island sent slave ships to Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia
Savannah, Georgia
Savannah is the largest city and the county seat of Chatham County, in the U.S. state of Georgia. Established in 1733, the city of Savannah was the colonial capital of the Province of Georgia and later the first state capital of Georgia. Today Savannah is an industrial center and an important...
on a regular basis in the mid- and late 18th century. American planters in those colonies were eager to have the skills of enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone and other areas of the West African “Rice Coast.” Opala calls Bunce Island “the most important historic site in Africa for the United States.”
Opala has devoted decades to promoting popular awareness of Bunce Island's importance for African Americans. He took Colin Powell
Colin Powell
Colin Luther Powell is an American statesman and a retired four-star general in the United States Army. He was the 65th United States Secretary of State, serving under President George W. Bush from 2001 to 2005. He was the first African American to serve in that position. During his military...
to Bunce Island in 1992. After visiting the castle, Powell was emotionally moved. He later described the experience in his autobiography, My American Journey. He said: “I am an American...But today, I am something more..I am an African too...I feel my roots here in this continent." Opala is prominent in the campaign to preserve the ruins of Bunce Island, a project that will ultimately cost millions.
Opala and computer artist Gary Chatelain are now working on a 3-D computer model
Virtual reality
Virtual reality , also known as virtuality, is a term that applies to computer-simulated environments that can simulate physical presence in places in the real world, as well as in imaginary worlds...
of Bunce Island, to show how the castle appeared in the year 1805, two years before the slave trade ended there. In 2007, African American TV actor Isaiah Washington
Isaiah Washington
Isaiah Washington IV is an American actor. A veteran of several Spike Lee films, Washington is best known for his role as Dr. Preston Burke on the ABC medical drama Grey's Anatomy from 2005 to 2007.-Personal life:...
donated $25,000 to the project. Washington has traced his own ancestry to Sierra Leone through DNA testing. Opala and Chatelain's computer model will be used to explain the castle to visitors when the site is finally preserved. The computer model is also featured in a traveling exhibit on Bunce Island that Opala recently created. The exhibit has gone to colleges and museums in the U.S. and Canada, and will go to Sierra Leone in 2011 when the country celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Independence.
Opala is the director of the Bunce Island Coalition (US), a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of the slave castle. In October, 2010, Opala's group and their partner organization, the Bunce Island Coalition (SL), announced the start of the Bunce Island preservation project, a five-year, $5 million effort to preserve the ruins at Bunce Island and to build a museum in Freeetown, Sierra Leone's capital city, devoted to the history of Bunce Island and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in Sierra Leone. The project is gaining international attention, and in October, 2011 Opala guided Britain's Princess Anne
Anne, Princess Royal
Princess Anne, Princess Royal , is the only daughter of Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh...
through the ruins, explaining his project's goals for preserving the island and telling its history.
.
Two-way connection
Opala has shown that the Gullah Connection is a two-way link. Some free Gullah people migrated to Sierra Leone after American Independence. They were originally American slaves who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolutionary WarAmerican Revolutionary War
The American Revolutionary War , the American War of Independence, or simply the Revolutionary War, began as a war between the Kingdom of Great Britain and thirteen British colonies in North America, and ended in a global war between several European great powers.The war was the result of the...
. The British promised them freedom in return for military service and resettled them in Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...
, Canada
Canada
Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...
. They were called Black Loyalists. Later, British philanthropists established a colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone, and arranged transportation for nearly 1200 Black Loyalists from Canada to Sierra Leone in 1792.
Opala says that about a quarter of the Black Loyalists, or "Nova Scotian" settlers as they were called in Sierra Leone, were originally Gullahs from South Carolina and Georgia. He says that these black Nova Scotians were "really African Americans." Some Gullahs also migrated directly from the United States to Sierra Leone in the early 19th century, including Edward Jones, a free black man from South Carolina. He became the first principal of Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College
Fourah Bay College
Fourah Bay College is the oldest university college in West Africa. It is located atop Mount Aureol in Freetown, Sierra Leone...
.
This two-way connection means that many Sierra Leoneans have family ties to the Gullahs in South Carolina and Georgia. People from Sierra Leone's indigenous tribes
Indigenous peoples
Indigenous peoples are ethnic groups that are defined as indigenous according to one of the various definitions of the term, there is no universally accepted definition but most of which carry connotations of being the "original inhabitants" of a territory....
-- the Mende
Mende people
The Mende people are one of the two largest and most dominant ethnic group in Sierra Leone, along with the Temne. The Mende make up 30% of Sierra Leone's total population or 1,932,015 members...
, Temne, Limba
Limba people (Sierra Leone)
The Limba people is a major ethnic group in the Republic of Sierra Leone. They form the third largest ethnic group in the country, about 8.5% of Sierra Leone's total population ....
, etc.—were transported as slaves to the rice plantations in the Low Country. But many of the Nova Scotian migrants who came back to Sierra Leone later on were Gullah people, and some of them had actually been born in Sierra Leone. The descendants of these migrants, who live today in Freetown, the capital city, are known as the Creoles
Sierra Leone Creole people
The Sierra Leone Creoles, or Krios, are an ethnic group in Sierra Leone, descendants of West Indian slaves from the Caribbean, primarily from Jamaica; freed African American slaves from the Thirteen Colonies resettled from Nova Scotia; and Liberated Africans from various parts of Africa...
(or Krios). So, both Sierra Leone's indigenous peoples and the Krios can claim family ties to the Gullahs.
In 2011, Kevin Lowther, another former Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Sierra Leone, published a groundbreaking biography of John Kizell, a man of the Sherbro tribe
Sherbro people
The Sherbro people are a native people of Sierra Leone, who speak the Sherbro language; they make up 3% of Sierra Leone's population or about 201,000. They are also known as the Bullom people...
of Sierra Leone who was transported to slavery in South Carolina. Kizell completed the full-circle, escaping slavery in Charleston, serving with the British army during the Revolutionary War, taking part in the evacuation of black troops to Nova Scotia, and then returning to his native land in Sierra Leone with the "Nova Scotian" settlers in 1792. Opala's foreword to the book calls attention to this two-way connection between Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs exemplified by Kizell's long and eventful life.
Popular interest
The homecomings Opala organized focused national attention on the Gullah Connection in Sierra Leone, and the people of that country responded with enthusiasm. When the first Gullah group made a pilgrimage to Bunce Island in 1989, hundreds of people came in boats and canoes to witness the historic occasion. Today, the “Gullah Connection” is an “evergreen” story in the Sierra Leone media, a story of continuing popular interest. Most Sierra Leoneans are now aware of their historical links to the Gullahs. The nation's high school history textbook covers the Gullah Connection. Several civic groups in Sierra Leone are dedicated to nurturing the country's family ties to the American Gullahs.The "Gullah homecomings" also generated extensive publicity in South Carolina and Georgia. The documentary films based on those events have been broadcast repeatedly on local TV and shown in schools and colleges. Many Gullahs have now visited Sierra Leone. During Sierra Leone’s civil war
Sierra Leone Civil War
The Sierra Leone Civil War began on 23 March 1991 when the Revolutionary United Front , with support from the special forces of Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia , intervened in Sierra Leone in an attempt to overthrow the Joseph Momoh government...
, Gullah civic leaders lobbied the U.S. Congress, asking for help for their “ancestral homeland.” Sierra Leonean immigrants in the U.S. have also taken a strong interest in the Gullah Connection, forming an organization called the “Sierra Leone-Gullah Heritage Association” to nurture the relationship in the United States. Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs now come together frequently at cultural festivals in the Low Country.
External links
- "Joseph Opala, Biographical profile", James Madison University
- Joseph Opala, The Gullah: Rice, Slavery and the Sierra Leone Connection Website, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University
- "The Scholar and the Slave Trade", Hartford Courant
- "The Language You Cry In" -- California Newsreel
- "The Language You Cry In" -- Inko Productions
- Leslie Goffe, "Priscilla: The story of an African slave", BBC News, New York, 23 November 2005
- "Priscilla's Homecoming" Website, Gilder Lehrman Center, Yale University
- "Priscilla's Homecoming and the USF Africana Heritage Project"
- Bunce Island preservation project, Providence Journal
- Bunce Island preservation project, Christian Science Monitor