This week’s open threads will focus on the Gullah people and their culture.
The Gullah Wars
The Gullah are the descendants of enslaved Africans who live in the Low country region of the U.S. states of South Carolina and Georgia, which includes both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands.
Historically, the Gullah region extended from the Cape Fear area on the coast of North Carolina south to the vicinity of Jacksonville on the coast of Florida; but today the Gullah area is confined to the South Carolina and Georgia Low country. The Gullah people andtheir language are also called Geechee, which some scholars speculate is related to the Ogeechee River near Savannah, Georgia. “Gullah” is a term that was originally used to designate the variety of English spoken by Gullah and Geechee people, but over time it has been used by its speakers to formally refer to their creole language and distinctive ethnic identity as a people. The Georgia communities are distinguished by identifying as either “Saltwater Geechee” or “Freshwater Geechee,” depending on their proximity to the coast.
Because of a period of relative isolation in rural areas, the Gullah developed a culture that has preserved much of their African linguistic and cultural heritage from various peoples, as well as absorbing new influences from the region. They speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and influenced by African languages in grammar and sentence structure. Properly referred to as “Sea Island Creole,” the Gullah language is related to Jamaican Patois, Barbadian Dialect, Bahamian Dialect,Trinidadian Creole, Belizean Creole and the Krio language of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Gullah story-telling, rice-based cuisine, music, folk beliefs, crafts, farming, and fishing traditions all exhibit strong influences from West and Central African cultures.
The name “Gullah” may derive from Angola, where ancestors of some Gullah people likely originated. They created a new culture from the numerous African peoples brought into Charleston and South Carolina. Some scholars have suggested it may come from Gola, an ethnicity living in the border area between present-day Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa, where many of the Gullah ancestors originated. This area was known as the “Grain Coast” or “Rice Coast” to British colonists in the Caribbean and the Southern colonies of North America. The name “Geechee”, another common buy viagra walgreen (emic) name for the Gullah people, may come from Kissi, an ethnicity living in the border area between Sierra Leone, Guinea and Liberia.
Some scholars have also suggested indigenous American origins for these words. The Spanish called the South Carolina and Georgia coastal region Guale after a Native American tribe. The name of the Ogeechee River, a prominent geographical feature in coastal Georgia, was derived from a Creek Indian word.
According to Port of Charleston records, African slaves brought to the port came from the following areas: Angola (39%), Senegambia (20%), the Windward Coast (17%), the Gold Coast (13%), Sierra Leone (6%), and Madagascar, Mozambique, and the two Bights (5% combined).
Particularly along the western coast, the people had cultivated African rice for possibly up to 3,000 years. Once British colonial planters in the American South discovered that rice would grow in that region, they often sought enslaved Africans from rice-growing regions because of their skills and knowledge needed to develop and build irrigation, dams and earthworks.
Two British trading companies based in England operated the slave castle at Bunce Island (formerly called Bance Island), located in the Sierra Leone River. Henry Laurens was their agent in Charleston and was a planter and slave trader. His counterpart in England was Richard Oswald.
Many of the slaves taken captive in West Africa were processed through Bunce Island. It was a prime export site for slaves to South Carolina and Georgia. Slave castles in Ghana, for instance, shipped their people to sites in the Caribbean islands.
After Sierra Leone was founded in the late 18th century by the British as a colony for poor blacks from London and black Loyalists from Nova Scotia, resettled after the American Revolutionary War, they did not allow slaves to be taken from Sierra Leone and tried to protect the people from kidnappers. In 1808 both Great Britain and the United States prohibited the African slave trade. The British, which patrolled to intercept slave ships off Africa, sometimes resettled Africans freed from slave trader ships after that date in Sierra Leone. Similarly, Americans sometimes settled freed slaves at Liberia, a similar colony established in the early 19th century by the American Colonization Society as a place for freed slaves and free blacks from the United States.