JUSTICE INITIATIVE

Part I: The African culture 
in the Southern United States

November 1, 2017
In the 1950s, when I was very young, my father moved our western Canadian "white" family to Atlanta, Georgia and, as I've written in my article " Growing up in Jim Crow Atlanta", this was when my life-long journey began. It was my first exposure to people other than those of European descent. It was, therefore, my introduction to a culture largely influenced by Africa, which to me describes the southern part of the United States. This includes, to name but a few examples, the cultural musical expressions (jazz, blues, etc.); the food (okra, gumbo, watermelon, etc.); acknowledgement of "family" defined as beyond nuclear family relationships - in other words, more of a community embracement; respectfulness of elders; profound and passionate religious expressions and commitment, and: "As James Baldwin correctly observed, blacks transformed Christianity in America, unleashing it from its more "God-centered" moorings and turning it toward the ideal of Jesus, the Savior." ( National Geographic)
 
My life-long journey in the South was to consistently acquire knowledge of the culture, but also to address what I soon learned was the malicious and sinister prevalence of the European-American practice of white supremacy, largely thanks to the on-going legacy of the institution of slavery. This also included learning about the isolation of the white working class and manipulation of them by the white elite. Europeans came to America with the feudal elite mindset that, unfortunately, has been maintained.

Nevertheless, there is and always has been a merging of both the African and European cultures and countless ways, not the least of which being in music. For example, the Appalachian whites developed "Bluegrass" music largely from their Irish, Scottish and English traditional music that " was also later influenced by the music of African Americans  through incorporation of jazz elements" ( Wikipedia) and the use of the banjo instrument, which is from West Africa:

The modern banjo derives from instruments that had been used in the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people taken from West Africa. Written references to the banjo in North America appear in the 18th century, and the instrument became increasingly available commercially from around the second quarter of the 19th century....
 
In the Antebellum South, many black slaves played the banjo and taught their masters how to play. For example, in his memoir titled  With Sabre and Scalpel: The Autobiography of a Soldier and Surgeon, Confederate veteran and surgeon John Allan Wyeth recalls learning it from a slave as a child on his family plantation. (Wikipedia)

But if you are going to learn about the profound influence of Africa in America you have no choice but to ultimately focus on South Carolina. In my years of activism in the South, the southeastern part of South Carolina - namely the Charleston area and the South Carolina Sea Islands - has always played a significant role. In fact, the most distinctive and unique African culture anywhere in the United States is of the Gullah community in the Sea Islands that has, for at least 250 years (since the mid 1700s), lived in this area. They are from Sierra Leone in West Africa and were brought to the islands as slaves because they were highly skilled rice growers and growing rice was most definitely not a European skillset.

Rice has been cultivated in West Africa for at least 3,000 years. Strabo noted that rice was cultivated in the Fezzan (modern-day Libya) by the Garamantes. Although this is well outside the zone of cultivation today, African rice was probably common in the Sahara in wetter periods (Chevalier, 1932:86). African rice (Oryza glaberrima ) is a distinct species from Asian rice (Oryza sativa) and is not interfertile with it. The first reference to rice in West Africa is in the writings of Leo Africanus (Africanus, 1632), who travelled through the region in the 1560s and noted the practice of sowing rice 'on the waters' in the area of modern-day Sokoto in northwestern Nigeria, a technique still used today. (ODI)

The slave owners reaped the financial benefits of the highly skilled West African rice growers, but the West African community remained isolated on the Sea Islands and away from the slave owner's so that, thankfully and uniquely, they retained their profound culture. In addition to their agricultural knowledge and skills, the Gullah brought with them their crafts, language and religious expressions that have been maintained to this day and that altogether powerfully influenced the southern culture:

Southern cuisine is the result of a splendid cultural convergence, deriving from the intersection of three foodways: British, Native American, and West African. The West African influence was particularly strong in the cuisine of the Lowcountry of South Carolina, where, long before the rise of cotton farming, a rice economy dependent upon enslaved labor ensured that West Africans were present in large numbers from the early days of the colony.
But what if, for some reason, West Africans had not been brought forcibly to the Lowcountry, and their cultural influence had not been felt in the region? To be sure, the entire history of the colony would have taken a dramatically different course. Lacking its rice cash crop, Charleston almost certainly would not have become one of colonial America's wealthiest cities. And, the food its residents ate would have been very, very different.
The ingredients wouldn't be the same, for starters, since so many of the grains and vegetables that define Lowcountry cooking would be missing from the kitchen. Cowpeas and black-eyed peas, okra, greens, watermelon, yams - these were all staples of the West African diet, as were sorghum and sesame (or benne), too.
Carolinians would have missed out on many African cooking techniques, too: one-pot cooking, stews, gumbos, thickening with okra or nuts. West African cooks prepared greens by laying meat on top, and without that influence the Southern tradition of using smoked meats as seasoning may never have begun. (Charleston City Paper)

Below is an article by scholar Joseph Opala about the Gullah. This will be followed by additional articles and a video about the Gullah and their African roots.

 

The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection

 
 
Mrs. Queen Ellis of Mt. Pleasant, South Carolina making a Gullah basket (1976).
The Gullah are a distinctive group of Black Americans from South Carolina and Georgia in the southeastern United States. They live in small farming and fishing communities along the Atlantic coastal plain and on the chain of Sea Islands which runs parallel to the coast. Because of their geographical isolation and strong community life, the Gullah have been able to preserve more of their African cultural heritage than any other group of Black Americans. They speak a creole language similar to Sierra Leone Krio, use African names, tell African folktales, make African-style handicrafts such as baskets and carved walking sticks, and enjoy a rich cuisine based primarily on rice.
 
Indeed, rice is what forms the special link between the Gullah and the people of Sierra Leone. During the 1700s the American colonists in South Carolina and Georgia discovered that rice would grow well in the moist, semitropical country bordering their coastline. But the American colonists had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop. The white plantation owners purchased slaves from various parts of Africa, but they greatly preferred slaves from what they called the "Rice Coast" or "Windward Coast"-the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa, stretching from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for slaves from this area, and Africans from the Rice Coast were almost certainly the largest group of slaves imported into South Carolina and Georgia during the 18th century.
 
The Gullah people are directly descended from the slaves who labored on the rice plantations, and their language reflects significant influences from Sierra Leone and the surrounding area. The Gullahs' English-based creole language is strikingly similar to Sierra Leone Krio and contains such identical expressions as bigyai (greedy), pantap (on top of), ohltu (both), tif (steal), yeys (ear), and swit (delicious). But, in addition to words derived from English, the Gullah creole also contains several thousand words and personal names derived from African languages-and a large proportion of these (about 25%) are from languages spoken in Sierra Leone. The Gullah use such masculine names as Sorie, Tamba, Sanie, Vandi, and Ndapi, and such feminine names as Kadiatu, Fatimata, Hawa, and Isata-all common in Sierra Leone. As late as the 1940s, a Black American linguist found Gullahs in rural South Carolina and Georgia who could recite songs and fragments of stories in Mende and Vai, and who could do simple counting in the Guinea/Sierra Leone dialect of Fula. In fact, all of the African texts that Gullah people have preserved are in languages spoken within Sierra Leone and along its borders.
 
The connection between the Gullah and the people of Sierra Leone is a very special one. Sierra Leone has always had a small population, and Sierra Leonean slaves were always greatly outnumbered on the plantations by slaves from more populous parts of Africa-except in South Carolina and Georgia. The rice plantation zone of coastal South Carolina and Georgia was the only place in the Americas where Sierra Leonean slaves came together in large enough numbers and over a long enough period of time to leave a significant linguistic and cultural impact. While Nigerians may point to Brazil, Cuba, and Haiti as places where Nigerian culture is still evident, Sierra Leoneans can look to the Gullah of South Carolina and Georgia as a kindred people sharing many common elements of speech, custom, culture, and cuisine.

JOSEPH OPALA is an American anthropologist who lectures at Fourah Bay College (University of Sierra Leone). His study of the Sierra Leone-Gullah connection began in 1977, when he conducted an archaeological and historical survey of Bunce Island under a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities. In 1980, he did research in Oklahoma among the Seminole Freedmen and acted as an historical consultant for their community leaders. Since 1985, Mr. Opala has been actively engaged in spreading information on the Gullah in Sierra Leone speaking on SLBS, BBC, VOA, etc. and writing for the African press. He is a founder and co- chairman of the Gullah Research Committee at Fourah Bay College, an interdisciplinary group committed to a thorough exploration of this important topic.

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