Thread by @blackarcheology

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

“The #Gullah are directly descended from the slaves who labored on the rice plantations, and their language reflects significant influences from #SierraLeone and the surrounding area.”

glc.yale.edu/gullah-rice-sl…

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.

The Gullah Geechee people are the descendants of Central and West Africans who came from different ethnic and social groups.

They were enslaved together on the isolated sea and barrier islands that span what is now designated as the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor.

The Gullah/Geechee people are descendants of African slaves that were brought to Charleston in the late 1500’s. When the slaves that were brought to the Carolina Colony were captured, they were placed in prison cells along the West African coast line.

Chillun gwine ta de market een de Gullah/Geechee Nayshun!

The result was an intense interaction among Africans from different language groups in settings where enslaved Africans and their descendants formed the majority.

“Over time, they developed the creole Gullah Geechee language as a means of comunicating with each other and they were also able to preserve many African practices in their language, arts, crafts and cuisine.”

gullahgeecheecorridor.org/thegullahgeech…

“Gullah creole 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.”

glc.yale.edu/gullah-rice-sl…

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 #SierraLeone.

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, ...

NOTE: The “Black American linguist” has a name.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_D…

.. and who could do simple counting in the Guinea/Sierra Leone dialect of Fula.

Zora Neale Hurston, one of the most famous African American anthropologist and writers, early on saw value in documenting Gullah/ Geechee language and traditions. “Sister Zora”, as she is sometimes affectionately called by many in Gullah community, spent time with the community.

Zora Neale Hurston: African American #Gullah Folk Music (FL): “Oh, the Buford Boat Done Come”

The Gullah Way of Seeing

“Although Jordan Peele is not Gullah, (I’m not sure what his father’s lineage is), his concept of the “sunken place” reminded me of this second sight or this Gullah way of seeing.”

thelivingainteasy.wordpress.com/2017/03/19/bet…

“The sunken place is both, of course, metaphorical and metaphysical. It is a place that people like the Gullah artist W.H. Johnson knew well.”

thelivingainteasy.wordpress.com/2017/03/19/bet…

“The Gullah worldview is something that I know exists, in part, because it is something that I experienced growing up in South Carolina.”

“Most people do not study Johnson as a Gullah artist, but I don’t see how one cannot. The best book about him and his art is by Richard Powell, a Morehouse grad and Duke professor, called Homecoming: The Life of Art of William H. Johnson (see Here).”

amazon.com/Homecoming-Art…

Director's Choice - I Baptize Thee by William H. Johnson

Perhaps more than anyone, the African American scholar Lorenzo Dow Turner helped to intellectualy engage the public on the African origins of Geechee.

He is not just a “Black American linguist”.

Lorenzo Dow Turner is the father of Gullah studies.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_D…

“An overheard conversation inspired Lorenzo Dow Turner, PhD’26, to become a linguistic detective. While teaching summer school at South Carolina State College in 1929, Turner listened as two students spoke what sounded like broken English.”

magazine.uchicago.edu/1012/features/…

“Reed Smith of the University of South Carolina believed that Gullah emerged as slaves altered the European-influenced English of white settlers. The Africans, he wrote in a 1926 pamphlet, would “wrap their tongues around it, and reproduce it changed in tonality, pronunciation,

... grammar to suit their native phonetic tendencies.”

About the time Turner first heard #Gullah, University of North Carolina’s Guy B. Johnson (African American) declared, “This strange dialect turns out to be little more than the peasant English of two centuries ago.”

Turner believed African influences remained. Although there is very little in Gullah that is not drawn from English, says University of Chicago linguistics scholar Salikoko Mufwene, PhD’79, ..

Turner was the first to prove that “one cannot account for the origins ... ignoring the languages that the slaves had brought from Africa.”

As he got more used to the speech, he could hear in there the English words, but there were words that were not English,” curator Alcione Amos says. “It dawned on him that these are probably African words.”

magazine.uchicago.edu/1012/features/…

Bobby Seale on Dr. Lorenzo Dow Turner

Gullah Traditions of the South Carolina Coast

PBS Now - Gullah Culture

Queen Quet - Keynote at Lorenzo

Dow Turner Symposium