Current Status
In 1948 Bunce Island became Sierra Leone's first officially protected historic site. M.C.F. Easmon, a Sierra Leonean medical doctor and amateur historian, led an expedition that year that cleared the vegetation, and mapped and photographed the ruins for the first time. In 1989 a group of Gullahs (members of an African-American community in coastal South Carolina and Georgia) made an historic homecoming visit to Sierra Leone and toured the ruins of Bunce Island. Shortly after that, the U.S. National Park Service announced a preservation program for the castle. Plans were put off by the confusion of the Sierra Leone civil war. “Gullah Homecomings” in 1997 and 2005 resulted in visits by African Americans to Bunce Island, which were documented as public history projects .
Bunce Island is under the protection of Sierra Leone's Monuments and Relics Commission, a branch of the country's Ministry of Tourism and Culture. The government is working to preserve the castle as a reminder of the past and to attract tourists, especially African Americans. Although other slave castles—especially Gorée in Senegal and Elmina in Ghana—are more popular attractions for black Americans, those castles are historically connected more to slave descendants of the West Indies than North America. Bunce Island has been called "the most important historic site in Africa for the United States."
General Colin Powell, then Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Bunce Island in 1992 while on an official visit to Sierra Leone. Deeply moved by the experience, Powell spoke of his reaction to the slave castle in a farewell speech he made before leaving the country. "I am an American...," he said. "But today, I am something more...I am an African too...I feel my roots here in this continent."
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