Joseph Opala - Biographical Background and Early Research

Biographical Background and Early Research

Opala was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1950. His father was Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Marian P. Opala (1921-2010), who fought in the Polish Underground during World War II before immigrating to the U.S. in 1947. Opala knew from his early childhood that his father had suffered a series of terrible blows, including imprisonment in a Nazi concentration camp (Flossenbürg) for nine months during the war, and then the total loss of contact with his family in Poland during the Cold War period that followed (see Iron Curtain). Opala has said that his fascination with the Atlantic slave trade -- and the idea of reuniting families torn apart by it centuries ago -- came partly from his own family experience, seeing how his father's enslavement by the Nazis and forced separation from his natal family for life, impacted not just his father, but also himself, indirectly, through the high degree of stress he experienced at home during his childhood years. Psychologists refer to the children of concentration camp victims as "second-generation survivors."

Opala obtained B.A. and M.A. degrees in anthropology before turning, later in his career, to the field of history. During his undergraduate years, he spent a summer on an archaeological dig at Cahokia Mounds, a major Native American site in Illinois, and two more summers doing ethnographic research among the Lacandon Indians in Southern Mexico.

Opala's interest in Sierra Leone began after college when he served in the U.S. Peace Corps in that country from 1974 to 1977. He began as an agriculture adviser, working with Limba rice farmers in a small village in the Northern Province, but later joined the staff of the Sierra Leone National Museum in Freetown. At the suggestion of U.S. Ambassador Michael Samuels, he decided to focus his research on Bunce Island. Then, after his Peace Corps service ended, Opala spent another year (1978) doing research on Bunce Island under a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.

There was very little information on Bunce Island when Opala began his research, and he realized that he would have to employ all three of the methods for learning about the human past -- history, archaeology, and oral history. Many Sierra Leoneans believed at that time that the Portuguese had operated on Bunce Island, but Opala soon found historical evidence in the Fourah Bay College library in Freetown that proved that British slave traders operated there during the castle's entire history. Turning to archaeology, Opala spent long periods camped out on the island, using his time there to cut back the vegetation that covered the ruins, and to examine the buildings in great detail. He was the first scholar to identify the functions of all the major structures in the castle, including the gate tower, the headquarters building, the men's and women's slave yards, and the underground gunpowder magazine. He also conducted oral history research, traveling by canoe to the fishing villages on the neighboring islands to interview the elders on their traditional understanding of Bunce Island's history. Opala was the first scholar to identify a small village about seven miles upriver where the descendants of the castle's African workers still live together today, governed by a chief with the hereditary title "Bai Adam," taken from the name of Bunce Island's last African foreman. Opala also recognized that the Temne fishermen who live on the nearby islands still call the island by a version of its original name ("Bence Island"), rather than the modern name "Bunce Island."

After returning to the U.S. in 1979, Opala served as an historical adviser to the Seminole Freedmen (or "Black Seminole") community in Oklahoma, a group with strong historical ties to the Gullahs in South Carolina and Georgia. Opala was one of the first scholars to recognize that connection, and the first to bring it to the attention of the Oklahoma Seminole Freedmen community. Then, after postgraduate study in anthropology in the U.S., and in African Studies in the U.K., he returned to Sierra Leone in 1985.