Bunce Island Preservation Project
In October 2010, Opala's Bunce Island Coalition (US) and their partner organization, the Bunce Island Coalition (SL), announced the start of a five-year project to preserve Bunce Island and build a museum in Freetown devoted to its history and its impact in both Sierra Leone and the Americas as a whole. Two well-known experts joined the project—the archaeologist Christopher DeCorse of Syracuse University, famous for his research on Ghana's Elmina Castle and Michael Schuller, president of a US-based engineering firm that carries out historic preservation projects all over the world. The Bunce Island project is now gaining international attention, and in October, 2011 Opala guided Britain's Princess Anne through the ruins, telling its history and explaining the project's goals for preserving the island.
Opala and computer artist Gary Chatelain of James Madison University are now working on a 3-D computer model of Bunce Island showing how the castle appeared in the year 1805. African American TV actor Isaiah Washington, who traced his ancestors to Sierra Leone through a DNA test, donated $25,000 to the project in 2007. Opala and Chatelain's computer model will be used to explain the castle to visitors at both the museum and the site itself. The computer model is also featured in a traveling exhibit on Bunce Island that Opala created. The exhibit has gone to colleges and museums in the U.S. and Canada, and it went to the Sierra Leone National Museum when the country celebrated the 50th anniversary of its Independence in 2011.
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