Joseph Opala - The Gullah Connection

The Gullah Connection

The Gullahs are African Americans from the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia. They have lived for generations in isolated rural settlements on the coastal plain of those states and on the long chain of Sea Islands that runs parallel to the coast. The Gullahs are well known for having preserved more of their African cultural heritage than any other African American community, including a creole language that contains many African loan words as well as a great deal of African influence in its phonology, grammar and syntax. The Gullahs have also retained a great deal of African influence in their rice cooking traditions, storytelling, music, religious beliefs, spiritual practices, herbal medicines, handicrafts, etc.

The Gullahs' history can be understood in large measure by considering just one particular factor—the cultivation of rice. Rice was the staple crop in coastal South Carolina and Georgia during the colonial period, and the rice planters in those colonies knew that Africans brought from they called the "Rice Coast" of West Africa had a great deal of skill at cultivating that difficult crop. American rice planters were, therefore, willing to pay premium prices for African captives taken from that region. Peter Wood and other outstanding scholars of Southern history have been making that point since the 1970s. They have also shown that the African captives from the Rice Coast contributed significantly to the success of the rice industry in colonial South Carolina and Georgia.

When American planters spoke of the "Rice Coast," they were referring to the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa, which extended about 700 miles from what are now the nations of Senegal, Gambia and Guinea Bissau in the north, down to Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia in the south. Long before European contact, African farmers in that area had been cultivating rice in diverse geographical conditions, and developing ingenious new methods for cultivating that crop in every new circumstance they encountered, long before European contact.

The value American rice planters placed on the skills of Rice Coast Africans is clearly reflected in the slave auction advertisements that slave dealers placed in the Charleston and Savannah newspapers of that period announcing the arrival of captives from the "Rice Coast," "Gambia," and "Seralion." American rice planters knew these geographical terms because it was important to them that the slaves they bought have a history of growing rice in Africa. And, indeed, some adverts stated clearly that the enslaved Africans offered for sale were "well acquainted with the culture of rice." And some adverts even referred specifically to "Bance Island."

Some scholars point to the Rice Coast region, in general, as important for Gullah origins. Others point to the Senegambia region on the north end of the Rice Coast because they believe that the rice-growing techniques Africans developed in that area are a better match for the rice farming that developed in South Carolina and Georgia. But Opala has long argued that while the Gullahs have historical and cultural links to the Rice Coast region as a whole, their connection to Sierra Leone is uniquely strong when compared to the other five modern countries that make up the Rice Coast today. Opala has brought three Gullah homecoming groups to Sierra Leone in recent years, and the remarkable stories possessed by each of those groups helps to bolster his focus on Sierra Leone.