Three Gullah Homecomings
In 1989, Opala worked with the Sierra Leone Government to bring a group of Gullah leaders led by Emory Campbell, a well known community organizer. The Gullahs were excited to learn of Opala's research on 18th-century slave trade links between Sierra Leone and South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullah visitors were hosted by Sierra Leone's president on a state visit and featured in all the country's media. This first historic visit by Gullah people to Sierra Leone was called the "Gullah Homecoming."
In 1990, Opala and two other scholars, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt and linguist Tazieff Koroma, located a Gullah family in coastal Georgia that has preserved a song in the Mende language of Sierra Leone, passing it down from mother to daughter for over 200 years. The 5-line song, an ancient Mende funeral hymn, is probably the longest text in an African language known to have been preserved by a black family in the United States. Working in Sierra Leone, Opala and his colleagues found a Mende woman living in a remote rural area who knows a similar song today. Their discoveries led to the "Moran Family Homecoming" in 1997 when the Georgia family and the Sierra Leonean woman were brought together in Africa. These events resulted in the documentary film The Language You Cry In.
In 2005, Opala brought to Sierra Leone a Gullah woman from South Carolina, named Thomalind Polite, who is linked to that country by an unbroken 250-year document trail. Records show that Polite is the direct descendant of a 10-year-old enslaved child—later called "Priscilla" -- who was taken from Sierra Leone to Charleston, South Carolina in 1756. Polite's family may be the only black family in the United States of slave descent with a continuously documented history starting with the records of an enslaved ancestor in Africa.
Polite's family history was first researched by Edward Ball, author of the prize-winning book Slaves in the Family (1998). Ball uncovered the family's history through detailed plantation records that reveal Priscilla's descendants in America for eight generations. But Opala later completed the story when he found the records of the slave ship Hare that brought Priscilla from Sierra Leone to Charleston, and the slave auction accounts that record her sale to a South Carolina rice planter. These discoveries led to "Priscilla's Homecoming" in 2005 when Polite traveled to Sierra Leone at the invitation of that country's government. Opala organized the visit and helped develop a website on "Priscilla's Homecoming", maintained by Yale University. He also curated an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society called "Finding Priscilla's Children: The Roots and Branches of Slavery." He is now working on a documentary film on this subject.
Read more about this topic: Joseph Opala