Joseph Opala - Two-way Connection

Two-way Connection

Opala has shown that the Gullah Connection is a two-way link. Some free Gullah people migrated to Sierra Leone after American Independence. They were originally American slaves who escaped to the British lines during the American Revolutionary War. The British promised them freedom in return for military service and resettled them in Nova Scotia, Canada. They were called Black Loyalists. Later, British philanthropists established a colony for freed slaves in Sierra Leone, and arranged transportation for nearly 1200 Black Loyalists from Canada to Sierra Leone in 1792.

Opala says that about a quarter of the Black Loyalists, or "Nova Scotian" settlers as they were called in Sierra Leone, were originally Gullahs from South Carolina and Georgia. He says that these black Nova Scotians were "really African Americans". Some Gullahs also migrated directly from the United States to Sierra Leone in the early 19th century, including Edward Jones, a free black man from South Carolina. He became the first principal of Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College.

This two-way connection means that many Sierra Leoneans have family ties to the Gullahs in South Carolina and Georgia. People from Sierra Leone's indigenous tribes -- the Mende, Temne, Limba, etc.—were transported as slaves to the rice plantations in the Low Country. But many of the Nova Scotian migrants who came back to Sierra Leone later on were Gullah people, and some of them had actually been born in Sierra Leone. The descendants of these migrants, who live today in Freetown, the capital city, are known as the Creoles (or Krios). So, both Sierra Leone's indigenous peoples and the Krios can claim family ties to the Gullahs.

In 2011, Kevin Lowther, another former Peace Corps Volunteer who served in Sierra Leone, published a groundbreaking biography of John Kizell, a man of the Sherbro tribe of Sierra Leone who was transported to slavery in South Carolina. Kizell completed the full-circle, escaping slavery in Charleston, serving with the British army during the Revolutionary War, taking part in the evacuation of black troops to Nova Scotia, and then returning to his native land in Sierra Leone with the "Nova Scotian" settlers in 1792. Opala's foreword to the book calls attention to this two-way connection between Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs exemplified by Kizell's long and eventful life.