Apartheid. USA 1988

October 25, 1987:

The discovery that American Gullah is a lost cousin of Sierra Leone's Krio language is part of a growing awareness of the Sierra Leonean roots of Gullah culture. Preserved in isolation of the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, Gullah is widely seen as the purest form of African culture to survive transplantation to the United States.

Renewing transatlantic links broken 150 years ago, two Sierra Leonean scholars are studying the Gullah - the word is used for the people as well as for the language - in South Carolina and Georgia. A delegation of Gullahs from the American Sea Islands is to visit Freetown in Sierra Leone. Rice has been responsible for the close link between the two cultures, American anthropologist Joseph L Opala told the Times. In the 1700's rice was one of the American colonies' most valuable exports. But English settlers had no experience cultivating rice and were not resistant to dis-

[p. 131]

eases - malaria and yellow fever - prevalent in the Carolina swamps. Hence, slaves, who had cultivated rice in Africa were at a premium. They cultivated rice largely with West African methods and little white supervision. After the Civil War, the rice plantations on the Sea Islands were largely abandoned. The decidedly African culture of the local blacks now known as Gullahs survived, cut off from the American mainstream. In the 1920's the first bridges were built and ethnologists followed. In the 1940's, Lorenzo Turner, a black American linguist, found one Gullah woman who sang a song in Mende. In 1979 researchers found 100 000 people in the area speaking Gullah and a core group of 10 000 who spoke Gullah and no English. Other Gullah-speaking communities of Afro-Indian Seminoles are in Oklahoma, Texas, northern Mexico and the Bahamas. Next year a book of eassays on the Sierra Leone link is to be edited by the Gullah Research Centre.^163.

163. The New York Times, from a report by James Brooke