Gullah Geechee Will Not Teach Other African Americans Arts and Culture
The Gullah and Geechee culture on the Body of water Islands of Georgia has retained ethnic traditions from Westward Africa since the mid-1700s. Although the islands forth the southeastern U.S. declension harbor the same collective of West Africans, the name Gullah has come up to exist the accepted proper noun of the islanders in Southward Carolina, while Geechee refers to the islanders of Georgia. Modern-day researchers designate the region stretching from Sandy Island, South Carolina, to Amelia Isle, Florida, every bit the Gullah Coast—the locale of the civilization that built some of the richest plantations in the South.
Many traditions of the Gullah and Geechee culture were passed from i generation to the next through linguistic communication, agronomics, and spirituality. The culture has been linked to specific West African ethnic groups who were enslaved on island plantations to grow rice, indigo, and cotton starting in 1750, when antislavery laws ended in the Georgia colony.
Enslavement
A Board of Trustees established Georgia in 1732 with the primary purposes of settling impoverished British citizens and creating a mercantile organisation that would supply England with needed agricultural products. The colony enacted a 1735 antislavery law, but the prohibition was lifted in 1750. West Africans, the statement went, were far more able to cope with the climatic conditions constitute in the South. And, as the growing wealth of South Carolina'southward rice economy demonstrated, enslaved Africans were far more profitable than any other form of labor available to the colonists.
Rice plantations fostered Georgia's successful economic contest with other slave-based rice economies along the Eastern Seaboard. Coastal plantations invested primarily in rice, and plantation owners sought out Africans from the Windward Coast of W Africa (Senegambia [afterwards Senegal and the Gambia], Sierra Leone, and Liberia), where rice, indigo, and cotton were indigenous to the region. Over the ensuing centuries, the isolation of the rice-growing ethnic groups, who re-created their native cultures and traditions on the coastal Ocean Islands, led to the formation of an identity recognized as Geechee/Gullah.
There is no single West African contribution to Geechee/Gullah culture, although ascendant cultural patterns often correspond to diverse agronomical investments. For instance, Africa'due south Windward Declension was later commonly referred to as the Rice Coast in recognition of the big numbers of Africans enslaved from that area who worked on rice plantations in America.
Linguistic communication
Mostanthropologists and historians speculate but have not confirmed that the term Gullah —deemed the cultural name of the islanders—derived from any 1 of several African ethnicities or specific locations in Angola and on the Windward Coast. Other researchers speculate that Gullah and Geechee are borrowed words from any number of indigenous groups along the Windward Declension—such as Gola, Kissi, Mende, Temne, Twi, and Vai—that contributed to the creolization of the coastal civilisation in Georgia and South Carolina.
Photograph by WIDTTF
Gullah is thought to be a shortened class of Angola , the name of the group get-go imported to the Carolinas during the early colonial menstruum. Geechee , historically considered a negative word identifying Ocean Islanders, became an adequate term in light of contemporary evidence linking information technology to West Africa. Although the origins of the two words are not definitive, some enslaved Africans forth the coast had names that were linked to the Kissi grouping, leading to speculation that the terms may as well derive from that particular culture.
Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner researched and documented spoken words on the declension during the 1930s, traced similarities to indigenous groups in West Africa, and so published the Gullah dialect lexicon, Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949). His inquiry confirms the evolution of a new language based on West African influences and English. Many words in the coastal civilisation could be matched to ethnic groups in West Africa, thereby linking the Geechee/Gullah people to their origins. Margaret Washington Creel in A Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Civilisation amidst the Gullahs (1988) identifies cultural and spiritual habits that relate to similar ethnic groups of Due west Africans who are linked by language. Her research on the littoral culture complements Turner'southward findings that Africans on the Sea Islands created a new identity despite the tragic weather of slavery.
Cultural Heritage
Documentation of the developing civilisation on the Georgia islands dates to the nineteenth century. Past the late twentieth century, researchers and scholars had confirmed a distinctive grouping and identified specific commonalities with locations in West Africa. The rice growers' cultural retentivity has been studied through linguistic communication, cultural habits, and spirituality. The inquiry of Mary A. Twining and Keith E. Baird in Sea Island Roots: African Presence in the Carolinas and Georgia (1991) investigates the common links of islanders to specific West African ethnicities.
The enslaved rice growers from West Africa brought with them noesis of how to make tools needed for rice harvesting, including fanner baskets for winnowing rice. The sweetgrass baskets found on the coastal islands were made in the same styles as baskets plant in the rice culture of West Africa. Sweetgrass baskets also were used for carrying laundry and storing food or firewood. Few present-day members of the Geechee/Gullah culture remember how to select palmetto, sweetgrass, and pine harbinger to create baskets, and the remaining weavers now make baskets as decorative art, primarily for tourists.
Religious meetings in "praise houses" were the spiritual outlet for enslaved Africans on the plantation. Fast-paced rhythmic hand clapping accompanied ring shout (spiritual) songs while participants moved counterclockwise in a circle, making sure never to cross their feet. Some aspects of the band shout are thought to exist related to the communal dances found in many West African traditions. The word shout is thought to be derived from saut, a West African word of Standard arabic origin that describes an Islamic religious move performed to burnout. Since the Civil War (1861-65), ring shouts have been held after Sunday church services and on weeknights in customs meeting houses. Few elders familiar with shout songs and the torso movements associated with the spiritual practice are alive today, but the tradition is kept alive in Georgia through the McIntosh County Shouters.
Paradigm from Richard N Horne
In the early 1930s Lorenzo Dow Turner recorded a vocal that islander Amelia Dawley had been taught by her mother, Octavia "Tawba" Shaw, who was born into slavery. Dawley taught the song to her own daughter, Mary Moran, who became the terminal person in the United States to know the song, which would link her to a pocket-size village in Sierra Leone threescore years later. Anthropologist Joseph Opala, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, and linguist Tazieff Koroma came across Turner's tape recording in 1989 and began tracing its origin, not only to Moran, who was living in Harris Neck, Georgia, only also to Bendu Jabati of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, who was the last person in her village with cognition of the song.
Photograph by Sharon Maybarduk
In 1997 the two women met in the African village to share and reenact what was understood as a Mende funeral song, sung but by the women of Jabati'due south family lineage, who conducted the funerals of the village. Testify suggests that a female member of Moran'due south family had been forced into captivity from the hamlet virtually 200 years earlier. The return of the song and the visit from the Moran family led to a countrywide celebration that can be viewed in the documentary The Language Y'all Cry In (1998). The discovery of the song and subsequent linguistic research confirmed still some other link between the cultures of West Africa and the Georgia coast.
Such corresponding practices every bit similar names, language structures, folktales, kinship patterns, and spiritual transference are but a few areas that advise a particular link between the southeastern coastal culture of the United States and Sierra Leone in West Africa.
Migration
Thousands of enslaved laborers from Georgia and South Carolina who remained loyal to the British at the end of the American Revolution (1775-83) found safe haven in Nova Scotia in Canada and thus gained their liberty. Many returned to Sierra Leone in 1791 and the following year established Freetown, the capital urban center. Members of that grouping are identified today as Krio.
Fugitives from slavery were besides harbored under Spanish protection in Florida prior to the Second Seminole State of war (1835-42). Native American refugees from around the South formed an brotherhood with self-emancipated Africans to create the Seminole Nation. The name Seminole is from the Castilian give-and-take cimarrón, significant runaway. The 1842 understanding betwixt the Us and Kingdom of spain, which ended the Seminole agree on Florida, caused a migration to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Some Seminoles followed Spanish protectors to Cuba and to Andros Island in the Commonwealth of the bahamas.
Aspects of West African heritage accept survived at each stage of the circle of migration, with rice, language, and spirituality persisting as cultural threads into the twentieth century. The Geechee/Gullah culture on the Body of water Islands of Georgia has retained a heritage that spans two continents. At the end of the Ceremonious War, lands on the littoral islands were sold to the newly freed Africans during the Port Royal Experiment, part of the U.S. government's Reconstruction plan for the recovery of the South after the war.
Photo by Jennifer Cruse Sanders
During the 1900s, country on some of the islands—Cumberland, Jekyll, Ossabaw, Sapelo, and St. Simons —became resort locations and reserves for natural resources. The modern-day conflict over resort development on the islands presents yet another survival test for the Geechee/Gullah culture, the nearly intact Due west African culture in the Us. Efforts to educate the public by surviving members of the Geechee/Gullah community, including Cornelia Bailey of Sapelo Isle and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, help to maintain and protect the culture's unique heritage in the face of such challenges.
Source: https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/arts-culture/geechee-and-gullah-culture/
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