Joseph Opala
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Joseph Opala | |
|---|---|
| Occupation | Professor |
| Nationality |  United States |
| Genres | Sierra Leone history, Gullah culture, Public history |
| Subjects | African Diaspora |
Joseph Opala (born August 4, 1950) is the scholar who identified the "Gullah Connection," the historical link between the Gullah people in South Carolina and Georgia and the West African nation of Sierra Leone. An American, Opala lived in Sierra Leone for 17 years, working with community leaders to highlight that country's links to African Americans. In 1988 he organized a visit by Sierra Leone's President Joseph Saidu Momoh to a Gullah community in South Carolina. He later organized three African American homecomings to Sierra Leone -- the “Gullah Homecoming” (1989), the “Moran Family Homecoming” (1997), and “Priscilla’s Homecoming” (2005). These events are chronicled in the documentary films "Family Across the Sea," "The Language You Cry In," and "Priscilla's Homecoming" (in production).
Contents |
[edit] Sierra Leone connections
Over the past 30 years Opala has uncovered some remarkably specific connections between the Gullahs and Sierra Leone. The Gullah people are African Americans who live in the Low Country region of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. The Gullahs have preserved more of their African cultural heritage than any other black community in the U.S. in isolated rural communities on the coastal plain and Sea Islands of those states.
In 1990, Opala and two other scholars 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 on the African side, Opala and his colleagues also found a Mende woman living in a remote rural area of Sierra Leone who still knows the same song today. Their discoveries led to the "Moran Family Homecoming" in 1997.
Later, Opala brought to Sierra Leone a Gullah woman from South Carolina whose family can claim an unbroken 250-year document trail linking them to a 10-year-old girl taken from Sierra Leone to Charleston in 1756. This may be the only black family in the United States with a continuously documented history starting with records of an enslaved ancestor in Africa. The family's document trail includes slave ship records, slave auction accounts, and plantation records. This discovery led to "Priscilla's Homecoming" in 2005.
[edit] Bunce Island research
Opala began his research in the 1970s with an investigation of Bunce Island, the British slave castle in Sierra Leone. He was the first scholar to recognize that Bunce Island has stronger links to North America than any other West African slave trading base. He showed that Bunce Island sent slave ships to Charleston, South Carolina and Savannah, Georgia on a regular basis in the mid- and late 1700s when American rice planters in those colonies were eager to have the skills of enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone and other parts of the West African “Rice Coast.” Opala calls Bunce Island “the most important historic site in Africa for the United States.”[1]
Opala has devoted decades to promoting popular awareness of Bunce Island's importance for African Americans. He took Colin Powell to Bunce Island in 1992, and after visiting the castle, Powell recorded the experience in emotional terms in his autobiography, My American Journey. He said: “Iam an American...But today, I am something more..I am an African too...I feel my roots here in this continent."[2]
Opala and computer artist Gary Chatelain are now working on a 3-D computer model of Bunce Island, showing in great detail how the castle appeared in the year 1805, two years before the slave trade ended there. African American TV actor Isaiah Washington recently donated $25,000 to the project. Opala is prominent in the campaign to preserve the ruins of Bunce Island, a project that will ultimately cost millions. His computer model will be used to explain the castle to visitors when the site is finally preserved.
[edit] Two-Way connection
Opala has shown that the Gullah Connection is a two-way link. Not only were slaves taken from Sierra Leone to South Carolina and Georgia in the colonial period, but some free Gullah people also returned to Sierra Leone after American Independence. Many of the "Nova Scotian" settlers who helped establish Sierra Leone's capital city of Freetown in 1792 were originally Gullahs from South Carolina and Georgia. Opala says the Nova Scotians were "really African Americans."[3] Some Gullah people also migrated to Sierra Leone in the early 1800s, including Edward Jones, a South Carolina man who became the first principal of Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College.
This two-way connection, Opala says, means that all Sierra Leoneans -- both the indigenous people from the country's interior and the Krios, the descendants of freed slaves who live in Freetown -- have family ties to the Gullahs in South Carolina and Georgia.
[edit] Popular interest
The homecomings Opala organized focused national attention on the Gullah Connection in Sierra Leone, and the people of that country responded with enthusiasm. When the first Gullah group made a pilgrimage to Bunce Island in 1989, hundreds came in boats and canoes to witness the historic occasion. Today, the “Gullah Connection” is an “evergreen” story in the Sierra Leone media -- a story of continuing popular interest. Most Sierra Leoneans are now aware of their historical links to the Gullahs, and the country's high school history textbook covers the Gullah Connection. There are now several civic groups in Sierra Leone dedicated to nurturing the country's family ties to the Gullahs.
The "Gullah homecomings" also generated a great deal of publicity in South Carolina and Georgia. The documentary films based on those events have been broadcast repeatedly on local TV and shown in schools and colleges. Many Gullahs have now visited Sierra Leone, and during Sierra Leone’s civil war Gullah civic leaders lobbied the U.S. Congress, asking for help for their “ancestral homeland.” Sierra Leonean immigrants in the U.S. have also taken an interest in the Gullah Connection, forming an organization called the “Sierra Leone-Gullah Heritage Association” to nurture the relationship in America. Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs now come together frequently at cultural festivals in the Low Country.
Professor Opala’s historical research and public history work have made a strong impact in both Sierra Leone and the United States. Opala was a lecturer at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College from 1985 to 1992. He now teaches history at James Madison University in Virginia.
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Joseph Opala "Bunce Island: A British Slave Castle in Sierra Leone".
- ^ Colin Powell My American Journey 533–534.
- ^ James Brooke "Birchtown Journal; For Nova Scotia Blacks, Veil Is Ripped From Past" New York Times, Oct. 8, 1999.
[edit] External links
 |
The external links in this article may not follow Wikipedia's content policies or guidelines. Please improve this article by removing excessive or inappropriate external links. |
