| Joseph Opala | |
|---|---|
| Born | August 4, 1950 Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Occupation | American educator and academic |
| Nationality | United States |
| Genres | History of Sierra Leone, Gullah Culture, Public history |
| Subjects | African Diaspora |
Joseph A. Opala (born August 4, 1950) is an American historian who documented the "Gullah Connection," the historical link between the Gullah people in South Carolina and Georgia, and the West African nation of Sierra Leone. He has also done extensive research on the Bunce Island slave castle in Sierra Leone.
Opala's research resulted in three historic African-American homecomings to Sierra Leone: the Gullah Homecoming (1989), the Moran Family Homecoming (1997), and Priscilla’s Homecoming (2005). Opala helped produce documentary films that cover these events and the many historical, cultural and language connections between Sierra Leone and the Gullahs. These homecomings are chronicled in Family Across the Sea (1991), The Language You Cry In (1998), and Priscilla's Homecoming (in production).
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Opala was born in 1950 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and is of Polish descent. His father was long-time Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice Marian P. Opala, who fought in the Polish resistance during World War II and emigrated to the United States in 1947. Joseph Opala's interest in anthropology and his leadership skills were in early evidence as anthropology club he founded became the first high school club to become an official member of the Oklahoma Anthropological Society. Joseph Opala studied anthropology as an undergraduate and graduate student, before turning his attention to historical research.
His interest in Sierra Leone began after college when he served in the U.S. Peace Corps from 1974 to 1977. He worked as an agriculture advisor with rice farmers in a rural area of Sierra Leone, and later joined the staff of the Sierra Leone National Museum in Freetown, the country's capital city. After returning home from Africa, he served as an historical consultant to the Seminole Freedmen community in Oklahoma in 1979.[1] He returned to Sierra Leone in 1985, and stayed there until 1997 when he left during the country's civil war.
Opala lived in Sierra Leone for a total of 17 years, doing extensive research on the Atlantic slave trade. During that time, he carried out several high-profile public history projects to publicize the family links he discovered between Sierra Leone and the Gullahs. In 1988 he organized a visit by Sierra Leone's President Joseph Saidu Momoh to a Gullah community in South Carolina. Later, he organized three "Gullah homecomings" to Sierra Leone that were all officially recognized by the country's government, and all of which received a great deal of international publicity. He worked with filmmakers to document these events. The documentary "Family Across the Sea" (1990) -- based on the first Gullah homecoming—won several awards and was broadcast on PBS stations throughout the U.S.
Opala lectured at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College from 1985 to 1992, teaching in the Institute of African Studies and the Department of Linguistics and African Languages. He was also active in the pro-democracy movement in Sierra Leone. He was a co-founder of the Campaign for Good Governance, Sierra Leone's largest pro-democracy and human rights NGO.[2]
In 2004 Opala was a fellow at the Gilder Lehrner Center at Yale University. In 2005 he was a fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Germany. Opala taught in the Department of HIstory at James Madison University in Virginia from 1999 to 2010. He recently moved back to Sierra Leone to act as the "coordinator" of the Bunce Island preservation project.
Opala has documented many specific links between Sierra Leone and the Gullah people. The Gullahs are African Americans who live in the Low Country region of coastal South Carolina and Georgia. Living for many generations in isolated rural communities on the coastal plain and the Sea Islands, they have preserved more of their African cultural heritage than any other black community in the United States.
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 Americans 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. The family passed 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.[3] 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.[3] These discoveries led to "Priscilla's Homecoming" in 2005 when Polite travelled 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.[4] 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.
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 18th century. American planters in those colonies were eager to have the skills of enslaved Africans from Sierra Leone and other areas of the West African “Rice Coast.” Opala calls Bunce Island “the most important historic site in Africa for the United States.”[5]
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. After visiting the castle, Powell was emotionally moved. He later described the experience in his autobiography, My American Journey. He said: “I am an American...But today, I am something more..I am an African too...I feel my roots here in this continent."[6] Opala is prominent in the campaign to preserve the ruins of Bunce Island, a project that will ultimately cost millions.
Opala and computer artist Gary Chatelain are now working on a 3-D computer model of Bunce Island, to show how the castle appeared in the year 1805, two years before the slave trade ended there. In 2007, African American TV actor Isaiah Washington donated $25,000 to the project.[7] Washington has traced his own ancestry to Sierra Leone through DNA testing. Opala and Chatelain's computer model will be used to explain the castle to visitors when the site is finally preserved. The computer model is also featured in a traveling exhibit on Bunce Island that Opala recently created. The exhibit has gone to colleges and museums in the U.S. and Canada, and will go to Sierra Leone in 2011 when the country celebrates the 50th anniversary of its Independence.[8]
Opala is the director of the Bunce Island Coalition (US), a non-profit organization devoted to the preservation of the slave castle. In October, 2010, Opala's group and their partner organization, the Bunce Island Coalition (SL), announced the start of the Bunce Island preservation project, a five-year, $5 million effort to preserve the ruins at Bunce Island and to build a museum in Freeetown, Sierra Leone's capital city, devoted to the history of Bunce Island and the impact of the Atlantic slave trade in Sierra Leone.[9] The project is gaining international attention, and in October, 2011 Opala guided Britain's Princess Anne through the ruins, explaining his project's goals for preserving the island and telling its history.
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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.[10]
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."[10] 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.
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 of people 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. The nation's high school history textbook covers the Gullah Connection. Several civic groups in Sierra Leone are dedicated to nurturing the country's family ties to the American Gullahs.
The "Gullah homecomings" also generated extensive 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. 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 a strong interest in the Gullah Connection, forming an organization called the “Sierra Leone-Gullah Heritage Association” to nurture the relationship in the United States. Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs now come together frequently at cultural festivals in the Low Country.