Gullah Roots - The Documentary

[Music] this program was supported in part by south carolina humanities when the plane landed the tears just kept coming and i couldn't get him to stop you know you hear about a place you dream about a place you have all kind of imaginations but when you get there and you finally realize that you where your family started from that's such a it empowers you in such a way that i can't even begin to express it [Music] the gala also known as the gala gigi are descendants of people from sierra leone and other neighboring countries of the west african rice coast they were kidnapped enslaved and taken to the coastal low country of south carolina and north carolina florida and georgia over the centuries the gulagici have retained a deep connection to africa and a culture shaped by the dynamic currents of the atlantic world house passenger ship in december 2019 a group of gullah gucci cultural ambassadors boarded a plane for sierra leone they included performers scholars teachers artists students and business people they were taking part in the latest of a remarkable series of homecomings that have nurtured an evolving relationship between sierra leone and the gala gichi there have been three previous galaguichi homecomings to sierra leone all organized in part by historian joseph oppala whose research helped to establish the historic link between the two cultures in 1988 president joseph mohmer of sierra leone visited penn center on saint helena island south carolina and president momoa invited emory campbell and the director of penn center to organize a homecoming of gullah people to sierra leone that took place the next year in 1989 the next one took place in 1997 it's called the moran family homecoming so they moved around and that involved a family of gala or gichi people from coastal georgia who had preserved a song in the mende language of sierra leone the last homecoming that i worked on was called priscilla's homecoming [Music] we had found tomlin polite in charleston south carolina she was the great great great great great granddaughter of a little girl brought on a slave ship from sierra leone in the year 1756. that was also just a national event that just caught everybody's imagination the 2019 homecoming was different from the earlier ones this recent homecoming was led by amadou masala sierra leone i worked on homecomings that were patronized by the government of sierra leone the us embassy backed them these were state visits what amadou has done though is to organize a homecoming by sierra leoneans and gullies themselves when i go southwest eastern north i will always come back what's happening now is that sierra leoneans and gullies have already picked up on the family relationship and they're going with it and that's really something that's great to see this trip has been in the works for some years now i've been building relationships since 2006 among many of these gola leaders that you see uh with us and uh it's happening now to my surprise and and you know um astonishment because of the number of people that we have out here and also the quality of gala leaders that agreed to come on our tour that first night there we got to the hotel and they came in the dancers and and and we met the chief the spirit of the people there is so great so welcoming inviting the reception of us you know it was so awesome and they really made you feel like hey you are this you are sister an auntie and cousin and right there it started man it started coming up the ground and through my feet it resonated through all of me and it just grew and grew and grew throughout the trip our forefathers we want to communicate to you that we leave these people in your hands all the protection you prevent them from accidents they wish them all the good things we are taking this alcohol so that's why we are joining this one tonight so that you can get it [Applause] these guys are relatives okay if you don't know about them we'll be here for about 10 days before we leave sierra leone you will know a whole lot about these causes more and more people are gravitating towards rude stories and towards heritage tourism and they will want to see the real deal that is what i think syrian has an advantage because like no other country we can show our links with african americans are real bonds island about 20 miles from freetown was the largest british slave fortress on the rice coast from 1670 until the english slave trade was abolished in 1807 it was the last glimpse of home for tens of thousands of enslaved africans today only ruins remain at buns island a testament to the horrors of the slave trade [Music] i didn't know what i expected i didn't know if i would have this strong emotional experience so folks were down there singing and doing stuff and i was gone i was up in the castle by myself i was mostly aware of the trees and how the roots have been tearing this building down and how this is what it looks like so many years after this castle was decommissioned and what's it going to look like in another hundred years in another hundred years i was very aware of the earth reclaiming it and this kind of idea that there's this cycle of pain or suffering and oppression and all of that i didn't feel it as overwhelming pain i felt it as part of this evolution of gulagichi of african-american of the diaspora time takes and the ruins fade away but haunting memories [Music] forever [Music] i definitely heard a lot about month island from my dad this is his second time going to sierra leone so he created a whole cd and book and i i was already sort of anticipating some of the pain that he interpreted in those creative projects i made a point to sort of move around asylum separately at one point i just was sitting by myself and what we were told was the pen where the enslaved women and children were being in that space made me think this might be a root of people feeling like they don't matter when we went to bunts island you could still feel the energy and so did my grandson who was with me at that point anybody who has that strong of an energy and a spirit that still stays in a location for over 200 years tells you something about the people themselves i'm a photographer and i'm out here taking as many pictures as i can just to document the history because a lot of people back home don't know about this place because they don't teach this i didn't know about it until until this trip where my grandma she told me on the way here about bunts island and the importance of it i'm 23 years old and i've never heard of it so it's people back home that i feel need to know about this place so that's why i'm here documenting as much as i can blunts island going there in particular that's where i made the connection and that's where the full circle happened for me it was there that i understood that's where we came from as we're going from place to place north south east and west of sierra leone going into more rural areas farming areas you get glimpses of rice fields rice is a staple food in sierra leone most sierra leoneans eat it at least twice a day for them as well as for the gala gichi rice is both a favorite dish and a part of their history colonists saw that these things matched and that they could grow rice here but they didn't know how to and we were the experts at it the gulligici people before we were gulagichi africans from the rice coast had developed a system for cultivating rice using dikes that controlled the flow of water in and out of the fields it worked perfectly for the southern low country in the 18th and 19th centuries rice created more wealth in south carolina and georgia than any other crop by 1860 the south carolina rice plantations were producing more than 14 million pounds of rice a year then we come upon this one area where the rice field is almost where we can just touch it and we on the van just like we got to stop can we go to the rice field everyone is just like we're going to stop they were harvesting they had their machetes and beautiful men beautiful men and i was like wow these are my people they gave us some bouquets of rice oh gala gucci people south carolina georgia we all love rice and there's nothing more beautiful than coming up this original sierra leone rice all i could think about was this is why we were brought over carolina gold rice is what it was known for at that time and it made people immensely wealthy off of our expertise knowledge and um slave labor when you talk about south carolina being one of the wealthiest colonies one of the wealthiest british colonies in the world well why was that it was because they rely tremendously on the technical and managerial skills of a group of enslaved africans who knew how to grow what became the most popular commercial export which is rice [Music] kabbalah is in the mountainous north of sierra leone as in the rest of the country residents speak their regional tongue as well as a creole language called creo it is similar in many ways to gullah which is spoken by the gulagichi creo and gulla are both creole languages with roots in english and african tongues they originated with the enslavement and trade of west africans allowing people to communicate across many different cultures gullah is the only distinctly english and african creole language in the united states over time speaking gullah became something to be ashamed of it was the effort to get get out of the galagic culture you know assimilate go someplace people used to tell us go someplace and find some culture in more recent years speaking gullah has become a source of pride as a child i was told not to speak gullah that was one of the things you have to speak perfect english and that's why sometimes they joke with me now that i'm i'm in the group that i speak proper and and and they laugh at me when we were in kabbalah there was a lady that i was dancing with and some other ladies came around me and they started talking to me in their native tongue i had no idea what they were saying to me so i looked over at dr eric crawford from store and i said come here eric eric come here so he came over and one of the ladies ladies looked at him and she said glady for siona take it take it for come seaweed and i was like but you didn't say it i understood exactly what she said so when we listen to gullah and then we go over to creole this is that common denominator so that no matter where we are we're still connected we're still family and we can still communicate the university students who assisted us i would listen to them and i would i wanted to know what it was that they were speaking many of them creole but they would speed through it i had been speaking with one of the tour coordinators about this and he said ask them to speak kringlish not creole kringlish and when i did that they slowed it down and i could more readily understand what they were saying and go love he said this yes and creole dancing this for this and because we said that yes in creole they said that for that in columbia honor anna and creole they say una for you ain't gonna love you say woman in creole there's a woman for woman yeah we taught the same way small small small small yeah we talked the same way kabbalah is at the base of a steep hill leading to the ruins of a centuries-old fortified town old yagala there's a mesa where africans moved their village up to to defend themselves against slave invaders who were also other africans so whilst up there they could see for miles away as we went up there and and saw for ourselves that yeah this place was really a special place there was a hard climb up the hill but i was determined to make it it's a grind brother it's a grind but we're gonna get it yeah we're gonna get it what gets me more than anything is the tenacity and the ingenuity of the people to come up here to get out of the way of the enemy and now today is very surreal because it to me it tells me that they had a desire to be free there's nothing like freedom and what i see here today is freedom and display it's important for us to tell the resistance story because you don't hear much about it and i think it brings some african pride to people of black people to learn that even in africa we resisted the slave trade is a small village the only place in sierra leone where women still sew coiled baskets its residents welcome visitors with music and dancing in the street that was very different than the welcoming ceremonies to other villages everyone was part of this processional which i learned that was the booboo dance you dance and you move forward then you stop and you dance and then dance some more and move forward it goes on you advance to the site where there is to be a ceremony on this day the special event involved nakia wiggfall a gullah basket maker from mount pleasant south carolina the seventh generation of her family to sew coiled baskets from native sweetgrass we all came into the village and there were plein airs rents which they made from the materials in the neighborhood like bamboo and they were dancing and of course putting me out front making me feel like a queen very special when i went to sierra leone i had a mission i wanted to sit and make baskets with the basket maker i brought in some starters because of time i wanted the basket makers there to actually work on my starters sitting there with those basket makers brought back memories to when me and my cousins and my sisters we always just sit around making baskets having telling jokes having fun talking having a good time i felt that when i was there because you had generations you have a grandmother you have the mother children it was special it was special to me as you can see this was the bottom and they uh started working on it now this grass is actually the grass from sierra leone it looks identical to the sweet grass that i have here [Music] this particular basket basically almost the same as that a basket maker in sierra leone started off with the bottom of it and i started sewing on it with my own materials from here and when i get through with this basket it will be a rice fanner as we would call it sweetgrass basket making is closely tied to the history of the south carolina rice kingdom the ancestors of gulagichi people used coiled baskets for hauling and processing rice and brought that tradition with them to america in particular the flat wide fanner basket used for separating the kernel from the chaff was vital to the rice economy [Music] going back to west africa and sitting with the basket makers in the village and connecting it to home in the whole galagy tradition to me it's like this is we're the same people they're just generations of basket makers on the other side whereas we are generations of basket makers on this side and we're we'll be sewn together forever [Music] in some way i always knew that there was something missing and now that i went to sierra leone as well as senegal i feel that i found what was missing [Music] taking a trip or a pilgrimage over to sierra leone as a gala gichi person really helps you to see and feel the connection that has been told that we have [Music] seeing how in a village setting that it really does take that village to raise the child and that's always been the case here in our communities in our gullah communities here that it takes the entire village elaine locke major philosopher of the harlem renaissance said nothing is more galvanizing than the sense of a cultural past so for the gulagichi people to understand that they have a very specific cultural past and that this very specific cultural past comes from a very specific place in west africa well that's that's strong the village of cineun angola has special meaning for the gala gichi this is where scholars located a song that linked a family from georgia directly to sierra leone the data that informed their discovery was collected by linguist lorenzo dao turner in 1931 turner visited the georgia sea islands to record people speaking and singing in gala he recognized one song sung by a gala gichi woman named amelia dawley as being in mende an african language spoken primarily in sierra leone decades later joseph oppala and two colleagues set out to find the song in sierra leone i formed a team with the sierra leonean linguist josef karoma and with cynthia schmidt who's an american ethnomusicologist we actually decided over our christmas break to just go from village to village in that area playing the song we got to this one village and a young woman began to sing along in her language from the very first moments of that recording we then went to look for it in the united states turner had recorded it from a woman amelia dolly we wondered if she had children or grandchildren who might still remember the song and it turned out that her daughter mary moran could still sing that song all these years later in 1997 mary moran and her family went to sierra leone where mary met bendu javatee the woman who knew the mende song centuries ago an african woman carried a song with her across the ocean now her song has helped her descendants to trace their roots the moran family homecoming was documented in the film the language you cry in which is broadcast in sierra leone every year on independence day [Music] more than 20 years after mary moran visited ungola members of her family returned for an emotional reunion the third time they have come back to the village where they've helped to establish a school and a health center also returning was cynthia schmidt and bendu jabati was an honored guest wilson moran mary's son was carried to the stage in a hammock i don't know about you personally thank her from the bottom of my heart for remembering the tinge of me and the awkwardness now i'm going to introduce winston on behalf of my family from the coast of georgia in the united states we bring greetings of love peace support and we want to thank you so much for your hospitality we look forward to working with you for many more years and thank you for making us feel so welcome it feels like home it really does it's my cousin it's my auntie [Laughter] this is an experience that i will never forget i will never forget it and i will never forget the people of this village especially this village this is where i'm from yeah i am home now and in the interest of time i want to pastor michael to you that day in the village of tayamah another visitor was honored anita singleton prather aunt pearly sue director of the gulliken folk was made a chief the ceremony began with a libation for me i'm i'm just happy beating up pearly suit but you know if if if it furthers the cause if it brings some prosperity to sierra leone prosperity to south carolina to beaufort to what we're doing you know i'm very humbled by it and very honored by it that people saw something in me deserve such a high honor so i'm just grateful just grateful grateful grateful grateful after they made her chief everybody marched out and they started to celebrate and they were moving around in that circle and that's the same way they moved around when i was a little boy going to my grandparents my great-grandparents church down in lower lexington county after church everybody would stand and they would go around in a circle and it just brought tears to my eyes the connection was just so strong for many years a circular dance called a ring shout was a part of gulagichi christian worship services performed from the days of enslavement into the mid 20th century the ring shout has its roots in west african rituals in which participants move in a counterclockwise circle shuffling their feet clapping and singing in a call and response style enslaved people often worship this way in small structures called praise houses where they could practice their unique form of afro-christianity away from the eyes and ears of their widened slavers [Music] they were out there doing the ring shout and they were going in different areas and when we are telling our stories we do the ring shout so i was actually able to see that the golagic people are unique and among all african americans they have maintained the broadest and deepest set of african retentions within their culture and so being able to go back to the wellspring for those cultural expressions is important for the people that carry them and keep them alive in this country freetown was founded by formerly enslaved people many of whom were gullahs from south carolina and georgia during the american revolution they escaped slavery joined the british army and became known as black loyalists their first attempt to establish an african colony in 1787 failed another group of black loyalists settled in nova scotia but there they faced harsh weather broken promises and racism in 1792 more than a thousand black loyalists left nova scotia for sierra leone seeking a better life in africa they named their city freetown and they gathered and thanked god under a tall k-pop or cotton tree when the nova scotian settlers landed we believe this is the tree that they came to we're not 100 sure but seeing how tall it is it probably stood out from a lot of the others so this tree has become symbolic for free time for sierra leone for the freedom of of you know experienced africans and for us who came back it's it's very central to free time spirit so if you are somewhere else and you wanted somebody to meet you in frieza you can say meet me by the cotton tee one of freetown's most famous monuments is the original four bay college building the first western style university in sub-saharan africa the college was founded in 1827 and this building was actually built in 1846. the first principle of ferrari college was a gala man from charleston south carolina edward jones we have this kind of evidence to show that indeed from a small part of africa over a long period of time many africans were taken to a small part of america we're finding out that we still have unanswered questions but there's something here that roots us and the writes we see it we recognize it basket sewing we see it we recognize it certain words expressions una i was like wow they're saying that all day long you know these are our people for over 100 years this is where africans came to study to above secondary level i think it's akin to the penn center in in default the penn center formerly the penn school was founded on saint helena island south carolina in 1862 by northern abolitionist missionaries the school was created to educate freed people and was one of the first schools for blacks in the united states today it is a community center and a museum of gullah culture the connections are many and i think now coming to more modern times we've had the recent twinning of freetown and charleston which i think cements the bond between us [Music] the museum was officially opened by the first chief minister of surely who later on became the first prime minister and that was submitted to my guy in 1961 the first gallery is here the woman who worked in museum was talking about the old magic and how the warriors during the recent civil war reached back to the old magic to to to fight to become warriors and how they believed in the magic that said they could become invisible and they could fly and they could be bulletproof and they could walk underwater and chills ran up my neck because i've been telling stories about people who could fly for decades now and that began to have even a deeper meaning to me and i begin to wonder about how we have carried these stories on and on and on in bits and pieces without even knowing where they started even telling some of the old stories i find myself telling them differently just since i've been back my belief in the magic is real more so than it had been [Music] here today i'm hosting as the mayor of freetown but also as a creole so i'm a descendant of freed slaves who made their way from nova scotia in 1792 and landed here in freetown so i always think of it in terms of this relationship as keeping the circle complete just recently in 2019 we welcomed freetown's mayor to penn center during that time they established a sister city between freetown sierra leone and charleston south carolina they're linking many aspects the museum the international african-american museum and just the city as a whole as part of that trip i had the opportunity to speak at the penn center on saint helena so we are so connected [Music] i've been the mayor for a year and eight months now having never been in public service or political life before when you are looking at the challenges that a city faces you can't do it in a silo you actually find that everything connects with everything else okay so we have a sector target which is job creation with a tourism focus and that's why for us today and this visit on it as a whole is so significant carolina georgia caribbean we are now one we have a really rich history a history which ties in with the history of the gulagici people there was a movement an involuntary movements which took our people from these shores to the west the caribbean to the americas to to the uk and then with time you know a certain number of settlers came back but many many more stayed but we're all connected so it's so exciting to have the galagici here maybe the best thing about what's going on now is the dots are finally connecting sierra leoneans have been hearing about the gulagichi for decades at a hotel near the beach in freetown they finally got to see their gullah geechee visitors perform hello family and sisters here we stand tried to bend this tried to break us and the cotton fields they tried to break us but we still again the rice fields with the alligators and the water moccasins and we're still here a little bit we're still now there's a few ways to spot a hat but the number one way is if you know somebody in your neighborhood who always got some kind of money but you ain't never seen go to work hey a hat now hats are known for shedding their skin at night tormenting people and they sleep right bunking a lot of myths that we hold in america about what it means to be african what it means to go back to africa it's put a whole new perspective on my life and it's put a whole new grind under me i feel like now before i go on i got to tell you it gave a new clarity and purpose for me as a writer or actor a storyteller number one the type of stories i want to tell the way i want to tell them the impact that i want to have i don't even know if i can put in the words we were sitting on buns island and it was almost like i could hear the ancestors saying what you're doing is what we need to happen that is the story of the bullhead thank you and sings to the universe being in west africa it just pointed to the non-linearity of time the the the fiction of this straight line and um that yes we come from these human beings these magical amazing incredible human beings who [Music] who lived and loved and worked and died and and lived and lived and lived until i'm here i want to tell you the story of being a he'd be the one that nine years old had been kicked out of the yacht they said that been even following your mom around put the foot everywhere mama been gold bean up and on them dina was captured and taken to fonz island and shipped off to the americas and um because of that event we are here my grandmother has told me that story um several times but it was amazing seeing her tell that story to everyone else on this trip so he say pina go out in the yard and be by yourself so go out in the yard and even play around and play around and then being a look up and they see a red cloth as soon as peter can reach up he has somebody grab him and put something on top he people choose stories that they want to tell and we have a lot of wonderful stories that are being told about africa and and those who came out but i think that story the reason i'm so emotional with it is that that arm of the ancestor is glad to be on the table to be heard and they rise and they rise eight times the moon come up and go down and then they get to this place and that man that had on that long court and their long tail been hanging down from their mouth tell them say get down get your home now take it back to africa and tell it on african soil was beyond my wildest expectations so um i left her there and probably won't tell that story much anymore because it's so hard to tell it's just a difficult story [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] we're finding that connection every little bit and piece of our history that we did happen to hold on to of our culture you know that we did happen to keep and whether we knew it or not now we're finding out now this light is being shed on it you know this is a jewel you know it's sacred [Music] several still don't know about this connection growing up i knew nothing i had to be in america in my 30s to learn that we have this relationship with people from uh south carolina and or georgia i don't want that to be lost from syria unions we need to know this story also syrian audience we want to welcome you from the ministry of tourism and cultural affairs this is a very important and historic events the history of the transatlantic slave trade cannot be told from an historically balanced without the mentioning australian which is also bones island we are our ancestors we are taken but now our consciousness has been revived and now we are coming back in this new age so we say this year for the gola people to come here other african-americans is a renaissance for the african rising and african diaspora ladies and gentlemen i present to you sierra leone's minister of tourism and culture [Music] [Music] [Music] let me take this opportunity of welcoming you on behalf of the president of the republic of sierra leone the ministers the government and people of sierra leone i know you have come to link up with your ancestral roots because today in the world we are talking about year of return we are talking about how do we celebrate how do we link up how do we ensure that african americans come back to their roots link with their heritage we're hoping that this tour will be a catalyst for more and more african-americans to visit africa i think it's an important thing for africans in america and in the diaspora to reconnect back to the continent and uh we believed the world would be a better place let me wish you well say hi to all the relatives that did not come tell them the next trip they have to be here and that time it is the best for all of us thank you very much god bless you wishing you safe without this young and wonderful students and some of them graduates this would have been impossible every village that we've been to all the welcoming you've been getting from all those villages they help us do that pre-arrangement sometimes riding a motorbike and guess what they are all volunteers yes that's how amazing they are right so we thank them and we want to continue [Applause] being with the young people in sierra leone has been admirable and inspiring just their hunger for a better reality you know you listen to the things that they've been through it's it's crazy to me that the civil war literally ended nine years ago here so they're used to seeing like their friends and their partners just murdered in the most gruesome way you know we talk about like gang violence back home but they talk about real war here the young people who helped to host us over there their willingness to work and to volunteer to do whatever they could to make us feel at home and make us feel safe and their enthusiasm to want to know about the gullah connection and how we how we're connected to them they're going to be the first graduating class with a major in tourism and hospitality from their colleges we're optimistic because we know that they are coming to sierra leone to create a better future for us that's way to talk with the tourism students that we are practicing in the tourism sector that they will do something for us they will create jobs for us they will come and invest in our country so i am optimistic hopefully we'll be able to get them over here between um uh the university of south carolina the gullah festival giving them a formal invitation to come over and hopefully their minister of of tourism and the mayor free town and um you know start getting the ball rolling we are starving we are starving i go like for the whole of the day i always get ten thousand sometimes fifteen thousand i have to pay transport come on like you can't able to save nothing the future is bleak some people actually are not forcing it to get to where we are now because we are in university so many people don't have the opportunity and for us that have been fortunate to reach at this level after having got our um our certificate it's also become difficult for us to get a job you can look for a job you can create one find look for something you innovate and you create something so for me after graduation i plan to establish my own business we want you guys to come back home and help rebuild this country because without you we can't able to achieve this goal like that why we are making new ambassadors now to go and break the message home the ability to come back and reconnect with people of our age this is something that's been lived on for generations and it's crazy to see the difference of privilege the things that we take for granted are things that they fight for every day the students that we encountered i think that we've got to work very hard at trying to get them here because they can truly tell the story about how it is being an african being at in sierra leone and relating it to the gullies it's so clear now what my mission is and what i have to do i have to do it for my grandchildren for my great-grandchildren i have to do it for all these young people that i see on the streets that have given up and that don't seem to have any hope because they don't know where they come from or where they're going and i can tell them i know where we come from now and you come you come from greatness it's not that you're going to be great you already are it's already in you back home in the south carolina low country many young gullah gucci people face the same difficulties as their peers in sierra leone when i see young people doing things whether they're selling drugs or whatever and i'm saying you got the salesman's set of skills let me give you a product that will bring you pride and economic development and help to maintain and retain our culture [Music] heritage tourism is one of the fastest growing areas and when we think about heritage tourism for the state of south carolina gala gichi is right up that front so we have to re-educate our people to know that your culture is important don't get angry because we know we don't have any hotels we don't have a whole lot of restaurants you know we don't own the walmarts we don't own the filling stations because all of those things when tourists come into this area bring tourist dollars so now we have to sit back okay so what is it that i can do so if we start teaching these kids taking them on tours in their own backyard teaching them these historic sites so that they can become tour guides and they can make two hundred dollars an hour because you got tour buses that bring in 40 people the average tour is 40 so that's sixteen hundred dollars so if we start teaching these young people how to become tour guides and i talked to the tour operator okay instead of paying 1600 hire one of my young people awareness of the potential for gala gichi heritage tourism was sparked by the first homecoming to sierra leone in 1989 documented in the film family across the sea my brother and my sister them after sierra leone and president joseph momo's visit to penn center joe oppala worked with emory campbell to organize a homecoming the president was so impressed by the similarities between the gullah language and the creole language similarities in the rice diet all of this impressed him greatly and president momo invited emory campbell and the director of penn center to organize a homecoming of gullah people to sierra leone plantation zoo apollo came in and did a lecture to the former penn school graduates and boy after that lecture a little penn school graduates who had never embraced gala they got up and they were so proud of after they heard that history juror paolo and others decided that you know you should take a trip to west africa and and those similarities you could compare to what you know and what you have experienced and so we did past wrongs and when we got to sierra leone we had such a big welcome uh oh gosh we were treated like royalty and when we came back everybody was excited about our trip and the entrances grew like wildfire so we decided huh we should go to congress and ask congressman clyburn if we could put a center at penn center on gala culture mr clyburn said we're going to bother with a center at penn center we're going to do a study to see where gullah really exists and that research study said yeah these people are color people it does have this footprint all along this coast and we should do a galagici korea to preserve it in many ways that trip that was taken 30 years ago was a catalyst to all the things that we celebrate today you know whether there's a historic mark on sullivan's island talking about the arrival of africans or whether there's a sweet grass basket marker in mount pleasant or the work that still continues at the penn center oh the fact that we're living and standing today in the gala gichi cultural heritage corridor i think 30 years ago that trip really what was it was a birth of it in 2006 congress established the gullah gucci cultural heritage corridor as a platform for sharing the history and culture of the gulagici extending from just north of wilmington north carolina to near saint augustine florida and 30 miles inland it is the only national heritage area that has a group of people as its subject confirming the national significance of the gullah gucci veronica's a former commissioner henry campbell former commissioner there are a lot of people of that generation who were instrumental in creating the golagic coastal heritage corridor because they wanted to ensure that future generations would have the ability to draw on that knowledge to have all of this history preserved and documented because they knew how powerful it is and how important it's going to be to generations to come to be able to reclaim that touch that and incorporate that into their own idea of who they are in this country in october 2019 ground was broken in charleston for the international african-american museum among the honored guests was freetown's mayor ivan aki sawyer the museum is being built on the charleston waterfront this is the spot where almost half of all the enslaved africans who came to the united states over the course of the entire transatlantic slave trade this is where they landed there is this amazing connection between charleston and sierra leone between charleston and between freetown we had an opportunity to create a sister cities relationship between charleston and and freetown and so that's really activating these bonds it's so important to go there to reconnect with our ancestry it gives one a sense that uh you know their their place in this world is far beyond what we've been told i think anybody that goes to africa becomes transformed it's a spiritual place definitely an example of where civilization started [Music] keep you

Channel: Fambul Tik - Leading African Heritage Tours

Views: 85,023

Rating: 4.8932195 out of 5

Keywords: Fambul Tik, Sierra Leone, Heritage Tours, Slavery, Slavery Resistance, Slavery Abolition, Slavery Resistance and Abolition Tour, Freetown, Senehun, Senehun Gola, Rogbonko Mataka, Rogbonko, Makeni, Old Yagala, Yagala Village, Kabala

Id: Dwi3iimgSWc

Length: 56min 46sec (3406 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 10 2020