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Significance of Gullah Heritage to Our Family History: The Gullah people are a distinctive group of people of African descent from coastal South Carolina and Georgia. They are beautifully distinctive because they have been able to preserve more of their African culture than any other group of African-Americans. The Gullah people are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans brought to South Carolina and Georgia. Those Africans were mainly from Sierra Leone, Angola, Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Dahomey, Togo, and several other nations. DNA tests revealed that a male ancestor in Grandpa Bill Reed's direct paternal lineage was brought to America, very likely Charleston, S.C., from Angola. He was of the Mbundu people. A female ancestor from Grandma Sarah Partee Reed's direct maternal lineage was brought here from the Gold Coast (Ghana). She was from the Akan people. It is very plausible that the ships that forcibly brought our ancestors to America also contained some of the ancestors of a number of Gullah people. In other words, we came over here involuntarily on the same ships!
Fact 1: The Gullah people speak a "creole language", with its vocabulary containing many words found in several African languages including Mende, Vai, and Krio from Sierra Leone/Liberia, Twi and Fante from Ghana, Kimbundu (the language of the Mbundu people) from Angola and several others. The Gullah people also use African names, tell African folktales, and they make African-style handicrafts such as baskets and beautiful wooden-carved walking sticks.
Fact 2: During slavery, the Gullah people had very little contact with whites. Unable to adapt to the tropical diseases of the sea islands, white planters moved their homes away from the islands and largely depended on a few plantation managers to run their rice plantations on the sea islands. This isolation allowed the Gullah people to practice their traditional African cultures and pass on its importance to the next generations. Being very proud of their African roots, the enslaved Gullah people brought together their distinctive languages, rituals, religious customs, music, crafts, and diets taken from their homeland cultures of the various African tribes they represented.
"Queen Quet", who was born on St. Helena Island, is a writer, lecturer, historian, and "artivist", who has traveled the world telling the story of the Gullah/Geechee Nation, including addressing the United Nations in Geneva, Switzerland. She focuses on the preservation of the Gullah people's historic homeland and the uniqueness of their language which evolved from the combination of the various African languages spoken among the enslaved people in the region. Also, see http://fpc.state.gov/fpc/17074.htm for more info on when she addressed the Washington Foreign Press Center, giving a briefing on the Gullah people and their concerns.
Fact 3: The Gullah people eat a cuisine based primarily on rice and seafood.
Fact 4: The Gullah people on St. Helena Island built a special resort for Dr. Martin Luther King in the 1960's. Because of its safety and isolation, Dr. King frequently stayed on the sea islands with other civil rights workers as they planned their Civil Rights strategies. Unfortunately, Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee before the Gullah people finished this house.
Fact 5: In 1997, researchers took a Gullah song provided by Mary Moran of Georgia back to Sierra Leone. Mary's grandmother had taught her the song which was passed on to her by her grandmother. After showing the song to many people from a number of villages in Sierra Leone, researchers found one specific village where a villager named Baindu knew and sung the exact same song! Baindu's grandmother taught her the song because birth and death rites are women's responsibilities in Mende culture. The Moran Family of Georgia later traveled to Sierra Leone to discover their African roots and visit the village their ancestor had come from.
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