Many Individuals are unaware that east of I-95 and alongside the South Carolina coast lies a tradition extra strongly rooted in African methods than every other in America. Within the Carolinas the tradition is called “Gullah” and in Florida and Georgia it is called “Geechee”.
The name “Geechee” might come from Kissi (pronounced “Geezee”), a tribe dwelling within the border space between Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia. The name “Gullah” might derive from Angola, a rustic in southwestern Africa the place most of the Gullahs’ ancestors originated. Some students have additionally prompt it comes from Gola, an ethnic group dwelling on the border space between Sierra Leone and Liberia in Western Africa.
A lot of the Gullahs’ ancestors have been dropped at South Carolina by way of the port of Charleston, which was some of the vital ports in North America for the Atlantic slave trade, and virtually half of the enslaved Africans got here by way of the port of Charleston.
The Gullahs and Geechees have been former African slaves and settled on remoted Sea Islands and marsh areas between Wilmington, North Carolina and Jacksonville, Florida within the nineteenth Century. These islanders introduced with them their ancestors’ potential to domesticate rice together with many different conventional expertise comparable to farming, fishing, basket making, web making, language, pottery, woodcarvings and extra.
They lived in small farming and fishing communities and the local weather and geographic isolation of the Sea Islands have been integral to the development of their distinctive tradition. For generations their similar peaceable lifestyle continued.
It was a time when most sea islanders have been black and understood the significance of tucking Spanish moss right into a shoe, portray window trim blue, and operating like mad from a coach whip snake.
Fishermen flung their nets into creeks and ocean to catch crabs, shrimp, and fish, and gathered oysters and clams. Farmers hoed the sandy soil to develop greens and cotton. They wove baskets with out worrying that the candy grass would possibly vanish from the swamps sometime. They delivered their very own infants, made drugs of herbs, and knitted their very own fishing nets. They danced and clapped once they worshiped, instructed tales, and adorned graves with life’s requirements and pleasures so the departed may cross simply and amiably between materials and religious worlds.
Winter was the time for stitching clothes and quilts and mending nets. Evenings and weekends have been perfect for the telling of folktales, for basket making, for track and dance, and for the expression of non secular religion and hope, which united the individuals and mirrored their African heritage. They sang spirituals and spoke their native tongue with out disgrace 문상 현금화.
In quiet self-sufficiency, the Gullahs and Geechees lived off the water and the land and their distinctive tradition thrived in isolation for hundreds of years on the distant Sea Islands till the surface world found the islands and began paying tens of millions to personal them.
For the reason that Nineteen Fifties, their farms, their fishing holes and the sea grass fields that fueled their artistry have fallen sufferer to bulldozers and their land is forfeited as a result of landowners, lots of whom are home employees on the sea island resorts, can’t afford to pay the escalating property taxes.
Different traces of the tradition, comparable to cooking, medicines, and storytelling are more and more more durable to seek out, and their distinctive language, a melodic mix of seventeenth and 18th century English and African dialects, is never spoken at present.
If the tradition dies, Gullah and Geechee kids will not know concerning the old life-style and a major a part of the tradition of the low nation can be misplaced together with African Individuals’ purest hyperlink to their previous.
To assist forestall their extinction, the Gullah/Geechee Cultural Preservation Act was signed into regulation in October 2006. The Act establishes a tradition heritage hall and creates a fee to assist federal, state, and native authorities handle it. The “Heritage Hall” extends from Jacksonville, Florida to Wilmington, North Carolina and the U.S. Nationwide Park Service will administer the venture with sturdy enter from the Gullah neighborhood.
The invoice authorizes $1 million per 12 months for ten years to hold out the work of the fee and requires a number of interpretive facilities inside the heritage hall. This Act will assist to save lots of the Gullah and Geechee tradition from extinction and is an extended overdue salute to those descendants of slaves who made important contributions to America’s heritage.
by Pearce W. Hammond