Gullah Geechee Culture
The Gullah and Geechee culture on the Sea Islands of Georgia has retained ethnic traditions from West
Africa since the mid-1700s. Although the islands along the southeastern U.S. coast harbor the same
collective of West Africans, the name Gullah has come to be the accepted name of the islanders in South
Carolina, while Geechee refers to the islanders of Georgia. Modern-day researchers designate the region
stretching from Sandy Island, South Carolina, to Amelia Island, Florida, as the Gullah Coast—the locale of
the culture that built some of the richest plantations in the South. Many traditions of the Gullah and
Geechee culture were passed from one generation to the next through language, agriculture, and
spirituality. The culture has been linked to specific West African ethnic groups who were enslaved on
island plantations to grow rice, indigo, and cotton starting in 1750, when antislavery laws ended in the
Georgia colony.
Enslavement
In the same manner as their slave ancestors, women on Sapelo Island hull rice with a mortar and pestle,
circa 1925. Language and cultural traditions from West Africa were retained in the Geechee culture that
developed in the Sea Islands. Board of Trustees established Georgia in 1732 with the primary purposes
of settling impoverished British citizens and creating a mercantile system that would supply England
with needed agricultural products. The colony enacted a 1735 antislavery law, but the prohibition was
lifted in 1750. West Africans, the argument went, were far more able to cope with the climatic
conditions found in the South. And, as the growing wealth of South Carolina's rice economy
demonstrated, slaves were far more profitable than any other form of labor available to the colonists.
Rice plantations fostered Georgia's successful economic competition with other slave-based rice
economies along the eastern seaboard. Coastal plantations invested primarily in rice, and plantation
owners sought out Africans from the Windward Coast of West Africa (Senegambia [later Senegal and the
Gambia], Sierra Leone, and Liberia), where rice, indigo, and cotton were indigenous to the region. Over
the ensuing centuries, the isolation of the rice-growing ethnic groups, who re-created their native
cultures and traditions on the coastal Sea Islands, led to the formation of an identity recognized as
Geechee/Gullah. There is no single West African contribution to Geechee/Gullah culture, although
dominant cultural patterns often correspond to various agricultural investments. For example, Africa's
Windward Coast was later commonly referred to as the Rice Coast in recognition of the large numbers
of Africans enslaved from that area who worked on rice plantations in America.
Language
The Georgia Sea Islands are the site of the unique Geechee and Gullah culture, which retains ethnic
traditions from West Africa brought to America during the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Although
elements of the culture persist, its survival is threatened by development on the islands.
Anthropologists and historians speculate but have not confirmed that the term Gullah —deemed the
cultural name of the islanders—derived from any one of several African ethnicities or specific locations
in Angola and on the Windward Coast. Other researchers speculate that Gullah and Geechee are
borrowed words from any number of ethnic groups along the Windward Coast—such as Gola, Kissi,
Mende, Temne, Twi, and Vai—that contributed to the creolization of the coastal culture in Georgia and
South Carolina. Gullah is thought to be a shortened form of Angola, the name of the group first
imported to the Carolinas during the early colonial period. Geechee, historically considered a negative
word identifying Sea Islanders, became an acceptable term in light of contemporary evidence linking it
to West Africa. Although the origins of the two words are not definitive, some enslaved Africans along
the coast had names that were linked to the Kissi group, leading to speculation that the terms may also
derive from that particular culture.
Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner researched and documented spoken words on the coast during the 1930s,
traced similarities to ethnic groups in West Africa, then published the Gullah dialect lexicon, Africanisms
in the Gullah Dialect (1949). His research confirms the evolution of a new language based on West
African influences and English. Many words in the coastal culture could be matched to ethnic groups in
West Africa, thereby linking the Geechee/Gullah people to their origins. Margaret Washington Creel in A
Peculiar People: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (1988) identifies cultural and
spiritual habits that relate to similar ethnic groups of West Africans who are linked by language. Her
research on the coastal culture complements Turner's findings that Africans on the Sea Islands created a
new identity despite the tragic conditions of slavery.
Cultural Heritage
Documentation of the developing culture on the Georgia islands dates to the nineteenth century. By the
late twentieth century, researchers and scholars had confirmed a distinctive group and identified
specific commonalities with locations in West Africa. The rice growers' cultural retention has been
studied through language, cultural habits, and spirituality. The research of Mary A. Twining and Keith E.
Baird in Sea Island Roots: African Presence in the Carolinas and Georgia (1991) investigates the common
links of islanders to specific West African ethnicities.
The Fanner baskets, used for winnowing rice, were introduced to Georgia rice plantations by slaves from
West Africa. Today such baskets are made primarily for sale to tourists as decorative art. Enslaved rice
growers from West Africa brought with them knowledge of how to make tools needed for rice
harvesting, including fanner baskets for winnowing rice. The sweetgrass baskets found on the coastal
islands were made in the same styles as baskets found in the rice culture of West Africa. Sweetgrass
baskets also were used for carrying laundry and storing food or firewood. Few present-day members of
the Geechee/Gullah culture remember how to select palmetto, sweetgrass, and pine straw to create
baskets, and the remaining weavers now make baskets as decorative art, primarily for tourists.
Religious meetings in "praise houses" were the spiritual outlet for enslaved Africans on the plantation.
Fast-paced rhythmic hand clapping accompanied ring shout (spiritual) songs while participants moved
counterclockwise in a circle, making certain never to cross their feet. Some aspects of the ring shout are
thought to be related to the communal dances found in many West African traditions. The word shout is
thought to be derived from saut, a West African word of Arabic origin that describes an Islamic religious
movement performed to exhaustion. Since the Civil War (1861-65), ring shouts have been held after
Sunday church services and on weeknights in community meeting houses. Few elders familiar with
shout songs and the body movements associated with the spiritual practice are alive today, but the
tradition is kept alive in Georgia through the McIntosh County Shouters.
In the early 1930s Lorenzo Dow Turner recorded a song that islander Amelia Dawley had been taught by
her mother, Octavia "Tawba" Shaw, who was born into slavery. Dawley taught the song to her own
daughter, Mary Moran, who became the last person in the United States to know the song, which would
link her to a small village in Sierra Leone sixty years later. Anthropologist Joseph Opala,
ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, and linguist Tazieff Koroma came across Turner's tape recording in
1989 and began tracing its origin, not only to Moran, who was living in Harris Neck, Georgia, but also to
Bendu Jabati of Senehun Ngola, Sierra Leone, who was the last person in her village with knowledge of
the song. In 1997 the two women met in the African village to share and reenact what was understood
as a Mende funeral song, sung only by the women of Jabati's family lineage, who conducted the funerals
of the village. Evidence suggests that a female member of Moran's family had been forced into captivity
from the village nearly 200 years before. The return of the song and the visit from the Moran family led
to a countrywide celebration that can be viewed in the documentary The Language You Cry In (1998).
The discovery of the song and subsequent linguistic research confirmed yet another link between the
cultures of West Africa and the Georgia coast.
Such corresponding practices as similar names, language structures, folktales, kinship patterns, and
spiritual transference are but a few areas that suggest a particular link between the southeastern
coastal culture of the United States and Sierra Leone in West Africa.
Migration
Thousands of slaves from Georgia and South Carolina who remained loyal to the British at the end of the
American Revolution (1775-83) found safe haven in Nova Scotia in Canada and thus gained their
freedom. Many returned to Sierra Leone in 1791 and the following year established Freetown, the
capital city. Members of that group are identified today as Krio.
Runaway slaves from the Sea Islands were harbored under Spanish protection in Florida prior to the
Second Seminole War (1835-42). Native American refugees from around the South formed an alliance
with African runaways to create the Seminole Nation. The name Seminole is from the Spanish word
cimarrón, meaning runaway. The 1842 agreement between the United States and Spain, which ended
the Seminole hold on Florida, caused a migration to Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma). Some
Seminoles followed Spanish protectors to Cuba and to Andros Island in the Bahamas.
Aspects of West African heritage have survived at each stage of the circle of migration, with rice,
language, and spirituality persisting as cultural threads into the twentieth century. The Geechee/Gullah
culture on the Sea Islandsof Georgia has retained a heritage that spans two continents.
Singers perform during the Sapelo Island Cultural Day, held each October on the island. The festival
celebrates the songs, stories, dances, and food of the Geechee and Gullah culture, which developed on
the Sea Islands among enslaved West Africans between 1750 and 1865.At the end of the Civil War, lands
on the coastal islands were sold to the newly freed Africans during the Port Royal Experiment, part of
the U.S. government's Reconstruction plan for the recovery of the South after the war.
During the 1900s, land on some of the islands—Cumberland, Jekyll, Ossabaw, Sapelo, and St. Simons —
became resort locations and reserves for natural resources. The modern-day conflict over resort
development on the islands presents yet another survival test for the Geechee/Gullah culture, the most
intact West African culture in the United States. Efforts to educate the public by surviving members of
the Geechee/Gullah community, including Cornelia Bailey of Sapelo Island and the Georgia Sea Island
Singers, help to maintain and protect the culture's unique heritage in the face of such challenges.