THE GULLAH HOMECOMING 1989

Saint Selena Island 1988

Historians have shown that there is a special connection between the Gullah Geechee people of South Carolina and Georgia and the West African nation of Sierra Leone. Between about 1756 and 1807, thousands of enslaved African rice farmers were taken from what is now Sierra Leone to the ports of Charleston and Savannah where they were sold to wealthy rice planters. The American planters realized they needed the specialized skills that African rice farmers had developed over many centuries.

In recent years, Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs have taken part in four “homecoming” visits in order to meet with lost family, and see if their similarities in language, culture and foodways are as great as scholars have been reporting. As it turned out, the Gullah Geechee visitors were not disappointed. These family reunions began with a 1988 visit by Sierra Leone’s President Joseph Saidu Momoh to Penn Center, the Gullah community organization on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina.

President Momoh had only recently learned about the “Sierra Leone – Gullah Connection,” and he was clearly delighted at the many similarities he saw between Sierra Leone culture and Gullah culture. 

He was especially taken by the Gullah language which is mutually intelligible with Krio, 

Sierra Leone’s lingua franca, or common language which is mutually intelligible with Krio, Sierra Leone’s lingua franca or common language. President Momoh was also impressed with Gullah rice dishes, like red rice and okra soup, which are similar to Sierra Leone’s “jollof rice” and “okra soup.”

National Public Radio covered this “Gullah Reunion,” as they called it, and broadcasted a vivid story on the event on Thanksgiving Day, 1988. President Momoh was so impressed by the enduring family ties between Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs that he invited Dr. Emory Campbell, the Director of Penn Center, to lead a homecoming visit to Sierra Leone in 1989. They responded with thirteen community leaders from four states.

Sierra Leone 1989

The “Gullah Homecoming” was in direct response to the invitation President Momoh offered the previous year, and it was a national sensation in Sierra Leone. It was the first time Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs had an opportunity to come together in large numbers and observe their cultural similarities and differences first-hand. Thousands of people took to the streets in Freetown, Sierra Leone’s capital city, just to see their Gullah cousins pass by in their tour bus.

The events the Sierra Leone government and US Embassy organized to welcome the Gullahs and explain their family connection were also packed. SCETV in Columbia, South Carolina, produced a documentary, called Family Across the Sea, based on the Reunion and the Homecoming, that played on PBS stations all across the U.S.

THE MORAN FAMILY HOMECOMING 1997

The “Moran Family Homecoming” was the second visit by the Gullah Geechee people to their ancestral home in Sierra Leone. The Morans, from Harris Neck, Georgia, and their ancestors have preserved a funeral hymn in the Mende language, passing it down, mother-to-daughter for more than 200 years. Their five-line song is almost certainly the longest text in an African language preserved by an African American family of slavery descent. The Moran Family Homecoming in 1997 was also a national sensation, followed by Sierra Leoneans every day on radio and in the newspapers.

The Morans visited Bunce Island, the ruins of a British slave trading base that shipped thousands of African farmers to South Carolina and Georgia. They also visited a remote Mende village, called Senehun Ngola, where researchers had recently discovered an African family that has preserved the same funeral song for many generations. The Moran Family Homecoming was led by Mary Moran, the family matriarch, and was documented in a film, called The Language You Cry In, that has been purchased by hundreds of schools and universities.

PRISCILLA’S HOMECOMING 2005

Thomalind Martin Polite, a young speech therapist from Charleston, South Carolina, led “Priscilla’s Homecoming,” in 2005. Ms Polite is the 7th generation descendant of a 10-year-old girl, later named Priscilla, who was taken from Sierra Leone to Charleston in 1756 in a slave ship, called the Hare. Ms. Polite’s family is in a unique position: They are the only African American family that can trace their ancestry back to a specific point in Africa using an unbroken paper trail of 250 years that includes slave ship records, slave sale records, and plantation records. One scholar of the Atlantic Slave Trade described the dovetailing of all these records as a kind of miracle, “like lightning striking three times in the same place.” 

A brief documentary video, called Priscilla’s Legacy, chronicles Ms Polite’s historic family journey.