Reviewing the Archives
The Gullah legacy begins in the lowlands and islands of the Gullah homeplace. The Gullah lived in small communities gathered along the South Carolina and Georgia rivers and coastal plain. The Gullah also populated the more than 100 sea islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and north Florida, between the Santee (SC) and the St. John's rivers (FLA).
Gullah is a generic name. Gullah now refers to the descendants of the more than sixty-five African ethnic groups brought directly to the sea islands, the lowcountry coast and its principal city of Charleston. Bunce Island, Sherboro, Goree Island, Axim, Elimina, Accra, Whydah, Mpina, Loango, and Benguela were only a few of the African ports, forts, castles, and slave factories delivering human cargoes to Charleston. From the Senegambia on Africa's Western horn to Angola along its southern coast, ships under English, Dutch, French, and other national flags sailed the Middle Passage to Charleston.
Each ship carried between 100 and 300 Africans. By 1809, their combined voyages imported more than 300,000 Africans. (By contrast, Brazil received between 10.2 and 12 million slaves!)
Angola and the surrounding area of Southwest Africa supplied over 4 million slaves for the Atlantic trade. By the 19 th century, Angola was the largest source of slaves not only for Brazil, but for all of North America. Charleston received close to 150,000 Angolans before 1808. Almost 50 percent of its imported slaves were from southwest Africa, despite Angola being the third or fourth choice for Charleston's brokers and traders. One noted broker wrote to his captain: "The Slaves from the River Gambia are preferr'd to all others with us save the Gold Coast.... next to Them the Windward Coast are preferr'd to Angolas."
Despite its high profile in the slave trade, the Europeans misnamed the country Angola. Mistakenly, they referred to it by the title of its ruler, the Ngola. Gullah derived the source of its name from this mistake. (The word Ngola became Angola. When pronounced, it became "gola," and finally "gullah.")
At first the term Gullah applied only to Africans from Angola. ("Gullah" Jack, for example, an Angolan metaphysician, was hanged for his alleged part in Denmark Vesey's planned uprising in 1822). Later, Gullah came to signal the entire complex of African arrivals.
Africans, however, called the state Ndongo. Two women played prominent but opposite roles in Ndongo's relationship to the slave trade. One of Angola/Ndongo's most famous rulers was a woman named Nzinga Mbandi (The Portuguese called her Jinga). Born in 1582, she assisted her brother (who preceded her as Ngola) in his diplomatic efforts to turn back Portuguese control of Ndongo society. After his death, she became Queen. In 1635, Queen Nzinga organized and directed a powerful coalition of neighboring states to prevent European intrusion in southwest Africa. Skillfully constructing the positions of her alliance, employing diplomacy that included letters to Lisbon and other European capitals, and threatening the use of force when necessary, she maintained independence for Angola until she died in December 1663. She was so successful that the Portuguese made an assassination attempt on her life.
Another local woman, Dona Ana Joaquina, was Angola's largest slave broker in the 1800's. Extraordinary wealthy, she built a palace in Luanda that served her as residence, office, and on its first floor, a quintal (an enclosure to hold slaves). (Today her palace has been restored.) Mme. Joaquina owned a hotel in Luanda which quartered many of the visitors to this city where slave caravans ended their journey. In the 1700 and 1800's, Luanda was the most racially mixed city in Africa, as was Dona Ana Joaquina herself. Members of this mixed group often were brokers between the Portuguese, other Europeans and the heads of African societies involved in the Atlantic slave trade.
Before the voyage through the Middle Passage, Angolan slaves were the only slaves to be baptized. Many of the chapels in Luanda sat on the beach and faced the sea. The Africans walked through the chapels before boarding the ships for the Middle Passage. The priests, having filled the aspersoriums with holy water, dipped their wooden aspergillums. Reciting the baptism rites, the holy fathers sprinkled the holy water on heads of the men and women filing by. The new members of the body of Christ then bordered slave ships anchored offshore. 150,000 of the newly baptized made the journey to Charleston. Perhaps 20,000 were lost at sea.
From the 1670's, arriving groups of slaves began to blend African traditions. This synthesis strengthened the collective African identity. Every modern African nation along the Atlantic coast is a source of Gullah language and of Gullah's cultural and material threads. As Judith A. Carney, the world's leading expert on rice and its history and geography points out, "Africans actively shaped the early modern Atlantic world."
In the lowcountry, the Gullah set up a civilization noted for its arts, herbal medicine and horticulture, cooking, language, crafts, massive plantations, and technical and physical skills. Under the Gullah imprimatur, Charleston set the trend for high tables, sophisticated gardening, architecture, and outdoor sports.
Charleston's buildings and architecture wear a Gullah influence in their piazzas and kitchen houses. The porch begins as an overhang and social space in front of homes in African villages. The kitchen house affirms the African practice of women cooking communally in a space outside the home. Working together, African women asserted their autonomy and collective identity. They preserved a psychological common ground.
The Gullah elevated the genteel courtier tradition to a high art, setting the standard for manners in the American South. Visitors were surprised to find south of Charleston two sisters living alone with their slaves on a plantation run by a Gullah servant who acted as an executive secretary. Their surprise was a prelude to the commonplace. By the 18 th century, Charleston became one of the most noted cosmopolitan cities in the world. It was the only one with an African majority population numbering in the tens of thousands.
For more than a century, the Gullah labored in the first American colony and state (South Carolina) and the largest American city to have an African majority-Charleston. Charleston eclipsed New York as the largest American port of entry for North American slaves after 1705. Geography combined with the sheer numbers of Africans in the society to alter Charleston's slaver
Geography provided the Carolina lowcountry with a hot, rain-sufficient climate with abundant river tributaries and deltas. From Africa, Charleston's harbor aligned with the East trade winds blowing across the Atlantic.
The Gulf Stream, flowing north past Massachusetts and ultimately east towards England, sits only 50 miles offshore from Charleston. Colonial explorers said this 40 mile wide ocean current was "more powerful than the wind." Its average flow is between 30 and 80 million cubic meters per second! At 75 degrees, the Gulf Stream helps warm England in winter.
Charleston's environmental advantages, local and global, perched it to cross the chasm of slavery. Even without an extensive ship building industry, Charleston's timber, turpentine, tar, indigo and rice culture, its climate, capital needs, and Huguenot innovations in slavery's political economy lead to its century-long hold on first place as America's center for buying, selling, and owning and gathering wealth from slaves.
The Gullah who crossed over were not confined to agricultural labor in the countryside or to the more sophisticated crafts of the city. Many Africans worked on the water as coasting captains. These captains collected the rice from the 750 plantations along the rivers north and south of Charleston. They loaded and hauled cargoes of over a million pounds of rice from single plantations. They delivered supplies and other goods. They navigated changing channels during changing tides. Commanding all-slave crews, the patroons (the Gullah captains) operated completely (largely?) outside of white supervision or control.
Africans translated for the Cheek (Creek?) Indians. Africans played piano and fiddle. Africans cooked at home and in hotels and restaurants. Africans cut sails, forged iron, cut hair, built houses, made cabinets, and staved barrels. They hauled freight, raced horses, cleaned laundry, laid brick and stone, piloted the local waters. The Gullah planted gardens, groomed horses, cut timber, put out fires, directed crews, designed fashion, sewed dresses, and fixed hair (cut hair listed above; redundant) .
Africans acted as physicians and nurses, healing the sick. Only elected and appointed officials, top managers, and legal, financial, shipping, and retail service providers failed to have African faces.
Even during slavery, the Gullah built their own institutions. The city's largest church stood at Calhoun and Meeting Streets. Built for a Gullah congregation in 1858, Zion Presbyterian seated 3,000 people. From 1817, huge crowds of 3,000 to 6,000 attended the night meetings of the Hampstead Meeting of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. City officials disbanded the Hampstead Meeting after the Vesey uprising in 1822. Its founder, Morris Brown, fled to Philadelphia. After the Civil War, Rev. Brown, now the AME Church's second bishop, returned to lead the same congregation. Renamed "Emanuel" ("God is with us."), it is the "Mother" AME church in the South-the oldest and once the largest. Its current building dates to 1891.
In the colonial era, St. Philip Episcopal Church supported an African Sunday School. From the late 1830's to the 1890's, at St. Michael's Church, which held the nation's most famous bells, the bell ringer was the Gullah gentleman, Washington McLean Gadsden. His ring announced the start of the War of 1861.
