Friday, 11 October 2024

HISTORY LESSON

October is "Gullah Geechee Heritage Month".....

The descendants of American slaves who populated the coastal areas of the Carolinas, Georgia and northeastern Florida in an area running roughly from Jacksonville in North Carolina to Jacksonville in Florida were known as "Gullah" in the Carolinas and "Geechee" in Florida and Georgia.

These peculiar people, specifically the Gullah of South Carolina, were members of a West African tribe known as the Temne, whose oral traditions stated that their ancestors left Jerusalem after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and from there migrated to Yemen/Ethiopia, to Mali/Western Sudan, then Futa Jallon/Guinea, and later Sierra Leone. It was in Sierra Leone that the Temne revolutionized rice cultivation in the region, and this superior knowledge made them the target of rice plantation owners in South Carolina who arranged to have thousands of them shipped across the Atlantic in slave ships.

Many of these Temne slaves who later became known as the "Gullah" would escape from the rice plantations and eventually instigate a bloody war against American armed forces known as "The Gullah Wars" from 1739 to 1858, in which a minimum of 2,000 U.S. soldiers were killed.

LONG LIVE THE GULLAH/GEECHEE SPIRIT!

No comments:

Post a Comment

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...