Visit Radio.sc To View All Our Online Music Stations

Gullah In South Carolina


www.Gullah.sc is South Carolina's premier web site to learn about Gullah people, language, traditions, and tourism events. Gullah is the language spoken by the Lowcountry's first black inhabitants. The language and culture still thrive today in and around the Lowcountry, especially the areas of Charleston and Beaufort, South Carolina.

In the Low Country there are a number of tours that offer visitors the ability to learn all about the Gullah traditions, authentic arts and crafts, Gullah presentations, music, and to learn more about the Gullah history, and the the rich and varied contributions made by Black Charlestonians.





Gullah : People, Heritage, and Lifestyles


The Gullah are African Americans who live in the Low Country of South Carolina, which includes both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands. Historically, the Gullah region once extended north to the Cape Fear area on the coast of North Carolina and south to the vicinity of Jacksonville on the coast of Florida. Today the Gullah area is confined to the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country. The Gullah people are also called Geechee.

The Gullah are known for preserving their African linguistic and cultural heritage. They speak an English-based creole language containing many African loanwords and significant influences from African languages in grammar and sentence structure. The Gullah language is related to Jamaican Creole, Bahamian Dialect, and the Krio language of Sierra Leone in West Africa. Gullah storytelling, food, music, folk beliefs, crafts, farming and fishing traditions.



"Gullah" and "Geechee"


The name "Gullah" may derive from Angola, a country in southwestern Africa where many of the Gullahs' ancestors originated. Some scholars have also suggested it comes from Gola, an ethnic group living on the border area between Sierra Leone and Liberia in West Africa. The name "Geechee" may come from Kissi (pronounced "Geezee"), a tribe living in the border area between Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia.


African Roots

Most of the Gullahs' ancestors were brought to the South Carolina through the port of Charleston. Charleston was the most important port in North America for the Atlantic slave trade, and almost half of the enslaved Africans brought into what is now the United States came through the port of Charleston.


The largest group of Africans brought into Charleston and Savannah came from the West African rice-growing region that stretches from what are now Senegal, Gambia, Guinea-Bissau, and Liberia. South Carolina and Georgia rice planters once called this region the "Rice Coast". The second-largest group of Africans brought through Charleston came from Angola in Southern Africa, but smaller numbers also came from the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) and the West Indies.




Origin of Gullah Culture

The Gullah have been able to preserve so much of their African cultural heritage because of geography and climate. By the mid-1700s, the South Carolina Low Country was covered by thousands of acres of rice fields; and African farmers from the "Rice Coast" brought the skills that made rice one of the most successful industries in early America. But the semi-tropical climate that made the Low Country such an excellent place for rice production, also made it vulnerable to the spread of malaria and yellow fever. These tropical diseases were carried by mosquitoes brought aboard the slave ships from Africa. Mosquitoes bred in the swamps and inundated rice fields of the Low Country, and malaria and yellow fever soon became endemic.


Africans more resistant to tropical fevers than the European slave owners. More Africans were brought into the Low Country as the rice industry expanded, and by about 1708 South Carolina had a black majority. Fearing disease, many white planters left the Low Country during the rainy spring and summer months when fever ran rampant, leaving their overseers in charge of the plantations. Having much less contact with white colonists than slaves in white majority colonies, the Gullahs were able to preserve their African language, culture, and community life.

Gullah customs and traditions

African influences are found in every aspect of the Gullahs' traditional way of life:

  • Gullah word "Guber" for peanut derives straight from Kongo(Congo) word "N'guba"
  • Gullah rice dishes called "red rice" and "okra soup" are similar to West African "jollof rice" and "okra soup". Jollof rice is a style of cooking brought by the Wolof and Mandé peoples of West Africa.
  • The Gullah version of "gumbo" has its roots in African cooking. "Gumbo" is derived from a word in the Umbundu language of Angola, meaning "okra."
  • Gullah rice farmers once used the mortar and pestle and "fanner" (winnowing basket) similar to tools used by West African rice farmers.
  • Gullah beliefs about "hags", "haunts" and "plat-eyes" are similar to African beliefs about malevolent ancestors, witches, and "devils" (forest spirits).
  • Gullah "root doctors" protect their clients against dangerous spiritual forces using similar ritual objects to those employed by African medicine men.
  • Gullah herbal medicines are similar to traditional African remedies.
  • The Gullah "seekin" ritual is similar to coming of age ceremonies in West African secret societies like Poro and Sande.
  • Gullah stories about "Bruh Rabbit" are similar to West and Central African trickster tales about the clever and conniving rabbit, spider, and tortoise.
  • Gullah spirituals, shouts, and other musical forms employ the "call and response" method commonly used in African music.
  • Gullah "sweetgrass baskets" are almost identical to coil baskets made by the Wolof people in Senegal.
  • Gullah "strip quilts" mimic the design of cloth woven with the traditional strip loom used throughout West Africa. The famous kente cloth from Ghana is woven on the strip loom.
  • The folk song Michael Row the Boat Ashore (or Michael Row Your Boat Ashore) comes from the Gullah culture.

Gullah People and the Civil War period

When the Civil War began, the Union rushed to blockade the Confederate shipping. Many White planters on the Sea Islands, fearing an invasion by the US naval forces, abandoned their plantations and fled to the mainland. When Union forces arrived on the Sea Islands in 1861, they found the Gullah people eager for their freedom, and eager as well to defend it. Many Gullahs served with distinction in the Union Army's First South Carolina Volunteers. The Sea Islands were the first place in the South where slaves were freed. Long before the War ended, Quaker missionaries from Pennsylvania came down to start schools for the newly freed slaves. Penn Center, now a Gullah community organization on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, began as the very first school for freed slaves.


After the Civil War, the Gullahs' isolation from the outside world increased in some respects. The rice planters on the mainland gradually abandoned their plantations and moved away. A series of hurricanes devastated the crops in the 1890s. Left alone in remote rural areas in the Low Country, the Gullahs continued to practice their traditional culture with little influence from the outside world well into the 20th Century.


Gullah People and Modern times

In recent years the Gullah people have been fighting to keep control of their traditional lands. Since the 1960s, resort development on the Sea Islands has threatened to push Gullahs off family lands they have lived on since for generations.


The Gullahs have also struggled to preserve their traditional culture. In 2005, the Gullah community unveiled a translation of the New Testament in the Gullah language, a project that took more than 20 years to complete. The Gullahs achieved another victory in 2006 when the U.S. Congress passed the "Gullah/Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor Act" that provides $10 million over ten years for the preservation and interpretation of historic sites relating to Gullah culture. The "heritage corridor" will extend from southern North Carolina to northern Florida. The project will be administered by the US National Park Service with strong input from the Gullah community.


Gullahs have also reached out to West Africa. Gullah groups made three celebrated "homecomings" to Sierra Leone in 1989, 1997, and 2005. Sierra Leone is at the heart of the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa where many of the Gullahs' ancestors originated. Bunce Island, the British slave castle in Sierra Leone, sent many African captives to Charleston and Savannah during the mid- and late 1700s. These dramatic homecomings were the subject of three documentary films -- "Family Across the Sea" (1990), "The Language You Cry In" (1998), and "Priscilla's Homecoming" (in production).


Over the years, the Gullahs have attracted many historians, linguists, folklorists, and anthropologists interested in their rich cultural heritage. Many academic books on that subject have been published. The Gullah have also become a symbol of cultural pride for blacks throughout the United States and a subject of general interest in the media. This has given rise to countless newspaper and magazine articles, documentary films, and children's books on Gullah culture and to a number of popular novels set in the Gullah region.


Cultural survival

The media typically portray the Gullah people as living only on the Sea Islands, but Gullahs have always lived through out in the Low Country. The media also portray Gullah culture as being "near extinction" because of resort development on the islands. Many Sea Island communities are, indeed, under serious threat, but there are islands that have never been subjected to tourism development where the Gullah way of life is very much intact. Most Gullah people live in coastal areas where resort development is not an issue and where their culture also still thrives today.


Far from being near extinction, Gullah culture has proven to be particularly resilient. Gullah traditions are still strong in urban areas of the Low Country, like Charleston. Many Gullahs migrated to New York starting at the beginning of the 20th century, and these urban migrants have not lost their identity. Gullahs have their own neighborhood churches and sometimes send their children back to rural communities in South Carolina during the summer months to be reared by grandparents, uncles and aunts. Gullah people living in New York also frequently return to the low country to retire.