By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D. Twitter: @farooqkperogi In line with my tradition to highlight aspects of the linguistic culture of Blac...
By Farooq A. Kperogi, Ph.D.
Twitter:@farooqkperogi
In line with my tradition to highlight aspects of the linguistic
culture of Black America in February, which is celebrated as “Black History
Month” in the United States and Canada, I want to introduce the reader to a
truly charming African-inflected Black American English creole called Gullah
(pronounced something like gah-lah) or Geechee. It is spoken by people who live
in the sea islands of the southern coast of the United States in such southern
US states as Georgia (where I live), South Carolina, North Carolina, and
Florida.
The Gullah were, for more than 300 years after being enslaved in the
United States, insulated from the dominant cultural and linguistic currents of
the rest of the country principally because the sea islands in which they were
forced to work on rice plantations by their enslavers were malaria-infested,
and white people didn’t have the genetic immunity that the Gullahs had to
survive the devastation of malaria on the islands. This insulation enabled them
to retain some of their African cultures and to develop a distinct form of the
English language that creatively combines the syntactic and lexical features of
various African languages and English.
In William Pollitzer’ absorbingly informative book titled Gullah
People and Their African Heritage, we learn that slave records of the Port
of Charleston in South Carolina show that most Gullah people are descended from
west and southwestern Africa. About 39 percent of them, records show, were
enslaved from what is now Angola (from where some scholars say the term Gullah
is derived), 23 percent from what is now Sierra Leone, 20 percent from what is
now Senegal and the Gambia, 13 percent from what is now Ghana, and 5 percent
from what is now (coastal) Nigeria, Madagascar, and Mozambique.
When these divergent African ethnicities converged in the sea
islands of southern United States, they lost their linguistic singularities but
forged a new collective linguistic identity that combines a substrate of their
various African languages and a superstrate of early modern English to form a
unique English creole that has captured the imagination of researchers of
varying disciplinary orientations.
However, it is only relatively recently that the African
linguistic heritage of the Gullah dialect has come to light. For several
decades, Gullah was described as nothing more than a fusion of the surviving
remnant of archaic British English dialects and “baby talk.” Others simply
called it “broken English” or a “debased form of Elizabethan English.” It
wasn’t until 1949 when African-American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner’s
magisterially game-changing book titled Africanisms in the Gullah
Dialect was published that the world learned of the enormous phonemic,
lexical, and syntactic similarities between Gullah and several west and
southwestern African languages.
Turner caused the world to see Gullah not as an incompetent
mimicry of Standard English, but as a complex, well-ordered, grammatically
self-sufficient language that blends features of several African languages and
English. As Katherine Wyly Mille and Michael B. Montgomery noted in their
Introduction to the 2002 edition of Turner’s Africanisms in the Gullah
Dialect, the book “provided, for the first time, concrete, comparable, and
measurable correspondences between Gullah and African languages, tangible
objects for those wanting to substantiate speculations about the history of
this unusual variety of language, which H.L. Mencken characterized as the only
type of American speech not intelligible to outsiders” (xii).
In researching the African heritage of the Gullah language in the
1930s, Turner first recorded the folk stories, chants, songs, speech patterns,
etc. of the people, then went to the University of London to study with
scholars of West African languages and cultures, where he learned and gained a
working mastery of Sierra Leonean Krio, Twi (spoken mostly in Ghana), Kimbundu
(spoken in Angola), Efik (spoken in the southern Nigerian state of Cross
River), Fante (spoken in Ghana), Ewe (spoken in Ghana, Togo, and parts of
Benin), Yoruba, Mandingo, and other African languages.
He also studied Arabic at Yale University because, after
interviewing scores of (French) West Africans in Paris in 1937, he realized
that languages such as Mandingo and Yoruba were heavily influenced by Arabic,
an influence that was transferred to Gullah, which I will discuss next week.
In addition, Turner visited and lived in Africa, notably in Sierra
Leone and in Nigeria, where he was a Visiting Fulbright Lecturer between 1950
and 1951 at the then University College in Lagos, which later became University
of Lagos. That means he came to Nigeria a year after his book was published.
Anyway, in Turner’s book, from where I will draw examples of
African influences in the Gullah language next week, we read of the fascinating
story of a family in coastal Georgia that had preserved and handed down a folk
song called “A waka” relatively unchanged for more than 200 years. It was later
discovered that, that song is in Mende, a Niger-Congo language spoken Sierra
Leone.
More than 40 years after the publication of the book and 20 years
after Turner’s death, three researchers by the names of Joseph Opala, Cynthia
Schmidt, and Tazieff Koroma found a rural Mende community in Sierra Leone where
people still sing that very song—with the same diction, rhythm, and cadence.
The story of the uncanny congruence between the centuries-old “A waka” folk
song in the Gullah language in the United States and in the Mende language in
modern Sierra Leone inspired the compellingly enthralling documentary film
titled The Language You Cry In. (The 57-minute documentary is available
online for free).
From the 1990s, the Mende people in Sierra Leone and the Gullah
people in the US have established formal linkages. They send representatives to
each other’s’ cultural festivals. In 2007, I ran into a man, who later told me his name was
Suleiman, at the International Your Delkab Farmers’ Market here in Atlanta. I was looking for
Nigerian food and found someone who struck me as distinctly Nigerian, so I
stopped him to ask for help. He told me he was Sierra Leonean, not Nigerian. Of
course, from his accent I could tell that he was Sierra Leonean because I was
around Sierra Leoneans a lot during my undergraduate days in Kano.
But I was intrigued when Suleiman told me he was in the US to
represent a Mende community at a Gullah cultural festival in Savanah, Georgia.
He said it wasn’t the first time he represented the king of some Mende
community, and that Gullah people also send representatives to Mende cultural
festivals in Sierra Leone. It was through him I first learned about the Gullah
people and their cultural and linguistic affinities with the Mende of Sierra
Leone.
Seven years later, in 2013, I took my family to Savannah, Georgia,
for a conference. While we were having dinner at a hotel, we overheard a barely
audible conversation that struck us as distinctly and unmistakably West
African, although we couldn't tell what West African language it was. I decided
to go ask the people what West African language they were speaking. The closer
I got to them, the more it sounded to me like they were speaking some dialect
of what linguists broadly call West African Pidgin English. I concluded that
they were probably Sierra Leonean (Krios). I was wrong. They were Gullah!
That encounter reminded me not just of Suleiman from Sierra Leone
who had told me of the connections between the Gullah people of Savannah,
Georgia, and the Mende of Sierra Leone (who also speak Krio, an English-based
creole); it also reminded me of my then 6-year-old daughter's teacher in 2010
who taught her students that "Kumbaya" (the title of a popular campfire
spiritual song here in the US that has origins in Gullah) was an "African
word." My daughter came home to ask me what the word meant in
"African." LOL! Although the word does sound West African, it is
actually the Gullah idiosyncratic phonetic approximation of the English
"come by here."
I am sharing this anecdote to make the point that Gullah
definitely does sound West African. Today in American English, the expression
“sing kumbaya” is used, often with a sarcastic undertone, to mean “engage in a show of unity and
harmony with one's opponents or enemies,” as in, “Don’t think you can undermine
and insult me and I’ll ignore all that and sit in a campfire with you singing
Kumbaya. No, I will pay you back in your own coin.”
Next week I will explore in more depth African linguistic
influences in the Gullah language. Keep a date.
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