amadu massally sweating through it on Bunce Island as he leads the Next Step Homecoming
How Fambul Tik Started
Hi, i am amadu massally
In 2006, I was invited to and took the trip to Columbia, South Carolina to go and watch a sneak preview of “African American Lives,” a documentary film that focused on genealogical research. It was led by Henry Louis Gates. After watching the preview, I was both struck and excited. The next morning, we were on our way to the Coast as we were able to arrange a Gullah tour of Hilton Head Island!
The Gullah Geechee people a peculiar group of African Americans that live off the coast of what is known as the “Corridor” today, have preserved much of their African ways than any other group of African Americans. I had heard learned they were from Sierra Leone soon after I arrived in Atlanta as a young student at Morehouse College in 1983. Then came Ambassador Andrew Young’s story about his DNA pointing to the Mende people of Sierra Leone; in an article published in the Sunday edition of the Atlanta Journal and Constitution of which I still have a copy.
The first Gullah man I ever met, consciously, was Dr. Emory Campbell. We had booked their tour on that Sunday, and we got there late. So, he waited for us at some intersection along HWY 78 on the famous Hilton Head Island and as his brother drove by, along the tour’s route, he flagged him down. During the tour when we got to one of only two public beaches left on the island as developers and tax tricksters forcibly sometimes, take over large portions of land, especially those facing the Atlantic Ocean that [Gullah] people used to own and can no longer visit. But something came over me while there, and I still cannot understand what it was. Put simply I felt like swimming home; after being absent for over two decades.
The loss of beaches that used to be public due to “development” and the loss of land from “tax tricks,” or eminent domain and whatever else, stuck on my mind. After the tour, we were invited to Emory’s home for dinner. Emma, his wife had cooked while we were out driving through streets sometimes that look like the trees want to grab you.
During dinner - rice of course was the main part of it - Emory and his wife shared a Bible. They had a few copies, actually, written in Gullah. I picked it up, opened it, and realize I could understand it once I figured out how to pronounce some of the new words (to me),and some of which are the same as in Sierra Leone’s Krio.
I remember that day like it was today. It changed the course of my life! January 2006! I became the first self-acclaimed Sierra Leone-Gullah citizen without knowing or planning it! And the rest is history…
The Evolution of Fambul Tik
In Sierra Leone people normally buy rice from the markets. But here is one transaction that was done on the farm. On the way to Old Yagala, a mesa, where Africans defended themselves from slave invaders; who were other Africans, we ran into this rice field. While we had a planned visit to a rice farm, this one was spontaneous. We had a great chat transacting!
Fambul Tik (“Family Tree”) is a heritage experience company that works tirelessly to restore the family ties between Africans and African Americans that were broken centuries ago by the Atlantic Slave Trade. Our work repairs breaches.
fambul tik’s Approach to the sierra leone - gullah connection
What the organization does is centered around this trail from Africa to the North American Colonies, up to and including Nova Scotia and Mexico.
Fambul Tik, then operating as the Sierra Leone-Gullah Heritage Association in 2006, made its first visit to Gullah Geechee communities. The organization had led a group of Sierra Leoneans to Penn Center in November of that year. Every year, in November, Penn Center holds its annual Heritage Days event. After that first visit sixteen years ago, to now, the organization has been in Georgia, Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, and Nova Scotia, “scavenging” for Sierra Leonean branches, scattered across the Americas.
Fambul Tik has been deliberate in keeping the Sierra Leone-Gullah Connection going for some time now. Over the years, they have attended several events in Gullah Geechee communities and have even hosted their own programs in those communities.
In November 2006, for example, the Mayor of Beaufort, SC, Bill Rausch, gave the Key to the city to the organization for our efforts in mobilizing about 50-odd Sierra Leoneans to Penn Center.
In December 2019, the organization took upon its greatest feat to date when it took over 50 African Americans on a historical study tour of Sierra Leone. Later this year (Dec 3, 2022), Fambul Tik takes on another important event that will definitely attract attention in the Gullah communities in Beaufort County and her surroundings. Along with our kinfolk, they will show some remarkable examples of how African Americans are related to Africans in what is now known as the Sierra Leone-Gullah Connection.
This diagram taken from a book cover that students at James Madison University worked with Joseph Opala on, depicts the Sierra Leone - Gullah Connection. It shows how people from Sierra Leone were taken from Africa to the North American Colonies in the 1600s and 1700s. So the red thick line from Africa is showing that people were taken from Sierra Leone to South Carolina first, and sixty years later they started taking Africans from the Sierra Leone Region to Savannah, Georgia. But it doesn’t stop there. Those thinner red lines show how Africans, [some of them must have been from the Sierra Leone Region] escaped plantation life and formed an “African Frontier” in Spanish, Florida. Where they co-existed with different Indian Tribes and eventually became “Black Seminoles.” Their traces are in Andros, Bahamas; Wewoka, Oklahoma; Nascimiento, Mexico; and Bracketville, Texas.
The green line shows a different route: After the American Revolutionary War some of the blacks who had fought alongside King George 3 were given freedom (or not returned to slavery) and taken up to Nova Scotia. They were known as Black Loyalists (loyal to the King of England), and there were white loyalists too. After the War of Independence, between 1783 and 1785, about 3,000 black people were taken from the Colonies to Canada and became the largest group of people of African descent to move there at any one time. 1,200 of them left Nova Scotia in 1792 and moved to the Province of Freedom; which later became “Freetown!”
Some of these people, about twenty-five percent according to estimates made by historians, were Gullah Geechees; from South Carolina and Georgia. There is a list in Canada, The Muster that shows the names of those who agreed to go to Sierra Leone; albeit not all of them eventually left. But this is partly why there is a two-way connection between the Gullah Geechees and Sierra Leoneans.