the next step homecoming 2019/20
“What a way to start a tour!” you could hear someone yell… Upon arrival at Bunce Island, and being in the midst of Gullah Geechee performers, singers, story-tellers, preservationists, academics, and citizens it was no surprise that we sang along with them as their Sierra Leonean hosts.
The fourth homecoming was a bit different. As the name shows, “The Next Step” was planned by ordinary citizens of Sierra Leone and implemented with their Gullah Geechees guests. Led by Amadu Massally and his partners at Fambul Tik (“Family Tree”), they guided their Gullah visitors and Sierra Leonean staff to focus on the topics most interesting to them. They followed the approach of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition, so the tour started at Bunce Island first to illustrate the slave trade from the interior to the coast and across the Atlantic.
Next, they visited Old Yagala, a mountaintop village where Africans built defenses and successfully fought off slave traders for generations. Illustrating resistance to the Transatlantic Slave Trade. In Africa. The abolition element was revealed when the tour got to Freetown, the capital city where about 1,200-odd formerly enslaved black people in the North American Colonies were repatriated to i. The Black Loyalists, who fought alongside King Goerge III in the Revolutionary War, arrived in 1792, and some of them were Gullah Geechees.
So they visited Old Fourah Bay College, where the first Principal was a Gullah.; saw the bust of Thomas Peters, a Wilmington, NC native. hey visited a rice field and saw mortar and pestles; and fanners. They went to a sweetgrass basket village with a 5th generation basket maker from Mt. Pleasant, SC, and visited Senehun Ngola, with the families that have preserved a funeral song for more than 200 years. In Freetown, they performed and shared Gullah culture with their Sierra Leonean hosts. They told stories in the Gullah language. And more…
Who or what is fambul tik?
Fambul Tik (“Family Tree”) is a heritage experience organization that works tirelessly to restore the family ties between Africans and African Americans that were broken centuries ago by the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Fambul Tik’s foremost goal in this work is in increasing awareness of the major historical and cultural connections between Sierra Leone and the Gullah Geechee people that historians have uncovered over a period.
The “Shuku Blay” made in one village in Sierra Leone, Rogbonko, is a coil basket made the same way by “sewing” just like the Gullah Geechees in Mount Pleasant, SC, and elsewhere along the corridor, sew their baskets.
