Numbering some 500,000 speakers of Gullah, a creole language many regard as the
African American mother tongue, the Gullah people embody the purest manifestation of
African American culture still in practice in North America today. Concentrated primarily in
the Lowcountry and Sea Islands of the southeastern United States, the Gullah are tied by
kinship to African American communities throughout America who bear their cultural
imprint—if no longer in language, then still in folkways or social values. As a result, they
have contributed substantially to the sustenance of what is most African in African
Americans’ cultural identity.
Today, even as flourishing cultural festivals draw visitors to the Lowcountry from all over
the nation, this historic culture teeters on the brink between renaissance and extinction.
Economic development by and of benefit to outsiders is ushering in a silent yet deadly
dispersal of the Gullah population by eating away at its traditional economic base. The
privacy and inwardness which once protected Gullah traditions has been ruptured by
outside voices. Those who felt the right to study them – historians, linguists,
anthropologists – have been joined by tourists, developers, and businessmen, whose
intrusions take on material dimensions. The Gullah must respond, or as a people, they
may perish.
This is the first Gullah-edited work of its order, combining fiction, nonfiction and social
commentary with the history of the people. As such, it marks an historic turning point
in Gullah development, indicating Gullah readiness to self-define in relation to the
contemporary mainstream, to promote their culture, their views, their history, and the
social issues that concern them.
The Legacy of Ibo Landing is an exciting mixture of the contemporary and the historic –
something familiar, yet so memory-laden as to be almost exotic. Through contemporary
fiction, 16 pages of full color photos and paintings by celebrated artists Jonathan Green,
Joseph Pinckney and Leroy Campbell, heritage resources lists, articles on Gullah history,
culture, language and cuisine, The Legacy of Ibo Landing envelops us in the fertile nexus
of African culture as it is practiced still in America. It offers nothing less than a voyage of
the soul to African Americans’ American roots in the southern U.S.. Families burgeon, the
generations encircle each other, and the ancestors walk.We savor Gullah folkways,
tremble with the mysteries of their ghosts and spirits, and catch brief melodic strains of
the Gullah language that has been preserved at such cost to its speakers, and is only
now in the process of moving from an oral to a written language.
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