The Struggle to Save America’s Historic
Gullah Culture:
Celebrating the Legacy of Ibo Landing
Clarity Press, Inc. is pleased to announce the publication of The Legacy
of Ibo Landing: Gullah Roots of African American Culture, edited by
Marquetta L. Goodwine et al. 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 |
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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.
This book commemorates what has long needed commemoration: the historic site
on the Georgia coast where a newly discharged cargo of captured Africans, still
in chains, walked hand in hand back into the sea rather than face life in
America in slavery. This noble event inaugurated the long resistance of African
Americans throughout the South to their capture, enslavement, and segregation.
In her articles, "Destructionment: Treddin’een We Ancestas’ Teahs: and
"Holdin Pun We Culcha," editor Marquetta L. Goodwine, Director of the
Gullah/Geechee Sea Islands Coalition, brings us to the heart of the contemporary
Gullah/Geechee struggle for cultural survival.
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