When Africans were brought to America as salves, most of what they brought along, in terms of their languages, foods and customs, was slowly absorbed into American life over the generations. One group however retained its culture. This piece in the BBC by Dexter Strong writes about this group, the Gullah Geechee, who, along the south-eastern coast of the US, have preserved a culture and a language rooted in West Africa that is “spoken nowhere else on Earth.”
The Gullah Geechee are the descendants of formerly enslaved people of West and Central African heritage who built free settlements across the isolated sea and barrier islands of the south-eastern US. It is ironical because the planters in the Carolina Lowcountry sought out people from West Africa’s Rice Coast precisely for their farming knowledge, and the same geographical isolation that bound them to the plantations later allowed them, and their descendants, to keep and adapt African practices. On 12 October 2026, the roughly 500-mile Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, running from North Carolina to southern Florida, marks 20 years as a designated National Heritage Area.
The culture lives in specifics. In the food, Lowcountry red rice echoes West African jollof, and dishes like Hoppin’ John, gumbo, purloo and shrimp and grits recur in homes and restaurants all along the Corridor. Alex Brown, a fifth-generation Gullah resident and Hilton Head councilman, ties the cuisine to community: “For us, food represents a way of living. Our historic culture of bartering is what produces these dishes.” Craft survives in coiled sweetgrass basketry; ritual in the “ring shout”, in which participants circle counterclockwise, stomping, clapping and singing in call and response. And the language itself preserves African-derived words such as oona (you all), nyam (eat) and goober (peanut, traced to nguba in Kimbundu and Kikongo). Even the name is uncertain in origin. As cultural preservationist Luana Graves Sellars puts it, “Gullah may derive from Angola or from the Gola people of West Africa. Geechee may come from the Kissi people or Geechee from Georgia’s Ogeechee River.”
For Sellars, language is only one form of expression: “Understanding the Gullah Geechee language is about understanding that everything we do speaks.” The ring shouts, she says, “all capture your attention and almost beg you to participate” – which is what the writer and his family find themselves doing, swaying along at a gathering in the river town of Bluffton.
The anchor of the story is Mitchelville, the self-governed freedman’s town built in 1862 on a former plantation on Hilton Head, which declined in the 1880s after Union forces withdrew and was finished off by the Great Sea Island Hurricane of 1893. For Brown, it belongs at the centre of the national story. “The story of American democracy cannot be told in full without mentioning Gullah sites like Mitchelville,” he says; people know Williamsburg and Jamestown, but “they have got to get to know Mitchelville.”
The threats, the piece notes, are present-day. Displacement, ancestral land loss and climate change continue to shadow these communities, and the Corridor commission warns that heirs’ property owners face pressure from developers. “Cemeteries where our founders rest are being disturbed, land straits once connecting islands are impassable,” Sellars says. Brown returns to what the land holds: “Our ancestors here not only founded a freetown but built a fort, Fort Howell, to defend that freedom. It was built with our hands and stationed by our bodies. This land is important to us.”
About a million Americans claim Gullah Geechee heritage, among them the former First Lady Michelle Obama. But the quiet argument of the piece is that the culture endures less through famous names than through a taste, a rhythm and a handful of words carried up and down the coast.
If you want to read our other published material, please visit https://marcellus.in/blog/
Note: The above material is neither investment research, nor financial advice. Marcellus does not seek payment for or business from this publication in any shape or form. The information provided is intended for educational purposes only. Marcellus Investment Managers is regulated by the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) and is also an FME (Non-Retail) with the International Financial Services Centres Authority (IFSCA) as a provider of Portfolio Management Services. Additionally, Marcellus is also registered with US Securities and Exchange Commission (“US SEC”) as an Investment Advisor.
