Joseph A. Opala, OR (born August 4, 1950) is an American historian noted for establishing the "Gullah Connection," the historical links between the indigenous people of the West African nation of Sierra Leone and the Gullah people of the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia in the United States.
Opala's historical research began with a study of Bunce Island, the British slave castle in Sierra Leone that was a departure point for many African slaves shipped to South Carolina and Georgia in the mid- and late 18th century Middle Passage. He was the first scholar to recognize that Bunce Island has greater importance for the Gullah than any other West African slave castle. He ranks it as "the most important historic site in Africa for the United States."Bunce Island: A British Slave Castle in Sierra Leone, exhibit website
Opala has traveled between Sierra Leone and the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country for 30 years, producing documentary films, museum exhibits, and popular publications on this historical connection. He is best known for a series of "Gullah Homecomings" in which Gullah people traveled to Sierra Leone to explore their historical and family ties to that country. He has drawn on his original research to establish these connections, and the work of earlier scholars, especially Lorenzo Dow Turner, an African-American linguist who in the 1930s and 1940s traced many elements of Gullah speech to West African languages.
Opala's research and public history events generated a national dialog in Sierra Leone on the subject of family lost in the Atlantic slave trade. These discussions have continued for almost three decades. The Sierra Leone media first coined the phrase, "Gullah Connection," for the family ties which Opala has brought to light.Bernadette Cole, "The Gullah Connection" (interview with Joseph Opala), West Africa magazine, 19 May 1986 He helped generate a similar dialog in the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country, where he has given public lectures and interviews to the local media, and organized workshops for teachers and cultural activists for many years. His work has helped Gullahs recognize their links to African traditions.Jane Fishman, "Childhood Folk Song Traces Woman's Roots", Spartanburg Herald-Journal, 24 Nov. 1991
Opala's efforts to bring Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs together through an exploration of their common history have been recognized in both countries. In 2012, Sierra Leone's President Ernest Bai Koroma awarded Opala the Order of the Rokel, that country's version of the British knighthood,"Professor Joseph Opala Honored in the 2012 National Honors, Insignia and Awards Ceremony" Cocorioko May 31, 2012"Sierra Leone's President Koroma Awards Professor Joseph Opala for Bunce Island Project" African Diaspora Tourism website and Sierra Leone citizenship the following year. Opala is now a dual citizen of the U.S. and Sierra Leone."Historian Professor Joseph Opala Receives Sierra Leonean Passport" Sierra Leone Express Media, December 13, 2013 Penn Center, the oldest Gullah community organization in the United States, in 2013 inducted Opala into its prestigious "1862 Circle" for his work in cultural preservation."Penn Center Gala: The 10th Annual 1862 Circle Gala Celebrates Inductees" , The Island News (South Carolina), 9 May 2013"Penn Center Honors Local, Cultural Leaders During 10th Annual Gala" Beaufort Gazette (South Carolina), May 18, 2013
Early life and education Joseph Opala was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1950. His father Marian P. Opala (1921–2010) fought in the Polish Underground in World War II and immigrated to the U.S. in 1947. Opala's father was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp (Flossenbürg) during the war, and lost all contact with his surviving family in Poland during the Cold War period that followed."Marian Opala" , Voices of Oklahoma, Oklahoma oral history archiveBob Burke & Ryan Leonard, Opala: In Faithful Service to the Law, Oklahoma Heritage Association, 2012 Opala grew up immersed in the effects of World and the separation of families."Marian Peter Opala", Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture"Marian P. Opala Obituary", Oklahoman, 14 October 2010, at Legacy.com Later his father became an attorney and was appointed as an Oklahoma Supreme Court Justice.
During high school years, Opala was an active member of the Oklahoma Anthropological Society, participating in weekend digs on prehistoric Native American sites in his home state. He spent his summers doing volunteer work in the Oklahoma Historical Society archives. During college, he took part in an archaeological dig run by the University of Wisconsin at Cahokia Mounds, a major Mississippian culture site in Illinois. He also did independent ethnographic research among the Lacandon Indians in Southern Mexico. Opala earned B.A. and M.A. degrees in anthropology at the University of Arizona and the University of Oklahoma, but later turned his attention to history. He did post-graduate study at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.
Early work in Sierra Leone (1974-1979) Opala's interest in Sierra Leone began with his service in the U.S. Peace Corps from 1974 to 1977. He was assigned to a Limba village in Tonkolili District, where his job was to introduce modern rice cultivation methods derived from the Green Revolution concepts then popular. While plowing a field, Opala spotted some ancient African pottery and European trade goods, including glass beads. He realized that the area where he was working, which lay along the Rokel River, was on one of the trade routes that connected the interior and the sea coast during the Atlantic slave trade period.
Opala took his discoveries to Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital city. Aided by the Peace Corps country director, he was assigned as "Staff Archaeologist" to the Sierra Leone National Museum and the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College. U.S. Ambassador Michael Samuels urged him to focus his efforts on Bunce Island."Priscilla: A Slave Story," Providence Journal, Feb. 14, 2005, by Paul Davis Anne Farrow, "The Scholar and the Slave Trade" , Hartford Courant, 5 April 2005 He conducted research there under the Peace Corps's aegis through 1977, then spent another year doing further research under a grant from the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.
At the time, there was little historic research published about Bunce Island, and documentation was scarce. The few Sierra Leoneans who had heard of it thought the Portuguese had built the castle.Joseph Opala, "Bunce Island: A British Slave Castle in Sierra Leone (Historical Summary)," in Bunce Island Cultural Resource Assessment by Christopher DeCorse, Sierra Leone Monuments and Relics Commission, 2007 Opala drew on history, archaeology, and oral traditions to learn more. He found historical evidence that British slave traders controlled Bunce Island during its entire history. Cutting back the vegetation and studying the ruins, he was the first scholar to identify the functions of the major buildings, including Bance Island House (the headquarters), the men's and women's slave yards, and the underground gunpowder magazine.Joseph Opala, "Historical Resources on Bunce Island: A Preliminary Survey," Sierra Leone National Museum, December 1976
Opala interviewed the Temne elders on the neighboring islands about their oral histories related to Bunce Island. He found that the local fishermen called the island by a variant of its original name -- "Bence Island" —and that the descendants of Bunce Island's African workers lived in a village a few miles upriver. He also discovered that for at least 250 years, the local people have associated a "devil" or nature spirit, with the "Devil's Rocks" lying off the north end of Bunce Island. They have continued long held rituals to propitiate that spirit to the present day.Robert Weller, "Archaeologist Becoming a Link to the Past for Blacks," Associated Press, 16 January 1986
After Opala left Sierra Leone in 1979, he did archival research in the US and UK. He discovered that many of the slaves who passed through Bunce Island were shipped to South Carolina and Georgia. The rice planters in those colonies were eager to purchase captives from Sierra Leone and other parts of West Africa where they were skilled in growing rice. He also found that there were strong linguistic connections between the Gullah people, the descendants of the rice-growing slaves still living in coastal South Carolina and Georgia today, and Sierra Leone. Linguists had been pointing to those connections for years without having the historical data to explain them.Joseph A. Opala, "The Gullah Language", in The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection, USIS, 1987 Opala wanted to return to Sierra Leone to share this new information with its people.
Public history from Sierra Leone (1985-1997) Soon after returning to Sierra Leone, Opala gave a well-publicized lecture on Bunce Island and that country's connection to the Gullah people at the US Embassy. Sierra Leoneans were delighted to learn about the group of African Americans, descendants of ancestors from their region, who had retained cultural traits and food dishes similar to theirs and a language related to their Krio language. Opala had many media requests for interviews, and people soon began to stop him on the street to ask about their Gullah "cousins."
Inspired by the popular reaction, Opala developed a series of public history initiatives that focused on Bunce Island and the "Gullah Connection" to the United States. These included public lectures, radio interviews, film shows and newspaper articles, and workshops for teachers and students. But his most successful effort was the "Gullah Homecoming" he organized in 1989 for a group of Gullah community leaders who wanted to see Sierra Leone for themselves. Their arrival galvanized the attention of the entire nation. The local media followed the visitors' every move during their week in Sierra Leone.Anne Farrow, "The Scholar and the Slave Trade" Hartford Courant, April 3, 2005
Opala lectured in the Institute of African Studies at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College (FBC) from 1985 to 1992, using his academic base to advance his Gullah Connection work. He acted as an adviser on cultural policy to President Joseph Saidu Momoh and the U.S. Ambassadors who served in Sierra Leone at that time. He also established a relationship with the U.S. National Park Service (NPS), and during his trips back to the US, he convinced NPS officials to send an expert team to survey Bunce Island in 1989. After seeing the castle, one of the NPS experts said he had "never seen an historic site so important for the United States in such desperate need of preservation."Recommendations for the Protection and Management of Bunce Island National Historic Site, Sierra Leone by David Reynolds, David Ates, & Daniel Murphy, US National Park Service report, 1989 Later, Opala helped persuade Herb Cables, then deputy director of NPS, to see Bunce Island for himself. Cables arrived in April 1992 with a pledge of $5 million for Bunce Island's preservation. That same month, Opala took Colin Powell to Bunce Island, and after seeing it, Powell was deeply moved. He later described the experience in his autobiography, My American Journey. He said: "I am an American...But today, I am something more..I am an African too...I feel my roots here in this continent."Colin Powell, My American Journey, pp. 533–534. But a military coup that occurred soon after Cables and Powell's visit interrupted work on the project, as the new NPRC military government had no interest in it.For more on Opala's experience of the 1992 NPRC coup, see: "The Vagabond King" by Simon Akam, New Statesman, Feb. 2, 2012