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Gullah Festival in Beaufort South
Carolina
Friday May 23 through Sunday May 25
By
Junious Ricardo Stanton
This past weekend I
traveled with the Cheyney University National Alumni
Association to the annual Gullah Festival in Beaufort
South Carolina. This was my first trip to South
Carolina. I had heard about the Gullah people years ago
and the festival. Last fall one of my fraternity
brothers mentioned he was thinking about sponsoring a
tour to the Gullah festival. To make a long story
short, I didn’t hear anything more from him and when my
alumni association announced it was sponsoring a tour I
jumped on the chance.
The Gullah people
are the direct descendants of West Africans who were
kidnapped, captured and stolen from their native soil
and brought to this hemisphere to work the cotton,
sugarcane and rice plantations, clear the land, till the
soil, to make it bloom and profitable for whites, most
of whom were absentee owners. Because of their
location and isolation on the islands off the coast of
North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida,
that is, their extremely limited contact with Europeans,
the most interesting aspect about the Gullah people is
that they
retained much of the culture, folkways, and traditions of
their immediate African ancestors. You probably have
heard the term Geechee. That was the name given
to Gullah people, which when I was growing up was an
extremely pejorative word. To call someone a Geechee was
an insult, on the order of calling you "black" before
black became positive, or calling you "trifling" or a
"nigger."
| Geechees are the
Gullah people who spoke a blended language comprised of
African and European words but with a distinctly African
syntax and flow. While the Gullah people used European
words, the sounds, phrasing and order were entirely
different from the way Europeans, their imitators, and
surrogates sounded. As with all things African in this
country, Gullah culture and language was viewed as “less
than,” backward, and inferior by whites. It was also
denigrated, derided and made fun of by black people who
had no idea what Gullah culture was.
To their credit
however, the Gullah people steadfastly refused to
acquiesce to white notions of what proper language was
or what it meant to be human.
Nana Yaa Asantewa performs |
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The Gullah people are
fiercely proud of their heritage and background. Over
the centuries, even though they too were enslaved they
developed a different approach to bondage. They were
more self-sufficient and they were the first to be
liberated when the Union troops invaded the area. It was
in South Carolina where
General Sherman, in attempting
to deal with the “contraband” (which is what they called
our ancestors) took it upon himself to order the Gullah
people be given up to forty acres of land vacated by the
whites who had fled the area. (This is where the term
“forty acres and a mule” originated.) The Gullah people
of South Carolina were the first large group of Africans
to be landowners and to be given the opportunity to
purchase land for themselves.
During the brief
period following the US Civil War called "Reconstruction," Africans in South Carolina as well
as other parts of the South played a monumental role in
shaping the reorganization of America with regard to how
it treated all its citizens. Alas the democratic
idealism and zeal of Reconstruction was short lived. The
ruling elites in both the North and South reverted to
their oppressive ways. Ironically, they devised even more
pernicious forms of peonage. But folks on the islands,
because they were still isolated from whites and close
knit, experienced more autonomy and self reliance then
their mainland brethren. Because of this, the Gullah
people tend to have more pride in who they are, their
past and their potential albeit still living in a
virulently racist country. It wasn’t until they ventured
off the islands or as more and more whites infiltrated
the coastal regions that the Gullah people experienced
overt contacts with racism and a blatant denigration of
their culture. In recent decades as more and more whites
came to the coastal islands, as usual they brought their
psychosis and greed with them. Over the years many Geechee families have lost their lands due to a myriad
of reasons and whites have eagerly gobbled up thousands
of acres.
In the 1980s a few
descendants of the Geechees decided to do something to
celebrate themselves, venerate who they were and honor
their unique heritage.
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Mrs Rosalie Pazant who
worked at Savannah State College at the time
was retiring soon but she wanted to get
involved in something positive to remain
active. Some friends encouraged her to
rekindle the spirit of a local tradition
called “Decoration Day” but with an emphasis
on education and preservation. So she and
several others set out to plan what has
evolved into what has become the Gullah
Festival.
The festival is an unabashed
celebration of Gullah history, its African
roots, its unique culture and legacy. This
year the festival was held from Friday May
23 through Sunday May 25. The 2008 festival
(the twenty-second year) featured plays,
panel discussions, artistic creativity, and
assorted edutainment. But more importantly
the Gullah Festival serves as a homecoming
celebration an initiation and baptism into
Gullah culture,.
Seretha M. Tuttle, tour guide |
Most of the
festival’s activities are held on the newly renovated
waterfront area of the Beaufort River in downtown
Beaufort. This is prime land. Naturally there are
elements in Beaufort that don’t want a festival that
unashamedly celebrates being African held at that
location even though the festival brings in major
tourist revenue for the hotels and restaurants in the
region.
Nevertheless, Mrs.
Pazant and her supporters remain steadfast and
undeterred. They plan to keep having the festival far
into the future. If you want to experience what it
genuinely means to be proud to be an African on a daily
basis, attend the Beaufort Gullah Festival. In November
the historic Penn Center in St Helena Island, across the
bridge from Beaufort, also sponsors a Heritage Festival.
This celebration is another opportunity to discover the
richness and revitalizing power of the Gullah people. It
is an opportunity to see first hand the Geechee people’s
uncompromising pride in their African heritage.
I was
just as energized attending the Gullah Festival this
weekend as I was in 2000 when I went to Kemet and saw
for myself the wonders created by our ancient African
ancestors. For facilitating this experience for me, I
thank the Cheyney National Alumni Association but I
especially appreciate Mrs. Rosalie Pazant who is now 91
years old. Mrs Pazant is still the president of the
festival. I thank Mrs Pazant, her daughters who support
her and their board for holding fast to the vision
despite the myriad obstacles they’ve faced over the
years. Thank you Mrs. Rosalie Pazant!
From the Ramparts
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 |
Super Rich: A Guide to Having it All
By Russell Simmons
Russell Simmons knows firsthand that
wealth is rooted in much more than the
stock
market. True wealth has more to do with
what's in your heart than what's in your
wallet. Using this knowledge, Simmons
became one of America's shrewdest
entrepreneurs, achieving a level of
success that most investors only dream
about. No matter how much material gain
he accumulated, he never stopped lending
a hand to those less fortunate. In
Super Rich, Simmons uses his rare
blend of spiritual savvy and
street-smart wisdom to offer a new
definition of wealth-and share timeless
principles for developing an unshakable
sense of self that can weather any
financial storm. As Simmons says, "Happy
can make you money, but money can't make
you happy." |
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The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected
Poems
By
Robert Hass
The Apple Trees at Olema includes
work from Robert Hass's first five books—Field
Guide,
Praise,
Human Wishes,
Sun Under Wood, and
Time and Materials—as well as a
substantial gathering of new poems,
including a suite of elegies, a series of
poems in the form of notebook musings on the
nature of storytelling, a suite of summer
lyrics, and two experiments in pure
narrative that meditate on personal
relations in a violent world and read like
small, luminous novellas. From the
beginning, his poems have seemed entirely
his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line,
with an unwavering fidelity to human and
nonhuman nature, and formal variety and
surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking
through difficult things in ways that are
both perfectly ordinary and really unusual.
Over the years, he has added to these
qualities a range and a formal restlessness
that seem to come from a skeptical turn of
mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the
poem and of the complexity of the world of
lived experience that a poem tries to
apprehend. Hass's work is grounded in the
beauty of the physical world. His familiar
landscapes—San Francisco, the northern
California coast, the Sierra high
country—are vividly alive in his work. His
themes include art, the natural world,
desire, family life, the life between
lovers, the violence of history, and the
power and inherent limitations of language.
He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully
as he can, what it is like to be alive in
his place and time. |
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posted
14 December 2011
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