54 Facts About Joseph Opala

Joseph Opala was the first scholar to recognize that Bunce Island has greater importance for the Gullah than any other West African slave castle.

Joseph 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.

Joseph Opala 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.

Joseph Opala 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.

The Sierra Leone media first coined the phrase, "Gullah Connection," for the family ties which Joseph Opala has brought to light.

Joseph Opala 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.

Joseph Opala's work has helped Gullahs recognize their links to African traditions.

Joseph Opala is a dual citizen of the US and Sierra Leone.

Joseph Opala was born in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma in 1950.

Joseph Opala's father was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during the war, and lost all contact with his surviving family in Poland during the Cold War period that followed.

Joseph Opala grew up immersed in the effects of World and the separation of families.

Joseph Opala spent his summers doing volunteer work in the Oklahoma Historical Society archives.

Joseph Opala did independent ethnographic research among the Lacandon Indians in Southern Mexico.

Joseph Opala did post-graduate study at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London.

Joseph Opala 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.

Joseph Opala 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.

Joseph Opala took his discoveries to Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital city.

Joseph Opala conducted research there under the Peace Corps's aegis through 1977, then spent another year doing further research under a grant from the US National Endowment for the Humanities.

Joseph Opala drew on history, archaeology, and oral traditions to learn more.

Joseph Opala found historical evidence that British slave traders controlled Bunce Island during its entire history.

Joseph Opala interviewed the Temne elders on the neighboring islands about their oral histories related to Bunce Island.

Joseph Opala 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.

Joseph Opala discovered that many of the slaves who passed through Bunce Island were shipped to South Carolina and Georgia.

Joseph Opala 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.

Joseph Opala wanted to return to Sierra Leone to share this new information with its people.

Joseph Opala lectured in the Institute of African Studies at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College from 1985 to 1992, using his academic base to advance his Gullah Connection work.

Joseph Opala acted as an adviser on cultural policy to President Joseph Saidu Momoh and the US Ambassadors who served in Sierra Leone at that time.

Joseph Opala established a relationship with the US National Park Service, and during his trips back to the US, he convinced NPS officials to send an expert team to survey Bunce Island in 1989.

That same month, Joseph Opala took Colin Powell to Bunce Island, and after seeing it, Powell was deeply moved.

Joseph Opala later described the experience in his autobiography, My American Journey.

Joseph Opala worked with Emory Campbell, Penn Center's director, and the US Park Service on the early planning stage of what ultimately became the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a national heritage area covering the entire Gullah region, including the coastal plain and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, and adjoining parts of coastal North Carolina and Florida.

Joseph Opala organized workshops at Penn Center on the Sierra Leone-Gullah Connection for local teachers and cultural activists.

Joseph Opala lectured on the Gullahs' links to Sierra Leone at colleges, museums, and community centers in the Low Country.

Joseph Opala brought several Sierra Leonean social activists to Penn Center, as well, who talked about their country's civil war and encouraged the Gullahs, as US citizens, to speak out on behalf of their African cousins.

Joseph Opala helped organize several reunions between the Gullahs and their Black Seminole cousins in Oklahoma, Texas, and Northern Mexico.

Joseph Opala organized a symposium at Penn Center that brought Black Seminole leaders to the Gullah region for the first time, and he helped organize return visits by Gullah leaders to Black Seminole communities in Oklahoma and Texas.

Joseph Opala later submitted a report to the US Park Service suggesting ways to incorporate Bunce Island and Black Seminole historic sites into the Gullah-Geechee Corridor in the future.

Joseph Opala taught at James Madison University in Virginia from 1999 to 2010, using his academic position, whenever possible, to advance his "Gullah Connection" work.

Joseph Opala organized Priscilla's Homecoming to Sierra Leone in 2005, and the following year, curated an exhibit, called "Finding Priscilla's Children," at the New-York Historical Society that later traveled to museums in South Carolina.

Joseph Opala worked with the Africana Heritage Project at the University of South Florida that produced an online database that will enable thousands of other African Americans to link their own family histories to Priscilla.

In 2007, Joseph Opala helped establish the "Bunce Island Coalition " at a meeting in Washington, DC attended by two former US Ambassadors to Sierra Leone, prominent Sierra Leoneans living in the US, Gullah community leaders, and former Peace Corps volunteers.

In 2010, a wealthy private donor pledged $5 million for the project, and Joseph Opala went to Sierra Leone right away to act as the project coordinator.

Joseph Opala maintains that about a quarter of the Black Loyalists were originally Gullahs from South Carolina and Georgia.

Joseph Opala organized these events in collaboration with the Sierra Leone Government, the US Embassy in Sierra Leone, and Gullah community leaders in the US Joseph Opala helped produce the documentary films that chronicle the first two homecomings: Family Across the Sea and The Language You Cry In.

Joseph Opala worked with the Sierra Leone Government to arrange the Moran family's homecoming, and helped produce the documentary film The Language You Cry In that chronicles this remarkable story.

Joseph Opala completed the story when he found the records of the slave ship Hare, that brought Priscilla from Sierra Leone to Charleston, and the slave auction accounts that record her sale to a South Carolina rice planter.

Joseph Opala developed a website on "Priscilla's Homecoming", maintained by Yale University.

Joseph Opala curated an exhibit at the New-York Historical Society called, Finding Priscilla's Children: The Roots and Branches of Slavery.

In 2010, Joseph Opala announced the start of a $5 million project to preserve Bunce Island.

Joseph Opala was then director of a non-profit called the Bunce Island Coalition, whose goal is to halt the erosion that threatens the island, stabilize the ruins, and construct a modern historic park.

Joseph Opala's group wants to build a museum in Freetown devoted to Bunce Island's history and its impact in both Sierra Leone and the Americas.

The Bunce Island project quickly gained international attention, and in October 2011 Joseph Opala guided Britain's Princess Anne through the ruins.

In 2013, Joseph Opala handed the project over to his Sierra Leonean colleagues in the Bunce Island Coalition, though he continues to serve as the group's historical adviser.

The homecomings Joseph Opala organized focused national attention on the Gullah Connection in Sierra Leone, and the people of that country responded with enthusiasm.