Fieldwork

EFFORTS UNDER WAY TO SAVE WEST AFRICAN SLAVE FORTRESS

BY HERB FRAZIER

Charleston Post and Courier

May 2, 2005 

FREETOWN, SIERRA LEONE--When Thomas Hull arrived here last year as the top U.S. diplomat, he told the president of this West African nation that part of his mission is preserving a local historic site with ties to Charleston. Hull has applied for a $30,000 grant from the U.S. State Department's Ambassador's Fund for Cultural Preservation to develop a plan to halt the decay of the crumbling ruins of a former British-owned slave fortress on Bunce Island on Africa's rice coast.

From Bunce Island, a tiny strip of land deep within Freetown Harbor, enslaved Africans were shipped thousands of miles to rice plantations in the Caribbean, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida between 1670 and 1808.

It is estimated that 50,000 people passed through Bunce on their way to the New World. From that group, about 10,000 of them were sold into slavery in Charleston, Savannah and St. Augustine, Fla. After they were plucked from their families, not all of the captives survived.

Preserving the ruins, Hull said, will honor "those who died and endured the horrors of the slave trade. It is significant historically to acknowledge the horrors of the past in the hopes that never again such things happen."

Using State Department money to preserve Bunce could validate the efforts of Bunce Island Preservation Inc., which also is soliciting money in the United States, said Hull, who first visited the island in early 1969 as a Peace Corps volunteer.

People on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean agree that Bunce merits care. But the kind of care is under some debate. While Hull and others advocate preservation, the Sierra Leone government wants Bunce restored as a tourist site for this impoverished nation that emerged two years ago from nearly a decade of bloody conflict.

Dr. C.A. Jalloh is the country's minister of tourism and culture in President Ahmad Tejan Kabbah's cabinet. Because of the conflict, Sierra Leone is "seriously constrained by resources to sell the country to the outside world," Jalloh said. "But we believe that gradually we will spread the word that Sierra Leone is at peace."

Bunce is part of that marketing plan, particularly to black Americans, he said.

The island has a more direct link to the United States than any other slave fortress in West Africa, he said. Jalloh is calling for Bunce's ruins to be preserved and later rebuilt "to strengthen the link with our brothers and sisters in America."

John Lee of Concord, Mass., is chairman of the 50-member Bunce Island Preservation. He said restoring the island's buildings that housed European workers would be ideal, but money to do that most likely will not be available, making it imperative to first preserve the ruins.

The island was the site of crimes against humanity, said Lee, who served as Sierra Leone's ambassador to the United States from 1996 to 2002. Those crimes, he said, supported a slave trade that ruined Sierra Leone, built America and enriched England. The island should not become just a tourist site, he said, but a place of pilgrimage and a cultural site to explain the historic ties among Sierra Leone, America and England. Because of its contributions in building the United States, Lee said, Americans have an obligation to help Sierra Leone preserve Bunce and develop a trained staff to manage it.

The secluded island is about a city block wide and two blocks long. Its silence is broken by the call of wild birds and the screech of monkeys that play in the crown of trees that cover the island in a green canopy. Because of the island's isolation, bits of clay pipes, musket balls and shards of pottery that litter the ground have gone undisturbed. The pieces are remnants of the daily life of Europeans and Africans who lived on the land to oversee the captives.

If Hull's plan is funded, archaeologist Chris DeCorse of Syracuse University will spend about a month at Bunce creating a detailed map. "The work that is planned is intended to provide an assessment of the archaeological resources that are there so we can better manage the site, so its significance to the past is not lost," he said.

The ultimate scope of the work, he said, which later could include archaeological digs at Bunce, will depend on how much money is raised.

Joseph Opala, who teaches history at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., said other West African slave fortresses sent more captives to the Americas, but Bunce sent a higher ratio of its human cargo to North America, particularly South Carolina, Georgia and Florida.

Bunce could get more attention, Opala said, if the U.S. Senate approves a bill to preserve Gullah/Geechee culture. The bill, sponsored by Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., has passed the U.S. House. The bill would establish five cultural centers in South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and North Carolina. A 15-member commission would oversee the centers. Gullah/Geechee people are descendants of enslaved Africans. In South Carolina, the culture is called Gullah. Georgians prefer Geechee.

Opala, who like DeCorse is a former Peace Corps volunteer to Sierra Leone, said cultural centers could include information about Bunce, leading people to a site in Africa with a link to Gullah/Geechee culture. But some black Americans might not want to visit Bunce because of its ties with slavery.

Wilson Moran, who lives near the Harris Neck wildlife preserve south of Savannah, recently declined an offer to visit Bunce a second time. In March 1997, Moran first visited the island when he traveled to Sierra Leone with his mother, Mary Moran, who made a cultural connection with a Sierra Leonean woman, Baindu Jabati. Both women sing the same Mende funeral song they learned from women in their families. The song is believed to have been brought to America in the 1700s by an enslaved Mende woman.

The story of the song is told in the documentary "The Language You Cry In." In the documentary, the Moran family visited Bunce Island. At one point during the film, Wilson Moran said he would not want to immediately return to Bunce.

He held to that pledge recently when he declined an invitation to visit Bunce. "I will come back, maybe later," he said. "It was such a sad place. It hit me so hard, it will take me awhile to recover."

Moran said his choice to avoid Bunce shouldn't dissuade others.

It is best, Moran said, to visit Bunce first. If not, a visit to the island at the end of a tour of Freetown would be anticlimactic, he said. "People need to go to Bunce Island to get the spiritual feeling of what happened to our ancestors before they came to America."