What ties South Carolinians to the people who call Barbados and Bahamas home?
Rice and sugarcane to the Gullah Geechee language make up some of the significant ties between Black peoples from the Lowcountry region of the Carolinas and Barbadians in the Caribbean. Considering the groups’ historical entanglements, their similarities have roots that are far from coincidental and go deeper than the indigo cultivated in the regions.
“Barbados is South Carolina…[it] is the colony that creates the Carolinas,” shares Sean Palmer, the executive of the YMI Cultural Center in Asheville, North Carolina. “[I]n fact, [they are] like cousins.”
Established as a British Commonwealth in the 17th Century, after English ships from Barbados and Bermuda sailed there, South Carolina became a lucrative depot described as a “colony of a colony.” For hundreds of years, merchants traded in commodities and also in humans. As the routes crisscrossed, the retention of culture in the generations of exchange remains. So much so, the congruity throws some folks off.
“I know y’all [Caribbeans] think y’all different from us…Like y’all spicy Black,” Palmer chuckled to himself. However, “[e]verytime I take people who are from the Caribbean to Charleston and [the Lowcountry], they [say] they sound like us.”
Palmer’s point is one that sometimes stings in conversations regarding the cultural and political tensions amongst U.S.-born Blacks and those from the West Indies. Palmer, who taught about Gullah Geechee culture at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, makes plain how the pervasive narrative attempts to convey the idea that folks from the regions carry customs as cavernous as the oceans separating them. For Palmer, history shows another lens.
“We as Black people, whether it be Caribbean, African, [or] African American, suffer the same kind of thing that all people suffer and it’s three words…the human condition,” Julian Phillips, an Emmy award-winning journalist and political analyst, told Ark Republic. Phillips is also an author.
Emmy award-winning journalist and political analyst Phillips emphasized. “I mean it’s just absolutely insane how humans are able to create these divisions based upon really nothing, but it happens.”
Same boat, different stops
Barbados rose to prominence as the richest English colony by the late 1660s because of sugarcane production. The relatively abrupt rise in sugar wealth transformed the Bajan economy and society. The island’s new way of life soon spread to other English territories in the West Indies.
Along with the increased income came a population explosion. By 1670, Barbados was thought to have 60,000 residents, with 60% of those being enslaved Blacks. Coupled with the over-planting of sugarcane, widespread deforestation depleted the island’s soil.
As fertile land dwindled for sugarcane production, or the harvesting of any other cash crop like rice, plantation owners started to consider the thirteen British colonies in America’s northern provinces.
The Genesis
When British, French, along with Dutch colonial authorities arrived in the U.S., they assessed the southern Carolina region and settled in 1670. “[The colonizers] realized the climate [was] conducive to crop development of some sort,” Palmer told Ark Republic. So, “all those rich planter families [were] given passage to the Americas…the Carolinas specifically.”
Once the colony launched, Sullivans Island, a small isle off the coast of Charleston, was used as a port of entry. Borrowing the governance of Barbados, the nascent South Carolina also transferred its slave system. Consequently, European slave holders brought enslaved Africans and the indigenous that were left, to begin cultivating the rice industry. Unlike sugarcane, which had a five-year life expectancy, rice thrived for seven—indicating the grain could yield a profit for a longer, yet back-breaking period of time.
Likewise, even more slave traders, like Sephardic Jews, entered the rice trade. Much like Barbados, the religious freedom in what was eventually to be known as South Carolina attracted those escaping religious persecution. With an ideology that the territory was known for investors to obtain wealth in a relatively short amount of time, the new state welcomed them and their wallets.
As rice gained popularity during the final decades of the 17th century, so did the proportion of forced Black labor in a chattel slave system.
“[T]he initial African population [moved] to the Carolina colonies…[and built] the inner coastal waterway,” detailed scholar and ethnographer, Althea Sumpter. Both to reinforce “rice growing and building the economy.”
Using contemporary mapping methods, researchers discovered that 160 miles of the coast, from Georgetown and Horry counties to the South Carolina-Georgia border, were originally covered by approximately 236,000 acres of rice fields, built on the backs of the Gullah Geechee ancestors.
When the cash crop’s economic power waned, a cultural legacy of those who worked the rice fields and plantation systems, wove through South Carolina and Barbados. Moreover, this connection is part of a chain of Black folk along coastal Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Florida that make up what is called the Gullah Geechee ethnic group.
Preserving the legacy, protecting the culture
Fortunately, there are people working on the preservation of what connects the descendants of enslaved Africans, and what are distinguishable traditions.
It’s important to know this, particularly for people of color, because “unfortunately, [for] folks who don’t look like us…we’re all just Black to them. It doesn’t make any difference,” observed Julian Phillips.
A custom forged was a common tongue, an English-based Creole language also known as “Gullah” or “Geechee.” The Gullah Geechee vernacular contains distinctive features of the African languages spoken by their enslaved ancestors. The word Gullah comes from Angola, a country located in west-central Africa. It also has strong ties to the Sierra Leonean “Krio” language. To this day, descendants of freed slaves in the West African nation are known as “Krio.” Scholars also pin the language to Barbados.
There is more than dialect connecting the U.S. and Caribbean cousins. Farther into the Lowcountry, we find St. Helena Island–a location that is integral to Gullah Geechee culture. There, the successors kept their Carolina-Caribbean customs and language alive in the centuries since. One being the masquerade ceremony, Junkanoo, that “[is] still celebrated in North Carolina,” as reported by Palmer.
Junkanoo is a community procession of masqueraders celebrating a holiday or special occasion. Found in the Bahamas and Jamaica, the custom shows old traditions from African and indigenous cultures steeped in rituals of performance and identity. Going north of the Caribbean, as early as the 1800s, Junkanoo or Jonkonnu has been documented as a part of Christmas festivities.
Similarities in language and masquerade, though major connections, are just the start. Resemblances of the architecture of Charleston, the single-structure house, are found in Barbados, and cuisine, such as the use of the herbs thyme and garlic.
Knowledge is power
For decades, Gullah Geechee peoples have been fighting ongoing land grabs by developers. With the real estate standoffs, their traditions and histories face erasure.
The current president’s defunding of historical repositories such as the Civil Rights museum in Montgomery, Alabama, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. threatens the livelihood of efforts to keep the Carolina-Caribbean history alive.
“Unfortunately, the Trump Administration, [is] trying to lessen the amount of truth that gets out there,” noted Phillips. He continues, by expounding that the new Administration does not “want DEI or anything that deals with [anybody] other than people that look like them [to be acknowledged for their essential role in the creation of American history and institutions].”
Despite this, the Barbadian legacy continues to impact the Gullah Geechee culture today, maintaining the centuries-old cultural ties.
