The Gullah Geechee Saga: Through African Eyes
Amadu Massally
The Gullah Geechee Saga: Through African Eyes
Book One of A Diaspora Storyteller’s Compass
Esteemed colleagues, cultural stewards, and fellow architects of memory —
It is with profound gratitude and purpose that I announce the release of The Gullah Geechee Saga: Through African Eyes, a work that seeks to expand our collective understanding of the African diaspora by restoring an essential perspective often missing in academic discourse: the African vantage point.
This book explores the Gullah Geechee story not as a closed chapter of American history, but as a continuum of African knowledge systems, cultural technologies, and linguistic brilliance that survived rupture and reinvention.
What Makes This Work Distinct for Academic and Cultural Fields
1. A Rare Primary Perspective — “Through African Eyes”
As a Sierra Leonean who has spent nearly two decades immersed in Gullah Geechee communities, I write not as an external scholar but as a cultural interlocutor.
This vantage point challenges prevailing narratives by foregrounding:
West African epistemologies
Rice Coast cultural continuities
Linguistic parallels with Gullah and Krio
Community-based documentation of living traditions
This book is not an external commentary — it is an insider’s contribution from both sides of the Atlantic.
2. A Multi-Disciplinary Framework for Diaspora Studies
The Saga brings together:
Ethnohistorical research
Linguistic analysis
Fieldwork
Oral tradition
Cultural anthropology
Memory studies
Archival deconstruction
It treats the Atlantic not as a boundary but as a bridge of continuities.
3. Correcting Archival Silences
This volume interrogates the Atlantic slave trade not only as an economic system, but as a curated extraction of African brilliance.
It reveals how enslaved Africans carried knowledge in:
Rice cultivation
Tidal irrigation
Metallurgy
Cosmologies
Kinship structures
Naming traditions
Language and prosody
These are presented as systems of knowledge—not artifacts of nostalgia.
4. A Living Complement to Public Scholarship
My return journey to Sierra Leone and the Gullah Geechee Corridor was documented in the PBS/SCETV film Gullah Roots, now viewed by over 260 million people.
The book expands on the scholarship behind that journey, offering deeper analysis and broader frameworks for researchers, educators, and cultural workers.
An Invitation to Scholars, Preservationists & Artists
I offer this book to those who work at the intersections of:
African diaspora studies
Gullah Geechee research
Linguistics and Creole studies
Atlantic World history
Cultural heritage and preservation
Museum and archival practice
African and African American studies
Performance and oral tradition
Material culture and craft lineage
Public history and documentary film
This work is intended as a tool, a provocation, and a bridge.
A tool for researchers.
A provocation for institutions.
A bridge for descendants seeking clarity and continuity.
Why This Book Matters Now
We are living in a moment where cultural histories are being contested, erased, or flattened.
This book argues that diasporic identity is not static — it is a living, evolving archive.
The Gullah Geechee Saga insists that:
cultural retention is not coincidence
language survival is not accident
resistance is not interruption
and the diaspora is not a wound alone, but a vector of brilliance
It is time to shift the frame from “what survived?” to “how did genius persist despite rupture?”
For Those Doing the Work of Memory
I invite you — scholars, archivists, linguists, curators, preservationists, artists, and educators — to engage with this volume as part of a larger intellectual and cultural mission:
To reconstruct the pathways that were obscured.
To reclaim the knowledge that was undervalued.
To honor the ancestors who engineered survival under unimaginable conditions.
Join the Circle
If you teach, curate, research, create, preserve, or interpret the Black Atlantic, I welcome you to sit at this table.
The work of reassembly belongs to all of us.
The hush is not emptiness — it is instruction.
The Saga is ready for the world.
Asé.
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“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
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