The Old History Books Are Wrong
Amadu Massally
History often tells us the Gullah Geechee people are “survivors.”
That is true. It is also too small.
Starting tomorrow, I will publish one letter a day for all of February. Each letter is drawn from the Laurens–Oswald paper trail.
These men wrote to each other as if they were discussing business. What they actually left behind is testimony.
For generations, the story has been that Africans were brought to the Lowcountry for muscle. But inside these letters is a different truth. They did not only demand “labor.” They demanded expertise.
They chased people from particular places and networks along the Rice Coast because Europeans had land, but lacked the knowledge to make it live.
You will see the mechanics.
You will see the language they used to turn human beings into inventory.
You will also see what they quietly admitted with their choices: that the economy they built depended on African intelligence they could not produce themselves.
Here is the warning.
If you think the Gullah Geechee story is only folklore, baskets, and cuisine, you are not ready for what this paper will reveal.
This series will trace the connections from the African coast to the Lowcountry and outward into the wider Atlantic world. Not as a legend. As a record.
We belong here not only because we suffered here.
We belong here because our expertise is part of the foundation this country stands on.
Tomorrow, we open the ledger.
Amadu Massally
“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
—Dr. Paul Farmer
Chief Strategist & Co-founder
Amadu Massally
1748: The Takeover
How a Scottish merchant turned a ruin into a human factory
Note on method & sources (brief): This series is letter-led—one document per day—anchored in The Papers of Henry Laurens (South Carolina Historical Society / University of South Carolina Press) and the Laurens–Oswald correspondence preserved within that archival record. The evidence is not new; the posture is. I read these documents through African historical context that predates European intervention, including the Mali → Mane → Rice Coast continuum. Secondary scholarship (including David Hancock’s Citizens of the World) appears only when it helps name patterns already visible in the primary sources.
DAY 1 (Feb 1)
If you want to understand what comes next in these letters, start here: with a purchase.
In 1748, a London-based consortium led by Richard Oswald acquired the lease to a battered trading fort on Bunce Island in the Sierra Leone River. Partners in the deal included merchants such as Alexander Grant and John Sargent.
Before that takeover, the site had already lived a hard, unstable life. Early operations were tied to crown-chartered trading, including the Royal African Company. But Bunce was raided in 1728 by a Luso-African competitor, José Lopez da Moura, and the post fell into disuse for years before private merchant management revived it.
A casual observer could look at that transaction and say, “Oswald bought a ruin.”
A system-builder would call it something else: a choke point.
Aerial photograph of Bunce Island (Bance Island), Sierra Leone. Courtesy of Travelgate Africa.
Bunce Island was not valuable only as a fort. It was
valuable as a machine position. It sat where river routes from the interior met
ocean routes to the Americas. Control the node, and you control the flow.
This is where the business model matters.
In Citizens of the World, David Hancock shows how London merchants built power through networks: partners, credit, information, agents, and reputation. Apply that logic here, and the “takeover” reads less like repair and more like redesign.[i]
Bunce becomes a processing operation:
- Not merely a place to trade, but a site to sort, hold, inspect, and ship human beings with predictable throughput.
- Not merely defenses, but surveillance and control over yards where people were confined in open-air pens, visible and exposed.
This is the moment the series truly begins, even before the first dated letter appears.
Because once a place is rebuilt as a factory, the paperwork changes. The language changes. People become “cargo,” “specimens,” “prime,” “refuse,” “loss.” Profit becomes the measure of breath.
And soon, in the correspondence between Henry Laurens and Oswald, you will see the next step: not only the buying of human beings, but the targeting of expertise along the Rice Coast to engineer a specific economy in Carolina.
Proof window (Day 1): Bunce Island’s private-management era is described as one in which the island rose to prosperity under London firms after the earlier company phase ended in 1728.
Tomorrow, we move from the node to the paper.
Tomorrow, the letters start speaking.
Question: What changes when we treat 1748 not as the start of our story, but as the moment a system tried to purchase African expertise and turn it into profit?
[i] In Citizens of the World, David Hancock describes how London merchants built power through networks of partners, credit, information, agents, and reputation
Day 1 – Sources
Primary:
· Henry Laurens Papers (manuscripts and/or microfilm). South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston.
· Richard Oswald correspondence / papers (manuscript collections; consult holding repositories and finding aids).
Secondary (context only):
· David Hancock, Citizens of the World: London Merchants and the Integration of the British Atlantic Community, 1735–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
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“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
—Dr. Paul Farmer
Chief Strategist & Co-founder
Amadu Massally
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“The idea that some lives matter less is the root of all that's wrong with the world.”
—Dr. Paul Farmer
Chief Strategist & Co-founder