The Charleston Society for the Preservation of Spirituals did not indicate where it collected its version of "Come by Here." For most of the other songs, it provided the name of an island, river, town, parish, or plantation. They were spread from the Santee River north of Charleston to Beaufort.
To know something about the performers then requires learning more about the Gullah-speaking slaves in coastal South Carolina than appeared in earlier posts. [1]
Lorenzo Dow Turner documented the presence of some 4,000 African words in Gullah in the early 1930s. His primary South Carolina sources were individuals living on Edisto Island, Saint Helena Island near Beaufort, and Johns and Wadmalaw islands near Charleston. He also talked to people from two other locations mentioned by the Charleston Society, Bluffton and James Island. [2]
P. E. H. Hair found 30% of the general terms Turner collected were used by the Yorùbá of modern Nigeria; 25% were from Sierra Leone, home of the Mende, and 20% were Kongo. More important, 65% of the words retained in ritual and narrative materials, like stories, songs, and prayers, were Mende. The Vai of neighboring, modern Liberia contributed 21%. [3]
This mirrors Gwendolyn Midlo Hall’s analysis of shipping manifests in The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade database. [4] From 1801 to 1807, most of the captives who arrived in Charleston were from Kongo, Sierra Leone, and the Gold Coast of modern Ghana. Between 1750 and 1775, when 43% of South Carolina and Georgia’s total slave population was imported, [5] the largest number came from modern Sénégal-Gambia and Sierra Leone. The Gold Coast and Kongo were a distant third and fourth. [6]
These groups came from different parts of the continent, and had cultures that began developing at different times. The earliest evidence for humanoid evolution has been found in Ethiopia by archaeologists. Lucy’s remains were discovered in 1974 by Donald Johansen in the Afar section of the Great Rift Valley. [7]
Geneticists attempted to define what happened next by looking at genomes that could be distinguished by particular clusters of mutations called haplogroups. Those based on variations associated with the paternal Y chromosome located the center of diversity in Cameroon, the silver star on the map below. [8]
Scientists assigned letters in chronological order, so that the A group was the earliest. The current location of individuals carrying that genome was only a relic of the past. New groups tended to displace earlier ones that then survived in remote areas. The large A area along the southeastern Atlantic coast coincided with the Kalahari Desert.
After the migration out of Africa during the Ice Age that led to the development of the C and D groups, the next major mutation emerged with the E group in Ethiopia. It eventually filled the continent.
Linguists’ attempts at reconstructing the development of African languages created a more nuanced interpretation of the movement of the E group. As shown in the map below, the A haplogroup appeared as the light-yellow population of Khoi-San speakers.
The primary language family of group E in sub-Saharan African was the Niger-Congo that spanned the area below the Sénégal river east along the Niger to the drainage of the Congo. [9] Kay Williamson argued that, "on the basis of the principle of least moves," the original homeland was the confluence on the Benue and Niger rivers at Lokoja in central Nigeria. From there its speakers spread west, east, and south subdividing as they migrated. [10]
As succeeding groups moved west they either absorbed the earlier populations or forced them to relocate. Thus, three major Niger-Congo subfamilies appear in the map for western Africa.
To the west of the Volta subgroups, the rose-colored Mandé was a separate, coherent clade.
Gerrit Dimmendaal and Anne Storch suggested "The internal diversification within Greenberg’s West Atlantic (or Atlantic in current terminology) indeed was so huge that some scholars would argue that it is primarily an areal grouping representing a number of independent, early descendants of Niger-Congo." [11]
David Sapir found enough commonalities within the Atlantic group to propose two sub-groups an early Southern Mel, and a later Northern Mel. [12] Gola was part of the earlier group that was expanding "about 2500 years ago" in what is now Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea. [13]
The migration south by the Bantu (tan on the map) came after the moves west. One characteristic of linguistic and genetic evolution was greater diversity in earlier areas than later zones, simply because not enough time had passed for variation to develop in the younger regions.
Graphics
1. U. S. Geological Survey, National Atlas. "Average Rainfall for South Carolina." Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Thegreatdr on 18 March 2008. The dark area near the coast where tidal rice was grown is the darker green.
Total of spirituals collected along the Santee River includes Santee River.
Charleston includes Back River, Charleston, Cooper River, Grayton Hall, Goose Creek, James Island, Red Top.
Edisto Island includes Christ Church Parish, Edisto Island, and Saint Andrews Parish.
Beaufort includes Ashepoo River Plantation, Beaufort, Bluffton, and Tomotley Plantation.
Berkeley County includes Pinopolis and Upper St Johns Parish.
Hampton County includes McPhersonville and Pocotaligo.
No location mentioned: 6
Two locations mentioned: 6
2. Section of Irish. "World Map of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups - Dominant Haplogroups in Pre-Colonial Populations with Possible Migrations Routes." Wikimedia Commons. 6 July 2018.
3. Ulamm. "Niger-Congo Languages." Wikimedia Commons. 28 October 2007.
End Notes
1. The Charleston Society and the development of rice plantations in South Carolina were discussed in a series posted between 6 January 2019 and 20 January 2019. Gullah was described in the post for 6 January 2019.
2. Lorenzo Dow Turner. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition. Gullah vocabulary, chapter 3; list of informants, 291-292. He also collected from people living along the Georgia coast and on its islands.
3. P. E. H. Hair. "Sierra Leone Items in the Gullah Dialect of American English." Sierra Leone Language Review 4:79-84:1965.
4. David Eltis, David Richardson, Stephen D. Behrendt, and Herbert S. Klein. The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
5. David Eltis, Philip Morgan, and David Richardson. "Agency and Diaspora in Atlantic History: Reassessing the African Contribution to Rice Cultivation in the Americas." The American Historical Review 112 (2007): 1329–1358, table 1. The other 57% was spread over one hundred thirty years.
6. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall. "Figure 4.1. Atlantic Slave Trade Voyages to South Carolina (1701-1807)." 94 in Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
7. Wikipedia. "Lucy (Australopithecus)."
8. Wikipedia. "Haplogroup."
9. John T. Bendor-Samuel. "Niger-Congo languages." Encyclopædia Britannica website. 26 July 1999; last updated 21 November 2017.
10. Kay Williamson’s work evolved in a number of papers including "Towards reconstructing Proto-Niger-Congo." 49-70 in Proceedings of the 2nd World Congress of African Linguistics, Leipzig 1997. Edited by H. E. Wolff and O. Gensler. Cologne: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2000.
11. Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and Anne Storch. "Niger-Congo: A Brief State of the Art." Oxford Handbooks Online. February 2016. Joseph H. Greenberg created the first accepted taxonomy in The Languages of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University, 1963.
12. J. D. Sapir. "West Atlantic: An Inventory of the Languages, Their Noun Class Systems and Consonant Alteration." Current Trends in Linguistics 7:45-112:1971. Discussed by B. W. Andah. "The Peoples of Upper Guinea (between the Ivory Coast and the Casamance)." 530-558 in Africa from the Seventh to the Eleventh Century. Edited by M. El Fasi. Paris: UNESCO, 1988. 539.
13. Andah. 552.
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