Bunce Island Cultural Preservation

Peace Corps Memories and Other Sorts of Preservation

Four former Peace Corps volunteers (PCV) gathered in Sierra Leone to talk about preservation.  Not the preservation of their old schools or left-behind shoes, but of an island.  Bunce Island, in particular, is an integral part of both American and Sierra Leonean history.  Prof Chris DeCorse and Syracuse University received an Ambassador’s Cultural Preservation grant from the Department of State to develop a cultural resource management plan for the site, which UNESCO designated as a World Heritage Site earlier this year.  He served in the Peace Corps from 1978-1980 in Koinadugu District.  Ambassador Thomas N. Hull, a former Peace Corps teacher, vied for the research grant.
 
More former PCV’s joined DeCorse’s team including Prof. Joe Opala, a former Peace Corps volunteer who worked with the National Museum 1974-78.  Opala has remained involved with the island in his historical research of the Gullah people and doing “homecoming” events with African Americans.  The US Embassy sponsored Priscilla’s Homecoming in May 2005.    Vera Viditz-Ward, also a former Peace Corps Volunteer, photographed the team’s work and the Island's archaeological features.   Her work is also visible in the National Museum with an exhibit of photos of Paramount chiefs. 
 
Also on the team were senior archaeological technician Bossman Murey from the University of Ghana, archaeologist Marcos Souza of Brazil, and Andrew  Pietruszka, a  doctoral student in archeology at Syracuse  University.  They were joined by Victor Farma, a Fourah Bay College graduate, Abu-Bakar Nylander from the Sierra Leone National Museum, and a team of local surveyors from Techsult & Co Ltd, Sierra Leone.
 
Bunce Island is located on the Rice Coast of West Africa in the Sierra Leone River. The island was declared Sierra Leone’s first officially protected historical site in 1948 and it boasts as being the place of ancestry for over 12,000 African-Americans in South Carolina and Georgia. British slave traders operated on Bunce Island from 1668-1807 and about 50,000 people were sent to slavery in the West Indies and North America from the Island.   During the Treaty of Paris negotiations for US independence, Henry Laurens, who was President of the Continental Congress and Charleston’s Bunce Island agent, colluded with Richard Oswarld, who was the British negotiator and Bunce Island’s owner, to include treaty terms that would perpetuate slavery in the new United States.  Those terms, which hinged on Bunce Island, influenced our Constitution and led ultimately to our Civil War.  The ancestors of the Gullah people brought from the Rice Coast of West Africa were concentrated and mainly left alone by the Europeans, which contributes to the fact that the Gullah people have retained a large part of their traditional African culture unlike many other African-Americans. Joseph Opala researched the connection between Bunce Island and the Gullah people beginning in the 1970’s.  DeCorse’s work is a platform for future studies and the collaboration of various citizens, interest groups, Monuments and Relics Commission and the government of Sierra Leone to preserve the Bunce Island and the collective history it contains. 
 
Bunce Island Photo Gallery