Cymraeg

America Gaeth a'r Cymry

The Slaves

Loss of language

As Welsh people, we like to think that we know what it means to live under the shadow of the disappearance of our culture and language, but this cannot prepare us for the scale of the linguistic loss as millions of Africans were snatched from their homes and sold in America.

Palmetto trees

"Seasoning"

It was a policy to separate slaves of the same nation from each other, in order to ensure that they could not communicate together in a language their masters did not understand, and therefore they were forced to learn English. "Seasoning" was the word for this process of breaking their will until they accepted all the conditions of their slavery, including the loss of language, culture and history, which was implicit in that.

"Roots" Alex Haley

Roots, Alex Haley

The examples of African words that have survived are comparatively rare. In his famous book "Roots" (1976) Alex Haley describes how the memory of his great, great, great grandfather, Kunta Kinte, who had been snatched from Africa back in 1767, was handed down through several generations.

Gullah language

There is one area where the black community has retained more of a hold on its African linguistic heritage, namely the Gullah area. The word Gullah describes the language and culture of the islands and coastline of the Carolinas and Georgia.

Slave family from Georgia

Here, because malaria was such a problem, the slave masters tended to leave their plantations under the care of African overseers, and as a result of this, and the fact that many of these areas were so remote, they have been able to retain some measure of separation.

Gullah is a creole language based on English, but includes a number of words borrowed from African languages,

buckra: white man
bidi: chicken
nyam: eat

and is also quite similar to West African languages in structure.

Dis de we bus: This is our bus
Dem chillun binnuh nyam all we rice: Those children were always eating our rice

Former slave Millie Williams

Amelia Dawley's song

However, the only complete sentences of an African language that have survived were in a song recorded by the linguist Lorenzo Turner in 1931. He came across Amelia Dawley, a fifty year old woman, and recorded her singing a song taught to her by her mother. She did not know the meaning of the words; something for mothers to entertain their children, that's all.

It was later understood that they were words from the Mende language and in 1997 Amelia's daughter, who also knew the song, was taken to the village in Sierra Leone where the song originated. It was not a children's song after all, but part of a burial ritual entitled "teijami" or "crossing the river".

Mende song recorded at Harris
Neck, Georgia in 1931

It had almost been forgotten in Sierra Leone as well, as the burial ritual had been superseded to a large extent since Christianity took root in the area one or two generations ago.

The history of this amazing meeting can be seen in the DVD "The Language you Cry in".

Here are the words to the song:

a wαkα mu mαnε kambεi ya lε; li, lε:i tαmbε
a wαkα mu mαnε kambεi ya lε; li, lε:i ka
ha sa wuli ηgo sihã; kpaηga li lε:
ha sa wuli ηgo ndεli, ndi, ka
ha sa wuli ηgo sihã; ya kwεndai ya

(Come, all, to dig a grave, its not ready, may he rest in peace
Come, all, to dig a grave, its not ready, may he rest soon in peace
Sudden death surprises us, like a shot from a gun
Sudden death surprises the tribe's older men
Sudden death surprises us, like drums from afar)