Linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner studied the language of the Gullah Geechee residents of coastal Georgia in the 1930s. He recorded Amelia Dawley singing a song in another language that she was taught by her grandmother. No one knew what the song said, or where it came from, but it had been passed down through Dawley’s family from her grandmother Catherine, who was kidnapped in Africa and enslaved on a coastal rice plantation in America in the early 1800s. A student from Sierra Leone recognized the lyrics in the recording as being of the Mende language.
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Decades later, anthropologist Joseph Opala took a recording of Dawley’s song to Sierra Leone. His colleague, ethnomusicologist Cynthia Schmidt, searched through villages in that country to find anyone who might recognize the song. In 1990, she finally found one woman, Baindu Jabati, in an isolated village called Senehun Ngola, who sang a song she learned from her grandmother. It was the same song. Her family had preserved it for hundreds of years.
Since the song contains about 50 words, it’s “almost certainly the longest text in an African language ever preserved by an African American family,” says Opala. “By comparison, [Roots author] Alex Haley was led to his roots in the Gambia by about five or six words in Mandinka.”
Through this song, Amelia Dawley’s family was traced to a specific area in Sierra Leone. Dawley’s daughter, Mary Moran, was 11 years old when the recording was made. She met Baindu Jabati in 1997, as seen above. Read how the preservation of a song in its original language led to the breakthrough in a family’s history at Smithsonian.
(Image courtesy of Sharon Maybarduk)
Source: neatorama