00:00.00 alifeinruins Welcome back to episode one sixty five of life of everyone's podcast. David and I are talking about rice and you had mentioned and kind of tease in the previous segment something about the the the goal geechi. Do you mind explaining what that is and or who they are I just have and I have 0 idea what. But this is a reference to. 00:20.84 David Howe Yeah, so this is what the ah hang on I'm looking at notes I'm just going through. Um I will explain that but I have a note here that the african diaspora began when the portuguese first trafficed people from West Africa in the fifteen hundreds um so I want to start that and the african diaspora is what we would describe or what is used to describe the people who live in essentially the descendants of slaves that live are enslaved persons that live in Brazil South America North America the caribbean all over and there's also. You know other diasporas is the ukrainian diaspora now. There's a jewish diaspora that just means people displaced from their homeland but the african diaspora is by far probably the largest. Um, yeah, um, so yeah, the the gullah gechi. Um, these. 01:06.22 alifeinruins Yeah I so. 01:17.56 David Howe It's a creole that was like made in a creole language. Um, and a first I need to kind of put some more stuff into context though. But ah the the coastal areas of Africa and the inland rivers where they were taking these people and capturing them became known as the rice coast. Because it so was so much rice cultivated but they brought people because they were good at cultivating rice which is just such an odd thing to me to like like it even shows an example of like an auction sale like a flyer being like that there we have I don't want to say the word. Not the the bad word but it's the spanish word for black is you know these ones are good at rice like it. It was just like in the thing as if it was like an advertisement for cattle like it's yeah, it's still It's just so jarring. Um. 02:09.69 alifeinruins That's that's that's wild. 02:14.76 David Howe And I have a note here the atlantic slave trade peaked from 17 60 to 1780 with an estimated 65500 africans brought to the Americas Annually annually um yeah and um. 02:28.29 alifeinruins That's that's a oh my God That's an extreme amount of humans. 02:34.75 David Howe There's lots of laws that it's called the ah what are they called the lord ah Lord proprietors are like the people that the king granted land to to make you know cultivate and have slaves essentially and. A lot of them. Ah as I was saying were brought from the caribbean to ah America but all or to the United States but Charleston was the first like really big port where slave enslaved people were taken from Africa and sold here in the Americas and that's where they were. 03:01.79 alifeinruins Um. 03:12.58 David Howe Buying these people who were you know more inclined to cultivate rice better I don't know how to describe that it's just such an odd thing to say um but the rice coast in Africa is ah I have another thing here too. 03:18.50 alifeinruins Yeah. 03:30.40 David Howe 39% of the enslaved people came from Angola 20% from senegambia the windward coast is another one seventeen percent Gold Coast 13 sirerra loans 6% and Benin and Madagascar is 4.5 so angola had the most. Um, and I will that will play a role here in a minute with the gullah gechi because they think it might be because angola gula is the thing but they had 39 % of the slaves brought to Charleston were from Angola. So yeah. This creates a like as the the rice trade or not the the rice industry grows in the Southern United States um it like the rice production increased exponentially. So so did the number of enslaved people that needed to do it. And at some point like it became almost one ah hundred to one a ratio of blacks to whites I guess it's just the in areas. Um and the way that the sharecrop I keep saying sharecropper but the way that the. Plantation owners or administrators. It just has planters in the in the text. so' just say planter the way they you'd think of cotton being like the most brutal form because that's what we're most used to seeing in american movies and media. Um. 05:00.49 alifeinruins Oh. 05:02.78 David Howe But with rice cultivation. It's so labor intensive and needs so many people that the people the planters were a lot more laxed with the the rules and the punishments of the slaves and they are I'm sorry the enslaved peoples. Um and they were given free time. They had tasks that they did like you're doing this Today. You're doing this today or this week get this done and when that task was done. They had the rest of the day to do what they wanted and this gave them incentive to not run away or rebel and things like that which again is sad but also like it was just an interesting thing to learn. Um, because I always thought that it was just absolutely brutal which it is but still. 05:43.10 alifeinruins Yeah, it is It is yeah but I guess they were they were trying to play some sort of mind games or you know abuse them in a way that they wouldn't want to? yeah yeah, they would they would that they wouldn't run away or provide incentive for for not. 05:51.70 David Howe Run a business. Yeah. 06:02.40 alifeinruins Rebelling and all that stuff. 06:03.59 David Howe Yeah, it's truly rough. Um, but the the word I was looking for before was country marks would make ethnic distinctions of the enslaved so they would look for tribal markings different branding symbols or clothing types or stigmatas. Ah, to understand. Okay, these people are from Gambia These people are from wherever but it also says here and I hate reading this but it was like slaveholders desired physical attributes. They correlated to certain ethnic groups size Strength Muscularity Agility Health Intelligence temperament and loyalty. It's just fucked. And then in general they deemed ethnic groups from the Gold Coast to be strong Handsome Proud and Hardy so based on like where they were From. It was more expensive or like they would seek out or not it being the shipment not necessarily the person and. And so that senegambians were deemed the most intelligent and fit for domestic service like it's just such a yeah, it's rough to read? Um, but I will get into the stuff Now. Um. 07:01.39 alifeinruins Hearts. Yeah. 07:10.83 David Howe Everything so these people are taken from all these different regions of the rice coast where they had distinct cultures and things like that but they were reduced down to you're agile you're strong. You're smarter and brought here and the initial I would say first generation had their. Native languages that they brought with them which um, the I named those before like the wolof and the Monday and the icon speakers in the uruba were brought here and they all spoke those languages and after a generation or 2 they were kind of lost because english or spanish became the one or portuguese in Brazil. 1 that they knew most but when new shipments were brought in from those areas. They also could learn the languages again and of course this is why in black culture in african-american culture I know people go by both so I want to say that um a lot of it is oral. History. My friend that I ah speaking with somebody recently who is trying to find their ancestry because they are brazilian and wanting to know where they came from and they found out that it is euruba or their euruba speaking. So anyway, they're brought to this country. They have. 08:23.44 alifeinruins Um. 08:26.60 David Howe Trying to keep their practices in customs. But the people who were cultivating rice had that time at the end of the day to be human and they could um you know tell stories and like practice their cooking and practice. You know, cultural cultural things. But the. The creolization of the languages people from gambia and people from Nigeria don't necessarily speak the same language at all. Not even the same language group but there are because it's a close area cognates just like portuguese and english or portuguese english and spanish and of course spanish and portuguese so they were able to. 08:55.84 alifeinruins Um. 09:05.32 David Howe Understand each other and keep traditions alive but also mold them together to make creolization and um in coastal south carolina and Georgia the ah the rice like islands and stuff were isolated from the rest of the mainland. And that's where this gullah geechi culture kind of arises and this is where the plantations or the the rice farms were overwhelmingly black versus the amount of white people that lived there and so. During like the rainy season. It said that the the planters would go back to the mainland because they feared malaria but also this isn't just a thing from the time but it just the text and the the black anthropologist writing this was saying that africans were just more predisposed to not getting malaria in. That time so they could keep they were less predisposed to getting they still got it and were forced to stay there with all the malaria but the white people went inland and a few people stayed you just oversee and make sure everything was going. Okay and Gullah Geechi is a like distinct culture that formed on these islands after you know through all this rice cultivation and it's ah it's a combination of um here I'll just read this so in South Carolina and Georgia the gullagguchi creole culture emerged alongside isolated islands in the mid seventeen hundreds. 10:38.37 David Howe And the gullah geechi region encompassed the entire rice belt extending all the way down to Florida um, the gullah ah was the term the gullah and the geeche are 2 different people but they combbined them together hyphenated was that gullah was the term referred to people in South Carolina and it may be a shortened form of Angola so the gullah angola but angolan like I said before were the most percentage wise brought to this area and they were the earliest ethnic group brought to the carolina colony as well. They also think it could be derived from the gola tribe of Sierra Leone and Liberia and then the geechee was the term used for those in Georgia Northern Florida and that may stem from the kisi tribe from the Sierra Leone Leone and due to the number of it says enslaved names linked to an ethnic group or it may have resulted from rice plantations along the oga geechee river. So anyway, it's um, they anthropologists have tried to link and figure this out. They have their own creole language. That's almost english but it's also very african and it's a mix of all those african languages so linguists have gone back and tried to find this and they find a lot of cognates with. Ah, people in Nigeria and Benin Ghana and ton togo and yeah Ghana and ah in Nigeria and Cameroon there was pigeon english that was also well established and much of that pigeon also transferred to America and influenced the the gullah gechi cultures. 12:14.20 David Howe So it is a isolated group of now black americans who when the Carolina industry rice industry collapsed eventually they just had all this land that was used to be rice farms and they continued rice farming. Some went after the civil war to go north to you know, New York and Chicago to look for jobs about half left and then during the depression. A lot came back and also and to the nineteen hundreds to the two thousand s um and if anybody listening is is part of the gullag gee culture like please email us it sounds so weird for me to. Talk about this as not being part of it and reading it anthropologically because these people still exist. But basically what I want to say is I have this highlighted the studies above from these anthropologists show that the gullah geechi culture was synchronized is the word on the Carolina and Georgia Coasts and the low country. Many ethnic sources in Africa primarily the rice coast so it is a linguistic and cultural group that is an amalgamation of customs from many different places in Africa and where a creole language was formed and they're keeping. African traditions alive even to today that stem back from the North Atlantic slave trade and also it says that the gullah geechie population is more closely linked genetically to Africa than any other africanamerican population in North America so they were the. 13:50.96 David Howe These islands in Toastal Georgia were some of the last to get imported slaves I'm sorry imported enslaved peoples from Africa whereas like in Mississippi and Georgia and Tennessee they were already existing enslaved people there. So. am I am I making sense. Sorry. 14:10.20 alifeinruins Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Um, you're it's It's fascinating how these these these cultures these language families kind of coalesce together to create this this this culture that we now see and then then got dispersed later. Um, it's it's It's really kind of fascinating how it how it happens like that. 14:31.68 David Howe Yeah, no for real and I've I've heard people that a gallauguchi speak and it is a really interesting language because it it I like the only example I can I can put is like in Jamaica people see how Guan like how's it going. Um, but in like Gallah Geechi language it is like Quin is like how you say like what's up and things are like how's it going and it's it's pigeon but it's also some words are just straight up african and they. Like the the weaving that they do is traditionally african but it also has influences from many different african areas that's combined together. Um and their food and their traditions and stuff and again I just feel so uncomfortable talking about this as as a non. Ah, black american specifically not even gullah geechi but it is anthropologically very interesting. How one because I know we're wrapping up here I didn't know that the rice industry was so booming at the time like I just didn't know that I would have just thought cotton. Yeah, um. 15:37.30 alifeinruins Yeah, me, neither. 15:42.26 David Howe And then that again I also didn't know I just assumed rice came from China or Korea or Japan which they also say that it might have been independently invented there too. But Africa I did not know had such an expansive rice cultivation culture for hundreds of years. And it's just interesting that people were trafficked from that area specifically because of that rice cultivation culture and brought to these isolated islands to cultivate rice and so much of that african ancestry. And culture and language is still like preserved in those islands because again they weren't really hospitable and not the greatest land and they were used just for rice cultivation but 1 that industry fell. There's just hundreds I said thousands of people that just lived there and were able to keep their. Ah, culture alive and also create such an interesting creole culture based on an interesting creole culture that they could from the atrocities it happened to their ancestors and you know them currently. Um. 16:51.67 alifeinruins yeah yeah I mean I think I think that well summarizes up all that we've we've talked about in this so that thank you? Yeah thanks for thanks for bringing up and and and talking about that and like like David mentioned if if you are Goli Geechi or you are someone who studies that. 16:54.72 David Howe Yeah. 17:11.70 alifeinruins Please get in contact with us. We'd love to talk to you and we don't even have to yeah we don't even have to do it on the show we're where we're like genuine genuinely interested of how this how this happens just what what that culture is like and. 17:11.95 David Howe Yeah, let's get you on the show. 17:26.37 alifeinruins And your thoughts and opinions on it. So yeah, please please reach out to us. Um, yeah I mean that ah that was a that was a hard hard episode. But I think there's there's interesting aspects to it. Um, for sure. 17:42.30 David Howe Yeah, um, it's just anthropologically unfortunately interesting and especially like I was like not my not that my jaw was dropped but when I was reading this but like the fact that this african-american linguist and anthropologist went any like. Found that all these cognates existed between these 2 languages is really interesting and also I can't find the exact quote I don't want to misquote it but there were people from the islands in Georgia South Carolina I believe gechi specifically that went to ghana and nigeria in the 90 s and ah were able to understand some words because it was part of their songs that they've kept for so long which yeah, super cool, unfortunate, but. 18:32.70 alifeinruins That's really it. That's interesting. Yeah yeah, um, well thank you all for listening to to this podcast please rate review leave us a message. You know all the normal stuff. 18:36.92 David Howe Cool. 18:49.72 alifeinruins I Think that's about it. 18:50.63 David Howe Yeah, thanks for listening. We should be back on schedule next week with Carlton and have something going or we're interviewing someone here soon. I think either way if you guys want a specific topic. Let us know on the Instagram and the podcast. Video version will now be on the archeology podcast network youtube so you can watch um in this episode Connor stare as I look at notes trying to not be canceled. So um. 19:18.28 alifeinruins Yeah, yeah, and and when when you go to the Youtube Darkeology Podcast Network there's a podcast section. There's a playlist section hit the podcast section. You'll see some of our episodes kind of appearing there. There's some older ones in there currently, but ah, all the new ones should be coming out there. So. Please watch listen and yeah, but and I think with that we are ah work we are out. 19:45.37 David Howe Yep, um I think on this episode I don't believe it is appropriate to tell a joke Connor would you agree? Okay so save it? yeah. 19:55.29 alifeinruins Yeah I would agree so we will catch you all next week