The First Doctors in America were African Women

[olufemi_baina_ayo]

The first doctors in America were African women.

Gullahs (African descendents) were first purchased by slave-owners for medical, biological and technological skills as metal workers, agricultural experts, barrel makers, bricklayers, swamp fishermen, cotton quilt weavers (quilted without stitching), and for other needed skill, such as herdsmen, deep sea divers, herbalists and chemists.

Africans are the people who started the science of nutrition: “How to put foods together” example: you don’t combine fruits and vegetables. Don’t combine meat and cheese or milk and whole grains foods just to name a few. Jelly and bread. Hamburger and bread. Sweet fruits don’t combine with anything but sweet fruits. Milk does not combine with anything in nature.

The first contemporary female doctors (MD’s) in America were Gullah women. Gullah is a title created by Whites and given to Africans that lived near the sea islands and rivers. The Gullah area includes Tidewater, Virginia, parts of the Chesapeake Bay, and extends 50 miles inland, continuing down the east coast to Mayport, Florida. The titles Gullah, Trinidadian, Jamaican, Puerto Rican, Latino, Creole, etc., were created by whites to keep Africans mistrustful and divided from each other.

The Gullah were forcefully brought to the Sea Islands because the Europeans were without resources, land, labor, and the technology needed to build their wealth, empires and American colonies.

The Gullah captives also possessed skills in science, engineering, military science, tool-making, bookkeeping, cabinet-making, furniture-making, construction, banking, government, teaching, and most of all, they had 10,000 years of culture in the most developed civilization in the world – that of Africa. It is this African technology that produced a great deal of European and American wealth.

Africans are the people who started the science of nutrition: “How to put foods together” example: you don’t combine fruits and vegetables. Don’t combine meat and cheese or milk and whole grains foods just to name a few. Jelly and bread. Hamburger and bread. Sweet fruits don’t combine with anything but sweet fruits. Milk does not combine with anything in nature.

One of the reasons why African holistic health remedies have not been utilized is because it was illegal for Euro-American doctors and drug stores to use African trained Gullah doctors in their practices. Midwives were the ones who actually administered medicine to the families.

The Black Seminoles are a small offshoot of the Gullah who escaped from the rice plantations in South Carolina and Georgia. They built their own settlements on the Florida frontier, fought a series of wars to preserve their freedom, and were scattered across North America. They have played a significant role in American history, but have never received the recognition they deserve.

Some Gullah slaves managed to escape from coastal South Carolina and Georgia south into the Florida peninsula.

The Gullah are a distinctive group of Black Americans from South Carolina and Georgia in the southeastern United States. They live in small farming and fishing communities along the Atlantic coastal plain and on the chain of Sea Islands, which runs parallel to the coast. Because of their geographical isolation and strong community life, the Gullah* have been able to preserve more of their African cultural heritage than any other group of Black Americans. They speak a Creole language similar to Sierra Leone Krio, use African names, tell African folktales, make African-style handicrafts such as baskets and carved walking sticks, and enjoy a rich cuisine based primarily on rice.

Indeed, rice is what forms the special link between the Gullah and the people of Sierra Leone. During the 1700s the American colonists in South Carolina and Georgia discovered that rice would grow well in the moist, semitropical country bordering their coastline. The American colonists, how ever, had no experience with the cultivation of rice, and they needed African slaves who knew how to plant, harvest, and process this difficult crop. The white plantation owners purchased slaves from various parts of Africa, but they greatly preferred slaves from what they called the "Rice Coast" or "Windward Coast" - the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa, stretching from Senegal down to Sierra Leone and Liberia. The plantation owners were willing to pay higher prices for slaves from this area, and Africans from the Rice Coast were almost certainly the largest group of slaves imported into South Carolina and Georgia during the 18th century.

The Gullah people are directly descended from the slaves who labored on the rice plantations, and their language reflects significant influences from Sierra Leone and the surrounding area. The Gullahs' English-based Creole language is strikingly similar to Sierra Leone Krio and contains such identical expressions as bigyai (greedy), pantap (on top of), chitu (both), yeys (ear), and swit (delicious). But, in addition to words derived from English, the Gullah Creole also contains several thousand words and personal names derived from African languages - and a large proportion of these (about 25%) are from languages spoken in Sierra Leone.

Penn Center recently learned of a people called "Black Seminoles" whose ancestors were Gullah slaves who escaped from South Carolina and Georgia plantations into the Florida wilderness. There, they joined with various groups of renegade Indians to form a new tribe - the Seminoles -- from a Spanish word meaning "wild," "free," or "untamed."

After a series of bitter conflicts with American military forces in Florida, the Black Seminoles and their Indian comrades moved West in the 1830s, ultimately settling in what is now Central Oklahoma, West Texas, and Northern Mexico. These scattered communities still exist today and, amazingly, still preserve the Gullah language and many cultural traits reflecting their Gullah roots in South Carolina and Georgia.

Penn Center selected "The Black Seminoles: Gullah Pioneer Freedom Fighters" as the symposium topic during its annual 1998 Heritage Days Celebrations. Thousands of people from the region, other parts of the US, and various foreign countries attend Penn's Heritage Days each year. This created an excellent opportunity to acquaint the public with a neglected part of African American history, and the Gullahs, themselves, with a long-lost branch of their own family.

Selected readings:

God, Dr. Buzzard, and the Bolito Man
A Saltwater Geechee Talks about Life on Sapelo Island.
By H. Bailey, Cornelia and Christena Bledsoe.

The Gullahs
Gullah Negro life in the Carolina Sea Islands
By Mason Crum

The Encyclopedia of American Facts about Dates
By G. Carruth

The Gullahs Who escaped Slavery
By Joseph A. Opala

The Gullahs
By Llaila o. Afrika

My Friend the Gullah
By James Gary Black

The Water Brought Us
By Branch Muriel Miller.