Drawing Depicting the Igbo Entering the Waters of Dunbar Creek Image Courtesy of Dee “Larue" Williams
Igbo Landing - The Legend of the Flying Africans, When death is a better option than slavery
By dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
”♫ Mmiri Mmiri ahụ wetara anyị, ♫ Mmiri Mmiri ga-akpọga anyị n'ụlọ ♫" (“♫ The Water Spirit brought us, the Water Spirit will take us home♫
Stories of slave rebellions are severely under-taught in American history courses. In the Caribbean where my family is from, they comprise a much larger share of school history, and I’ve always had an interest in them. Unfortunately in the US the white supremacist who created slavery and later segregation, understood the power of slave revolts, and took active steps to strike them from both public memory and school’s historical curriculums. Furthermore the stories of American slave resistance that many of us do know from our times in high school only dwell on the rioting, bloodshed, violence, and destruction of slave revolts. We only learn of a few revenge killings as enslave people like Nat Turner rose up against their oppressors.
But throughout American history there are other acts of resistance by slaves whose stories are worthy of being retold. These tales may have sad and bittersweet endings, but they also speak to the unconquerable spirit of Africans held captive by brutal economics of the transatlantic slave trade.
Take for example the story of “The Igbo Landing” (also known as the Ibo Landing, Ebo Landing, or Ebos Landing). The story that gives Ebos Landing ( as it’s called in coastal Georgia) its name is one of the most colorful, anguishing, but enduring tales in the state of Georgia's rich history. This story has become better known as the "Myth of the Flying Africans”. Regardless of its name, the story of the Igbo landing has been retold and embellished for 200 years in the form of local legends, Gullah folklore, and children's tales. It has also been adapted into movies, novels, and television shows. The story of the Flying African is based on the historical event of the remarkable story of an Igbo slave rebellion on St. Simons Island. This melancholy tale has blossomed to become a powerful metaphor of African American courage, longing, conviction, and a refusal of the captives to submit to being conquered at all cost. Furthermore this story stands out for me for a personal reason, my brother-in-law is an ethnic Igbo from Nigeria. Because today modern Igbo people self identify with the spelling “IGBO” that is the spelling I will use when writing this piece.
The current and historical lands of the Igbo people, In Nigeria, West Africa.
The historical roots of the flying Africans legend can be traced to the spring of 1803, when a group of Igbo slaves arrived in Savannah Georgia after enduring the nightmare of the Middle Passage. The Igbo (from what is now the nation of Nigeria, in West Africa) were renowned throughout the the current and former British colonies (including the US) for being fiercely independent and unwilling to tolerate the humiliations of transatlantic chattel slavery. The Igbo Landing itself is a historic site at Dunbar Creek on St. Simons Island, Glynn County, Georgia. In May of 1803, the Igbo and other West African captives arrived in Savannah, Georgia, on the slave ship the Wanderer. Historical records show they were purchased for an average of $100 each by slave merchants John Couper and Thomas Spalding to be resold to plantations on the nearby St. Simons Island.
On that day in May 1803 the chained slaves were then reloaded and packed under the deck of a coastal vessel, the York, which would take them to St. Simons where they were to be resold. During the voyage, approximately 75 Igbo slaves rose in rebellion. These brave captives fighting for their very freedom, overpowered their outnumbers captors. During their revolt they drowned or killed all their captors. But unfortunately the struggle that won their freedom also caused ship to the ground in Dunbar Creek, Georgia as they were unable to navigate their newly captured ship.
The sequence of events that occurred after the ship ran aground remains unclear. It is only known that soon after running aground, the freed Igbo marched ashore singing. The Igbo were led by their high chief who was among the former captives on the ship. At some point at the high Igbo chief’s direction, the group of Igbo turned around and reversed course, walking in unison into the marshy waters of Dunbar Creek. They began singing in the Igbo language: ”♫ Mmiri Mmiri ahụ wetara anyị, ♫ Mmiri Mmiri ga-akpọga anyị n'ụlọ ♫" (“♫ The Water Spirit brought us, the Water Spirit will take us home♫ ") thereby accepting the protection of their God, Chukwu and certain death over the alternative of a lifetime of slavery, and committed mass suicide.
Roswell King, a white overseer on the nearby Pierce Butler plantation, wrote the first account of the incident. He and another man identified only as Captain Patterson recovered many of the drowned bodies. Apparently only a subset of the 75 Igbo rebels drowned. Thirteen bodies were recovered, but others remained missing, and some may have survived the suicide episode, making the actual numbers of deaths uncertain.
Regardless of the actual numbers, the deaths signaled a powerful story of resistance. These captives had overwhelmed their captors in a strange land, and then took their own lives rather than remain enslaved in a strange New World. Over time the Igbo Landing gradually took on enormous symbolic importance in the local African American folklore of coastal Georgia. The mutiny and subsequent suicide by the Igbo people has been called by many locals the first freedom march in the history of the United States. Local people claimed that the Landing and surrounding marshes in Dunbar Creek where the Igbo people committed suicide in 1803 were haunted by the souls of the dead Igbo slaves. Locals claim that on moonless nights, the singing and clinking of chains can be heard emanating from the marshes.
To modern audiences the idea of a group of people taking their own lives together appears to be an unbelievably tragic act. But put yourself in the shoes of the Igbo landing folk, whose lives where shattered by the trauma of the events leading up to their actions that day. One fateful night you are stolen from your bed, dragged into a dank slave castle on the West African coast, sold as a slave, transported by strange people you have never seen the likes of before. These people speak a language you don’t recognize clad in garments that seem alien. These pirates store you in a dank dark ship galley, where you suffer from sea sickness and filth for weeks on end. They feed you strange foods and then sell you again, letting you know your freedom and liberty is forever vanquished. Finally rising up, you win your freedom only to recognize there is no hope to return to your beloved home and people. With only the prospect of imminent recapture and a lifetime of cruel servitude before you, the cold embrace of the arms of water spirit taking you to the home of your god Chukwu, seems like the only rational option.
The story of the people of Igbo landing, who chose death over slavery which had long been part of Gullah folklore, was finally recorded from various oral sources in the 1930s by members of the Federal Writers Project. The Federal Writers Project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program, created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression.
According to Professor Terri L. Snyder, “the enslaved cargo “suffered much by mismanagement,” “rose” from their confinement in the small vessel, and revolted against the crew, forcing them into the water where they drowned”. Led by their chief, the Africans then marched ashore, singing. At their chief’s direction, they walked into the marshy waters of Dunbar Creek, committing mass suicide.
As the Ibo Landing story spread throughout the islands, and passed down in oral history among the enslaved Africans and Gullah Geechee, it eventually made it’s way to the mainland. As it it made it’s way to the mainland two versions of the story emerged. Instead of giving their life to the seas, the brave Africans instead, made their way back to Africa to slip the bounds of their captors.
In all the Ibos walked on the water back to Africa. In the other version they flew back. These stories of “flying Africans” became especially potent myths, symbolizing healing from the slavery era along with cultural pride and continuity (also listen to “All God’s Chillun Had Wings”).
They could fly, they could fly
They could slip the bonds of earth and rise so high
They could fly across the ocean
Together, hand in hand
Searching, always searching for the promised land.
Rhiannon Giddens — We Could Fly
The story of the people of Igbo landing, were finally recorded from various oral sources in the 1930s by members of the Federal Writers Project. The Federal Writers Project was part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), a New Deal program, created to provide jobs for out-of-work writers during the Great Depression. More than 100 years after the Igbo uprising on St. Simons, members of the Federal Writers Project collected oral histories in the Sea Islands (many of which can now be found in Drums and Shadows: Survival Studies among the Georgia Coastal Negroes). An older African American man by the name of Wallace Quarterman was asked if he had heard the story of Ebos landing. Quarterman replied:
Ain't you heard about them? Well, at that time Mr. Blue he was the overseer and . . . Mr. Blue he go down one morning with a long whip for to whip them good. . . . Anyway, he whipped them good and they got together and stuck that hoe in the field and then . . . rose up in the sky and turned themselves into buzzards and flew right back to Africa. . . . Everybody knows about them.
A typical Gullah telling of the events, incorporating many of the recurrent themes that are common to most myths related to the Igbo Landing, is recorded by Linda S. Watts:
The West Africans upon assessing their situation resolved to risk their lives by walking home over the water rather than submit to the living death that awaited them in American slavery. As the tale has it, the tribes people disembark from the ship, and as a group, turned around and walked along the water, traveling in the opposite direction from the arrival port. As they took this march together, the West Africans joined in song. They are reported to have sung a hymn in which the lyrics assert that the water spirits will take them home. While versions of this story vary in nuance, all attest to the courage in rebellion displayed by the enslaved Igbo.[*]
For centuries, some historians had cast doubt on the events of the Igbo Landing. Many of these historians argued that the entire incident was more local folklore than fact. But a 1980 research project verified the accounts that Roswell King and others provided at the time. University researchers used “modern scientific techniques to reconstruct the episode and confirm the factual basis of the longstanding oral accounts”.
So powerful is the story of resistance of the Igbo Landing that it is often referred to in African American literature. Famously writer Alex Haley recounts it in his high acclaimed book, Roots, and it was the basis for Nobel laureate, Toni Morrison’s, novel, Song of Solomon.
Contemporary artists like Beyoncé have also depicted and paid homage to the Igbo Landing in their music.
In the acclaimed Marvel comic film, Black Panther, Killmonger, played by actor Michael B Jordan, refers to this event, the Igbo Landing, saying, “Bury me in the ocean with my ancestors who jumped from ships, ’cause they knew death was better than bondage”.
In September 2002 the St. Simons African-American Heritage Coalition organized a two-day commemoration with events related to Igbo history and a ceremonial funeral procession to the site. 75 invited attendees came from across the American South, as well as Nigeria, Belize, and Haiti, all countries where similar acts of resistance to a life of slavery had taken place. They gathered to designate the site as holy ground and give the souls rest. The account of the Igbo is now part of the curriculum for coastal Georgia schools.
The Igbo Landing has come to occupy great symbolic importance in local African American folklore. The mutiny and subsequent suicide by the Igbo people have been called the first freedom march in the history of the United States and local people claim that the Landing and surrounding marshes in Dunbar Creek were haunted by the souls of the dead Igbo slaves.
Sometimes when faced with between only two choices, a life of slavery and dying with the loved ones of your community, the unfortunate choice becomes clear. The brave rebel slaves of the Igbo Landing chanted ”♫ Mmiri Mmiri ahụ wetara anyị, ♫ Mmiri Mmiri ga-akpọga anyị n'ụlọ ♫" (“♫"The Water Spirit brought us, the Water Spirit will take us home♫"") accept the protection of Chukwu and decided to walk back across the waters to their ancestors.
Sources:
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Brick by brick, beam by beam and shingle by shingle, a house where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others planned marches in support of Black voting rights in the Deep South has been trucked from Alabama to a museum near Detroit.
The intricate operation to move and preserve the Jackson Home and other artifacts from the Civil Rights era preceded President Donald Trump’s efforts to eradicate what he calls “divisive” and “race-centered ideologies,” and minimize the cultural and historical impact of race, racism and Black Americans.
Trump’s purges have sought to remove all reference to diversity, equity and inclusion from the federal government and workforce, and many private companies have followed suit. The establishments that house some of the most important reminders of African American history — including the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. — have come under particular pressure.
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Minnie “Gracie” Gadson claps her hands and stomps her feet against the floorboards, lifting her voice in a song passed down from her enslaved ancestors who were forced to work the cotton and rice plantations of the South Carolina Sea Islands.
It’s a Gullah spiritual, and the 78-year-old singer is one of a growing group of artists and scholars trying to preserve these sacred songs and their Gullah Geechee culture for future generations.
“I have a passion to sing these songs,” Gadson said.
On a recent summer day, her voice rang out inside Coffin Point Praise House. It’s one of three remaining wooden structures on St. Helena Island that once served as a place of worship for the enslaved, and later, for generations of free Black Americans.
Gadson grew up singing in these praise houses. Today, as a Voices of Gullah member, she travels the U.S. with others in their 70s and 80s singing in the Gullah Creole language that has West African roots.
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sixty years after the Voting Rights Act became a landmark law against racial discrimination, legal challenges heading to the Supreme Court could curtail its remaining protections for minority voters. NPR: 60 years later, Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters face new threats
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Otis Wilson had enough with talking and decided to go to court.
His Louisiana town of St. Francisville, north of Baton Rouge, had long elected alderpersons as at-large representatives for a single, townwide district. In places where elections are racially polarized, that kind of voting system can result in a white majority's votes drowning out the ballots of voters of color, courts have found.
"I filed a lawsuit because we had no Blacks at all on the council. And I tried to talk to the council and the mayor to work something out, and it didn't," says Wilson, a now-retired school bus driver, who led a group of other Black voters to sue St. Francisville officials in 1992.
Their lawsuit was among the hundreds of cases that private individuals and groups have brought to enforce protections against racial discrimination under the federal Voting Rights Act, which then-President Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law 60 years ago this week.
After a long and complicated legal battle, St. Francisville ultimately agreed that the town had violated Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act and switched to alderperson elections with multiple districts.
"It wouldn't have happened" without the pressure of his lawsuit, says Wilson, a onetime candidate for alderperson who was later elected as a Democratic member of his Louisiana parish's police jury, a local governing board. "If you didn't go further, it just wouldn't happen."
The legal path that allowed Wilson to fight against the dilution of his and other Black voters' collective power at the ballot box, however, may be ending soon, as a novel legal argument makes its way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Contrary to decades of precedent, Republican state officials in at least 15 states contend that private individuals and groups do not have the right to sue to enforce Section 2 because they are not explicitly named in the landmark law's text. Only the head of the Justice Department, they argue, can bring this kind of lawsuit.
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A decision by the US government to incinerate more than $9.7m (£7.3m) of contraceptives is projected to result in 174,000 unintended pregnancies and 56,000 unsafe abortions in five African countries.
More than three-quarters of the contraceptives (77%) were destined for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia and Mali, according to the International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF), an NGO global healthcare provider and advocate of sexual and reproductive rights.
The contraceptives, many of which will not expire until 2027-29, had already been manufactured, packaged and ready for distribution. IPPF offered to take them for redistribution at no cost to the US taxpayer, but the offer was declined.
Their destruction will deny more than 1.4 million women and girls in the five countries access to lifesaving care, IPPF said.
Marie Evelyne Petrus-Barry, the Africa regional director of IPPF, said: “This decision to destroy ready-to-use commodities is appalling and extremely wasteful. These lifesaving medical supplies were destined to countries where access to reproductive care is already limited, and in some cases, part of a broader humanitarian response, such as in the DRC. The choice to incinerate them is unjustifiable.”
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