I never understand why people speak in absolutes...
The Gullah: Rice, Slavery, and the Sierra Leone-American Connection | The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition
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. But the American colonists 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.
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Additionally, I'm a Chavis descendant, which was a free colonial black family that was started by an indentured with the Portuguese surname of Chaves that originated from the Kongo Kingdom in present-day Congo/Angola. Many of the earliest black American families were from Kongo and whose Americanized names can be traced back to their Portuguese origins (Portugal colonized Kongo in the 1400s, so many of the indentures/slaves that came from this area 1) had Portuguese names and 2) were Christian before they came to the Colonies.) Other free colonial black families that they intermarried with were the Driggers/Rodrigo, Martin/Martins, Evans/Ibanez, Morris/Morais, Gomes/Gomez, Andrews/Andrade. So there was a clear connection between these early black families, their customs, and this Kingdom in Africa.
KONGO ACROSS THE WATERS | First exhibition in America to deeply explore the legacy of Kongo culture | Princeton University Art Museum
“This exhibition presents some of the finest works of African art in the world, and reminds us of Kongo’s visual legacy throughout the Atlantic world—an idea of central importance, considering the fact that nearly one fourth of first-generation African slaves in the United States were from the Kongo region,” said Princeton University Art Museum Director James Steward. “In doing so, this represents the Museum’s most ambitious project to date involving African artistic production and culture.”
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I suspect that one can actually make specific cultural links to certain areas of West Africa after studying AA migrational/linguistic/cultural practices here in the United States. It's not an area that has been widely studied. I would also suspect that along with the first generation of African slaves, second, third, and fourth, generation slave descendants had a sense of where they were from. At some point, families probably just experienced a disconnect where it wasn't improtant to them anymore.
