ADOKINOU & EKLU VISIT DAUFUSKIE ISLAND, SOUTH CAROLINA MDDLE SCHOOLWhen two West African documentarians recently visited Daufuskie Island Elementary School, students learned they don't just share an ocean with the African coastline.
They share a history.
Republic of Benin filmmaker Thomas Akodjinou and Togolese playwright and director Felix Yao Eklu stopped by the school as part of a three-state tour to gather research for a documentary titled "Children... the artists of the world."
The film is based on tracing what happened to the descendants of the last ship that transported slaves from Africa to the New World. Information collected through interviews and visits to various cultural museums in the South -- including the Civil Rights Museum in Selma, Ala., and the Gullah Gallery in Charleston -- will be used in the documentary and will form the International Center for Ethnic Art and Cultural Design in Benin in 2008.
"Everybody doesn't know about this history, because sometimes it is not easy for them to talk about it or write about," Akodjinou explained to the students. "But now we think it is necessary to show this history. To present this history. To learn this history. ... I think it is necessary for the children to know what it was like in the past and how we are living now and how we want to build the future world."
The filmmakers learned of Daufuskie through Diane Cameron, a former Hilton Head Island resident who met Akodjinou and Eklu while working as an artist-in-residence in Africa. Upon her return to the United States, she created a Charleston-based nonprofit called Seed 2 Seed, which serves as a cultural bridge between Africa and its diaspora. She is serving as a sponsor and contact for the delegation.
"What we've come to find out in Africa is that they don't know our history," Cameron explained to the students. "They don't know what happened to us once we got on that slave ship and sailed to America, sailed to the Caribbean, Haiti, South America -- wherever we went. They don't have any true recollection of what happened to us. So (Thomas and Felix) are here to gather that information to take back to Africa to show their people. 'This is what happened to your brothers, your sisters, your mothers, your fathers, your children.
During their visit to the school, the students of Daufuskie Elementary shared a few of the songs they sang for this year's Gullah Festival and performed a portion of their Christmas program. Lead teacher Sarah Haarlow gave the crew copies of a few magazines that contained a history of the island, artwork and short stories from former Daufuskie students for their research.
In turn, Cameron taught the students a dance she learned during her time in Africa and informed them that Seed 2 Seed would be partnering each of them with a pen pal overseas.
"That way, you can learn more about their culture, their language, their lives," she said to them. "And you know what you'll find out? That they're just like you. They cry, they laugh, they play. They have the same thoughts that you have sometimes. We are more alike than we are different, but the only w know it is if we have formed these relationships."
After spending time with the students, fifth generation Daufuskian Yvonne Wilson gave Cameron and the filmmakers a tour of the island, sharing her own story of how her family came to live on Daufuskie and how many have left due to development and the cost of living.
Her great-great-grandmother, Rosetta Frazier, came to the island as a slave from Sierra Leone, but eventually worked to make it a home of her own. Wilson's grandfather, Samuel Holmes, was the only carpenter on the island for a time. Her grandson, Qur'an Greene, is one of the students at Daufuskie Elementary.
"One thing we can say about Daufuskie, it's constant change," she said, noting that only 12 African-American natives of the island still live there. "Our legacy, it's like threatened. We want to leave it for our kids for them to understand and appreciate it, but they're not here. We've got to leave it to somebody, so that's why I came back."
Wilson showed them a tabby ruin of a fireplace from an old slave house and gave them a tour of a praise house outside First Union African Baptist Church -- both emotionally wrought objects representing the island's link to a rich, albeit solemn, past. She walked them through the Mary Fields School, an old graveyard half-destroyed to make way for a golf course, and to a beach on Daufuskie that almost escaped development.
"They always say you can get out on this beach here and go straight back to Africa," Wilson told Cameron and company, as each of them stood out on the secluded strip of sand and stared out at the water. Behind them, the beginnings of a tower full of condominiums were the only aspects that would lead them to believe otherwise.
"Once we got over here, we were, I guess, never allowed to think back about where our past came from," Wilson said. "It was never talked about, Africa."
For Eklu, that was one of the most moving parts of the trip, because it defined exactly why his group was there -- to bridge a gap.
"We are gathering information to help write an important story," he said. "... As I said, we feel at home here."
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