Their language and culture have preserved a significant influence of Africanisms as a result of their historical geographic isolation and the community's relation to its shared history and identity.

[17] The Dyula civilization had a large territory that stretched from Senegal through Mali to Burkina Faso and the rest of what was French West Africa.

[19] Sapelo Island, the site of the last Gullah community of Hog Hammock, was also a principal place of refuge for Guale people who fled slavery on the mainland.

Many of the enslaved Africans taken in West Africa were processed through Bunce Island, a prime export site for slaves to South Carolina and Georgia.

Slave castles in Ghana, by contrast, shipped many of the people they traded to ports and markets in the Caribbean islands.

The peoples who contributed to Gullah culture included the Bakongo, Mbundu, Vili, Yombe, Yaka, Pende,[25] Mandinka, Kissi, Fulani, Mende, Wolof, Kpelle, Temne, Limba, Dyula, Susu, and the Vai.

[14] By the middle of the 18th century, thousands of acres in the Georgia and South Carolina Lowcountry, and the Sea Islands were developed as African rice fields.

[citation needed] The subtropical climate encouraged the spread of malaria and yellow fever, which were both carried and transmitted by mosquitoes.

[26] Mosquitoes in the swamps and inundated rice fields of the Lowcountry picked up and spread the diseases to European settlers, as well.

Fearing these diseases, many white planters and their families left the Lowcountry during the rainy spring and summer months when fevers ran rampant.

[28] In late 2024 underwater sonar was used to map 45 previously unknown irrigation devices used to control water flow for rice fields in conjunction with earthen dams and levees, developed by the Gullah Geechee over an area of 2,000 acres (800 hectares) of the northern end of Eagles Island, North Carolina, US.

White planters on the Sea Islands, fearing an invasion by the US naval forces, abandoned their plantations and fled to the mainland.

Long before the War ended, Unitarian missionaries from Pennsylvania came to start schools on the islands for the newly freed slaves.

Penn Center, now a Gullah community organization on Saint Helena Island, South Carolina, was founded as the first school for freed slaves.

The rice planters on the mainland gradually abandoned their plantations and moved away from the area because of labor issues and hurricane damage to crops.

Left alone in remote rural areas of the Lowcountry, the Gullah continued to practice their traditional culture with little influence from the outside world well into the 20th century.

Since the late 20th century, the Gullah people—led by Penn Center and other determined community groups—have been fighting to keep control of their traditional lands.

Since the 1960s, resort development on the Sea Islands greatly increased property values, threatening to push the Gullah off family lands which they have owned since emancipation.

[40] The Act provides for a Heritage Corridor to extend from southern North Carolina to northern Florida in a project administered by the US National Park Service with extensive consultation with the Gullah community.

Sierra Leone is at the heart of the traditional rice-growing region of West Africa where many of the Gullahs' ancestors originated.

Bunce Island, the British slave castle in Sierra Leone, sent many African captives to Charleston and Savannah during the mid- and late 18th century.

[47][48] Rice is a staple food in Gullah communities and continues to be cultivated in abundance in the coastal regions of Georgia and South Carolina.

[51] Over the years, the Gullah have attracted study by many historians, linguists, folklorists, and anthropologists interested in their rich cultural heritage.

In 1991 Julie Dash wrote and directed Daughters of the Dust, the first feature film about the Gullah, set at the turn of the 20th century on St. Helena Island.

Typically they send their children back to rural communities in South Carolina and Georgia during the summer months to live with grandparents, uncles, and aunts.

The show was hosted by Ron Daise—now the former vice president for Creative Education at Brookgreen Gardens in Murrells Inlet, South Carolina—and his wife Natalie Daise, both of whom also served as cultural advisors, and were inspired by the Gullah culture of Ron Daise's home of St. Helena Island, South Carolina, part of the Sea Islands.