"[1] Opala has traveled between Sierra Leone and the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country for 30 years, producing documentary films, museum exhibits, and popular publications on this historical connection.

[2] He has drawn on his original research to establish these connections, and the work of earlier scholars, especially Lorenzo Dow Turner, an African-American linguist who in the 1930s and 1940s traced many elements of Gullah speech to West African languages.

[3][4] Opala's research and public history events generated a national dialog in Sierra Leone on the subject of family lost in the Atlantic slave trade.

[5] He helped generate a similar dialog in the South Carolina and Georgia Low Country, where he has given public lectures and interviews to the local media, and organized workshops for teachers and cultural activists for many years.

[9] Penn Center,[10] the oldest Gullah community organization in the United States, in 2013 inducted Opala into its prestigious "1862 Circle" for his work in cultural preservation.

During high school years, Opala was an active member of the Oklahoma Anthropological Society, participating in weekend digs on prehistoric Native American sites in his home state.

He was assigned to a Limba village in Tonkolili District, where his job was to introduce modern rice cultivation methods derived from the Green Revolution concepts then popular.

Aided by the Peace Corps country director, he was assigned as "Staff Archaeologist" to the Sierra Leone National Museum[17] and the Institute of African Studies at Fourah Bay College.

Cutting back the vegetation and studying the ruins, he was the first scholar to identify the functions of the major buildings, including Bance Island House (the headquarters), the men's and women's slave yards, and the underground gunpowder magazine.

He also found that there were strong linguistic connections between the Gullah people, the descendants of the rice-growing slaves still living in coastal South Carolina and Georgia today, and Sierra Leone.

Inspired by the popular reaction, Opala developed a series of public history initiatives that focused on Bunce Island and the "Gullah Connection" to the United States.

[24] Opala lectured in the Institute of African Studies at Sierra Leone's Fourah Bay College (FBC) from 1985 to 1992, using his academic base to advance his Gullah Connection work.

[30][31][32] After returning to the US, Opala served for two years as the Scholar in Residence at Penn Center, the foremost Gullah community organization, based on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.

[10] Opala worked with Emory Campbell, Penn Center's director, and the US Park Service on the early planning stage of what ultimately became the Gullah-Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor,[33][34] a national heritage area covering the entire Gullah region, including the coastal plain and sea islands of South Carolina and Georgia, and adjoining parts of coastal North Carolina and Florida.

He brought several Sierra Leonean social activists to Penn Center, as well, who talked about their country's civil war and encouraged the Gullahs, as U.S. citizens, to speak out on behalf of their African cousins.

Later, he helped arrange for Gullah families on St. Helena Island to care for the children of Sierra Leonean war refugees granted asylum in the U.S. while their parents settled their affairs in their new home.

Opala later submitted a report to the US Park Service suggesting ways to incorporate Bunce Island and Black Seminole historic sites into the Gullah-Geechee Corridor in the future.

Opala worked with the Africana Heritage Project at the University of South Florida that produced an online database that will enable thousands of other African Americans to link their own family histories to Priscilla.

[47] The Gullahs live in the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia on the coastal plain and the long chain of Sea Islands that runs parallel to the coast.

African farmers had been cultivating rice in that region for centuries, and had developed methods to grow that crop in every new environment they pioneered long before European contact.

[51] Opala maintains that about a quarter of the Black Loyalists (or "Nova Scotians" as they were called in Sierra Leone today) were originally Gullahs from South Carolina and Georgia.

[51][failed verification] Some Gullahs also migrated directly from the United States to Sierra Leone in the early 1800s, including Edward Jones, a free black man from South Carolina.

Opala's foreword to the book calls attention to this two-way connection between Sierra Leoneans and Gullahs exemplified by Kizell's long and eventful life.

[53] Opala is best known for the series of "homecomings" he organized, starting in 1988 with a visit by Sierra Leone's President Joseph Saidu Momoh to the Gullah community on St. Helena Island, South Carolina.

Opala worked with the Sierra Leone Government to arrange the Moran family's homecoming, and helped produce the documentary film The Language You Cry In that chronicles this remarkable story.

After signing a memorandum of understanding with the Sierra Leone Government in July 2010, the Coalition began overseeing a series of scientific studies leading to a full-blown preservation project.

The documentary films based on those events have been broadcast repeatedly on local TV and shown in schools and colleges in those states, and many Gullahs have now visited Sierra Leone.

African Americans, in general, have taken a good deal of interest in the Mende song from Sierra Leone preserved by the Gullah family in coastal Georgia.

based partly on the documentary The Language You Cry In—and including a dramatic performance of the Mende song at the end of the play—has met with enthusiastic audiences in repertory theaters all across the country.

[81][82][83] But Opala's most enduring contribution is, no doubt, his discovery of Bunce Island's historical importance for the United States, and his decades of research and public history work to promote popular understanding of that site.