[3] Some African Americans trace their roots to indigenous enslaved Sierra Leoneans exported to the United States between the 18th and early 19th century.
In particular, the Gullah people of partial Sierra Leonean ancestry, fled their owners and settled in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, and the Sea Islands, where they still retain their cultural heritage.
Moreover, between 1776 and 1785, during the American Revolution, many Gullah of Sierra Leoneans origin fled from the United States and emigrated to Nova Scotia, Canada, after the abolition of slavery in this country.
[4] Subsequently, in 1787 the British helped 400 freed slaves from the United States, Nova Scotia (many of them were Gullah), and Great Britain to return to Sierra Leone, where they founded the colony Freetown in 1792.
[4] They did not emigrate to the United States again until the 1970s, when a new group of Sierra Leoneans, mostly students, arrived to study at American universities.
Other Sierra Leonean communities are settled in suburbs of Alexandria, Fairfax, Arlington, Falls Church, and Woodbridge in Virginia, and in Landover, Lanham, Cheverly, Silver Spring, and Bethesda in Maryland.
There are also Sierra Leonean communities in the Boston and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, and in New Jersey, Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, Texas, Oregon and Ohio.
Many Sierra Leonean residents in the USA work in two or three jobs to reach enough salary to help their families in their country, whilst some others have university degrees.
[4] The Gullah, or (in Georgia) Geechee, are descendants of enslaved Africans that were sent from Africa or since the Caribbean, particularly Barbados, to serve as free labor for the cultivation of rice, whose area of cultivation was the southeast coast of the modern United States, and that still live in Sea Islands and the coastal areas of South Carolina and Georgia.
Indeed, most of the slaves that were imported to southeast coast of the United States came from the West African's rice-growing region, established mainly in Sierra Leone, through the Bunce Island.
So although the ancestors of the Gullah come from many places on the coast of West Africa, many of the elements that are part of their material culture, food (rice) and crops (indigo) are the same as those held by Sierra Leoneans.
Hair, a British historian, said the "startling" fact that all texts in African Gullah dialect are written in languages spoken in Sierra Leone.
But Dr. Cabello also said that an "unusually large proportion" of the four thousand African names and personal loans in the Gullah language come from Sierra Leone.
He estimated that twenty-five percent of African names and twenty percent of African vocabulary words came from the Sierra Leonean languages, principally Mende and Vai[15][16](one of the Gullah words of origin not Sierra leonean is the same term "Gullah", that may derive from Angola[17]).