Mrs. Michelle Obama, nee Robinson, may be descended from a Sierra Leonean rice farmer who was probably captured in his farm in Southern Sierra Leone and sold in to North American slavery at the instigation of the Lords Proprietors of England, probably in the early to mid-18th Century.
The Lords Proprietors were grand land speculators based in London who obtained grants from the King of England to develop the Carolinas in North America as a commercial enterprise in 1663 and 1665. Carolina was defined as land from the Atlantic to the Pacific Coast. By late that Century, the Lords Proprietors were virtually bankrupt and desperate for survival when they happened upon a sea captain who, noticing the geographical similarities between South Carolina and Sierra Leone (hot, humid, swampy lowlands on the Atlantic coast; rivers-originating highlands in the Northern interior) and knew from experience that rice flourished in Sierra Leone, suggested that the Lords Proprietors adopt rice as their cash crop. They did and so the existing slave trade took a catastrophic turn for Sierra Leone’s successful rice farmers.
Michelle Obama traces her ancestry back 5-generations to her great-great grandfather, one Jim Robinson, who was born into slavery in the Friendfield Plantation, Georgetown, South Carolina, a rice plantation. Despite its name: 8 0Friendfield’, it was most certainly not a friendly place for the enslaved inhabitants who toiled in swamps from day break to beyond sunset six-and-a-half days a week from childhood until a few months or weeks before death. Whereupon, they were interred in the plantation’s swamps!
Mrs. Obama’s connection to Sierra Leone first came to light only recently when her Gullah-speaking relatives from South Carolina showed up in Washington for her husband’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States. The Gullah Language is a Creole-like language that originated with the West African-trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and still spoken in the South Carolina low country were rice farmers from Sierra Leone were forced to settle create the rice industry for whites.
Mrs. Obama’s connection to Sierra Leone first came to light only recently when her Gullah-speaking relatives from South Carolina showed up in Washington for her husband’s inauguration as the 44th President of the United States. The Gullah Language is a Creole-like language that originated with the West African-trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and still spoken in the South Carolina low country were rice farmers from Sierra Leone were forced to settle create the rice industry for whites.
