Michelle Obama...a Sierra Leonean?

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. 

 

From about 1699 through 1783, the Lords Proprietors of Carolina deliberately sent expeditions of slave boats specifically to what is today Sierra Leone to capture healthy, successful rice growers and transported them to South Carolina (and Georgia) where they were forced to toil in swamps planting to create the rice industry in South Carolina, cultivating, harvesting and processing the rice har vest throughout their entire lifetime.

During the Atlantic Slave Trade days, Sierra Leone was the center of the rice growing Grain Coast that was then reputed as the home of the finest and most skillful rice farmers in the world. Historians point to the rice growing skills in American wetlands by enslaved Sierra Leone rice farmers as a key transfer of technology from Africa that enriched the United States making South Carolina as one of America's richest states in the 18th Century.

To give effect to their grandiose development plans, the Lords Proprietors thus took several actions that left a permanent mark on the Sierra Leone landscape. The group chartered a company called The Royal Africa Company to trade in slaves; set up a slave fort on Bunce Island, upriver from present day Freetown, and dispatched three cousins from Liverpool, with the surnames of Tucker, Rogers and Caulker, to what is present day Southern Sierra Leone. Their instructions were they should ingratiate themselves with the chiefs and influential personalities in the area for the purpose of facilitating the sale of their subjects and their transportation to the New World.

Tucker settled in today’s Gbap, Bonthe District; Rogers settled in Massam Kpaka, Pujuhun District and Caulker settled in Shenge, Moyamba District. From that beginning, those three English cousins and their African descendants arranged for the kidnapping of tens of thousands of Sierra Leoneans; parked them in Bunce Island to await the arrival of slave ships that soon transported then to various US slave trading ports but later to Charleston, SC and Savannah, Georgia to build the rice industry. Georgia was part of the Carolina Land Grant awarded to the Lords Proprietors by the English Monarch, Charles II.

One of the most notorious slave captains that transported rice farmers from Bunce Island, Banana Islands and points south on the Sierra Leone shore to Charleston and Savannah during the heyday of the shipment of SL rice farmers to the US was John Newton who later turned against slavery, took Holy Orders and became a minister in the Church of England. He was the author of Amazing Grace, one of the most popular songs in all of Christendom and served as an adviser to William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson in their ultimately successful campaign to end the slave trade as well as abolish the hellish institution of slavery. 
Because he was born into slavery in a South Carolina rice plantation, it is possible that an ancestor rice farmer of Jim Robinson may have been transported from somewhere in Sierra Leone t o Charleston, where he was put up for sale with other captured rice farmers in the Charleston Slave Market and from there his progenies ended up in the Friendfield rice Plantation.

Michelle Obama was born in Chicago where her grandfather had migrated to during the Great Migration of African-Americans from the South to the industrial North. She is the daughter of Fraser Robinson III, a fourth generation descendant of Jim Robinson. 
During Kabbah’s 2nd SLPP Administration, a group based in New Haven, Connecticut sought to get the government’s cooperation in preserving Bunce Island for posterity with the help of the US Park Service. The group received US Government encouragement but no serious cooperation from the Kabbah Government despite numerous efforts.

Courtesy of - JL