East Cooper sweetgrass basketmaker Nakia Wigfall recently completed a unique rice fanner basket that blends West African and Lowcountry artistry.
The fanner is among four dozen coiled baskets that basketmakers in Rogbonko, Sierra Leone, started in 2019 during Wigfall’s visit to the village. Wigfall recently finished them at her home in the Six Mile community north of Mount Pleasant.
Wigfall’s nimble fingers have crafted thousands of baskets that have generated praise for her skills passed down from her mother, Ethel “Catherine” Wigfall, who once operated the family’s now closed basket stand along U.S. 17.
The baskets that the Africans touched, however, evoked a new level of pride that “is not about a unique design or how beautiful it looks,” Wigfall told the Charleston City Paper. “It’s more about creating pieces with my Sierra Leonean family in the land where I should have grown up.”
On Friday, April 12, Wigfall will cross another cultural boundary when she sings and sews baskets with artisans in Red Bays on Andros Island, Bahamas. They are the descendants of Florida’s Black Seminoles who migrated to the island in the early 1800s.
Wigfall’s seven-day Bahamas journey is likely the first time a Lowcountry basketmaker has followed the strands of the coiled basket tradition from West Africa’s former rice coast through the Lowcountry to Florida and then to the Caribbean.
She is taking a few dozen baskets to the Bahamas that she and West African artisans partially completed so the Bahamian basketmakers can finish them. “My dream is to do this with every basketmaker where they grew rice in West Africa,” Wigfall said. “I want the people and the material to produce authentic baskets from those areas.”
The basket tradition
West Africans brought the basket tradition to coastal South Carolina during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Some of their descendants later fled to Spanish Florida where they joined with the Seminoles in the Florida wilderness before some of them went to the Bahamas and other Caribbean Islands after the American Revolution.
A desire to collaborate with West African basketmakers came to Wigfall during a 2016 trip to Senegal. To make her dream a reality, she has partnered with Sierra Leonean-born Amadu Massally, a retired Dallas accountant.
Massally is the founder of the community organization Fambul Tik, which means family tree. The group connects Sierra Leoneans with Gullah Geechee people, who are descendants of enslaved West Africans.
Massally organized Wigall’s trip in 2019 to the basket-making community in Rogbonko (pronounced RoBONko) where mostly women sew coiled baskets called “shuku blai or shukublay.” Her journey featured in a film, supported by S.C. Humanities, Gullah Roots: How to go to Africa on a Roots Tour, released in October 2020.
Wigfall’s travels, Massally said, is a celebration of the “material culture” that came to America from West Africa during the slave trade and continues in both cultures.
The Bahamas connection
In the Bahamas, Wigfall and Massally will connect with Red Bays basketmakers through Dr. Grace Turner, chief archaeologist and research officer at the Bahamas Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation in Nassau.
The Red Bays baskets, traditionally called “straw bag,” are coiled like the Carolina baskets, Turner said. The more tourist-popular baskets in Nassau, however, feature flat strips of palm fronds, which are plaited together to form the basket, she explained. Turner said she plans to invite a basketmaker in Nassau to join Wigfall at Red Bays.
The Bahamas, a former British colony, exported baskets beginning in the early 1700s, Turner said. “Originally, they were utilitarian items we used in the households and around the plantations,” she said. Baskets in the Bahamas and the Lowcountry have since become decorative art that’s mostly sold as souvenirs to tourists.
Turner said Wigfall will see how Red Bays basketmakers “construct their baskets with the ultimate objective” of producing baskets that have materials from throughout the African diaspora.
A threatened tradition
A multicultural basket is “a unique idea that Nakia has been talking about for years and now she’s making that dream come true,” said McClellanville resident Dale Rosengarten, co-author of Grass Roots: African Origins of an American Art.
Nevertheless, Rosengarten said, in the midst of Wigfall’s accomplishments the basket tradition is at a crossroads due to commercial development that has changed how baskets are sold and diminished the source of sweetgrass.
Generations of basketmakers once sold their wares at wooden road-side stands along U.S. Highway 17 in the Mount Pleasant area. But many of those stands are now skeletons along a wider highway.
“Along that six-lane highway, people are going too fast, and they don’t have enough lead time to figure out” how to stop safely at a basket stand, Rosegarten said. “A few basketmakers have circumvented that problem” by placing stands near their homes where there is a driveway or placing stands in shopping areas, she said.
Sweetgrass also is becoming “slim to none,” Wagfall said. “The town of Mount Pleasant allows us to use some of the sweetgrass that has been planted in different areas,” she said. “However, this grass is ornamental and it is not as strong as the natural sweetgrass, and it is difficult to harvest.”
These and other pressures have inflated the price of the baskets. “Just like [the price of] everything else it is going up. Basketmakers are artists,” she said. “Just like a painting can sell for thousands of dollars, [a basket] should cost more than it does now.”
Basket admirers don’t understand, she said, “how we get from the grass to the finished baskets.” Wigfall said she has harvested grass only to discover that a poisonous snake was inches from her heels in places where alligators lurk.
“It is a dangerous situation,” she said. “We are really starting to market the basket the way it should have been marketed.”
Massally said attention to the international link among basketmakers can bring a renewed interest in the basket culture.
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