East Cooper sweetgrass basketmaker Nakia Wigfall has joined with artisans in West Africa, the Bahamas and Georgia to create the first-ever coiled basket collection that blends basketmaking styles from around the African diaspora.
The collaboration has led to 28 baskets that are now part of a new traveling exhibit to showcase the different techniques and materials used to make a coiled basket. It is an artifact of a West African tradition that has traveled through the South Carolina-Georgia Lowcountry to Florida and then to the Caribbean.
“I am ecstatic. I want people to feel the connection that I feel,” said Wigfall, who has a bitter-sweet assessment of how the basket tradition’s legacy is treated. Local governments acknowledge sweetgrass basketmakers, she admitted. But they don’t do enough to celebrate them, she lamented. “Rice and baskets built … South Carolina,” she stressed.
A desire to collaborate with West African basketmakers came to Wigfall during a 2016 trip to Senegal. To make her dream a reality, she partnered with Sierra Leonean-born Amadu Massally, an independent curator and public historian, who specializes in African diaspora cultural heritage.
Together they have created the collection called the “Sweetgrass Basketry, Diaspora Memory and Cultural Reconnection.”
The baskets are a blend of different cultures. The collection includes one culturally hybrid basket made by Wigfall, and an artisan in Georgia, the Bahamas and Sierra Leone. Twenty-four baskets were made by Wigfall and basketmakers in Sierra Leone and three baskets were made by Wigfall and Bahamian artistians.
Ata least six institutions and universities are interested in displaying the baskets, including S.C. State University in Orangeburg, said Massally, who lives in Dallas.
Ramon Jackson, history curator at the S.C. State Museum in Columbia, said “this is new to me to have these hybrid pieces.”
Jackson said he would encourage Wigfall and Massally to include basketmakers from North Carolina and Florida to cover the entire Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor. Including North Carolina and Florida, he explained, would create an interesting conversation on how artists around the corridor have preserved the basket tradition and overcame the difficulties to obtain the materials to make the baskets.
The museum recently acquired Mount Pleasant sweetgrass basketmaker Corey Alston’s “Big Percy,” which is possibly the world’s largest sweetgrass basket.
Wigfall said she made a basket that has sweetgrass from the four states in corridor. She calls it the Gullah Geechee Corridor Basket.
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.
Massally organized Wigall’s trip in 2019 to the basketmaking community in Rogbonko (pronounced RoBONko) where mostly women sew coiled baskets called “shuku blai or shukublay.” Her journey is featured in a film, supported by S.C. Humanities, Gullah Roots: How to go to Africa on a Roots Tour, released in October 2020.
Two years ago, Wigfall and Massally met Bahamian basketmakers in Red Bays through Grace Turner, chief archaeologist and research officer at the Bahamas Antiquities, Monuments and Museum Corporation in Nassau.
Wigfall sat with basketmakers Gregory Grant in Riceboro, Ga., Norma Knowles in Red Bays, and Sierra-Leonean born Fatmata Opala, who lives in Charlottesville, Va.
Massally said all of the travel “is not just an exercise in nostalgia. It is a profound reclamation of identity and power. The basket proves that our ancestors did not arrive as blank slates. When enslaved Africans were brought to the American South, they did not forget this technology.”
When artisans from Sierra Leone, South Carolina, Georgia, and the Bahamas met, they symbolically and literally stitched a “fractured diaspora back into one family,” he said. “As Bahamian artisan Norma Knowles realized during the exchange, ‘We are one big family just in different places.’ Learning this history heals the generational wounds of displacement.”
Wigfall’s journey is not over. “My dream is to sit with basketmakers from the former rice coast countries of West Africa so we can end up with one basket that represents all of us.”
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