2 days ago
6
With their eyes downcast in reflection, dozens of people dressed in white crossed a bridge to pay respect to their ancestors last October. They carried flowers, herbs and photos of their loved ones to lay at the foot of an altar on a tiny strip of land in the middle of a pond. For the last few years, this ritual at the start of the annual Gullah Geechee herbal gathering on Johns Island, South Carolina, has served as a link between the living and the dead. “It gives them a sacred space to connect with the land,” the gathering’s founder, Khetnu Nefer, said about the attendees, and to “connect with our communal ancestors”.
Held on Nefer’s family’s land, a stretch of 10 acres (four hectares) of flat grass surrounded by woods, the gathering educates attendees on the herbal traditions of the descendants of west Africans enslaved on the Sea Islands along the south-east US. Over the course of the three-day conference, Black and brown instructors – some of whom are Gullah Geechee – host around 20 workshops ranging from English-based creole lessons to foraging for herbs including chaney root, which is boiled into a tea to heal fatigue or arthritis. During an herbal remedy class, attendees learn which herbs can be used to treat chronic pain, including mullein, a flowering plant that is sometimes boiled into a tea to heal symptoms associated with asthma or bronchitis.
When she was growing up, Nefer remembers, her grandmother walked the lands to search for herbal remedies for common ailments. The Sea Islands were only accessible by boat until the erection of bridges in the mid-20th century, so many Gullah Geechee people relied on herbs instead of western medicine due to a lack of access to doctors. For 50-year-old Nefer, teaching younger generations who aren’t as familiar with the old ways to identify and connect with herbs in the wild is important. “Our elders are transitioning, and a lot of them tend to gatekeep because they feel like the next generations aren’t interested,” Nefer said. “I felt like it was incumbent of my generation to be that bridge between the elders and gen Z and lower to make sure that this stuff doesn’t die out and that we have a repository for this information.”
Largely unknown outside the Gullah Geechee community, many herbs in North America were brought over during the middle passage by enslaved Africans to treat common maladies. They wore necklaces made of licorice plant seeds to treat coughs, and braided okra seeds into their hair to use its ground-up leaves as a poultice for wounds. Formerly enslaved Africans also used herbs in spiritual practices to deal with conflicts. Now, Gullah Geechee people are continuing their ancestral traditions by holding intergenerational gatherings to trade their knowledge on sustainable herb farming and medicine making. And perhaps now more than ever, due to social media and a desire to connect to ancestral roots, younger Gullah people are expressing a renewed interest in the craft.
“In my generation, we live in both worlds: there is a lot of discrimination and anti-Blackness in the medical industry,” said Akua Page, a 31-year-old Gullah Geechee tour guide based in Charleston, South Carolina. “My generation will go to the hospital because they have the machinery to get diagnosed, but we’ll still sit down with our elders [and ask]: ‘What plant did you utilize to help with this?’”
In March 2020, Nefer held the first conference at a small Black-owned farm in Charleston with 80 attendees. The conference doubled in attendance the next year when it was held on her family’s property, and then tripled the following year, with the majority Black attendees, some of whom were Gullah Geechee, ranging in age from 25 to 70 years old. Last October, the conference shrunk to 90 people after a hurricane struck the area the day beforehand.
Nefer plans to host the next conference in the spring of 2026, when she believes that herbal remedies may be more important than ever as state and federal regulations continue to limit access to healthcare including birth control. “There are herbs that can help with different maladies,” Nefer said. “If we can connect our resources together, we won’t have to be reliant on big pharma and the doctors and we could be self-reliant.”
‘When we came here, we brought our plants with us’
The origins of Gullah herbal medicines are a melting pot of the knowledge of enslaved people from different parts of west Africa and Native Americans, said Khet Waas Hutip, a 46-year-old Gullah herbalist.
“When we came here, we brought our plants with us,” said Hutip, founder of the holistic healing store Sacred Rootz in Summerville, South Carolina. “We may had necklaces with seeds, we may had cornrows or hairstyles with beads. Those beads had seeds in them, and then these things start to cultivate over here.”
Much of the knowledge about enslaved Africans’ herbal practices are based on oral history and passed down between generations. Most enslaved Africans were illiterate and white writers weren’t incentivized to document Black practices, according to Faith Mitchell, a medical anthropologist and author of the groundbreaking 1978 book Hoodoo Medicine: Gullah Herbal Remedies. “So there’s this enormous silence where you just wish you knew what was going on and what happened from one day to the next,” Mitchell said. “The history of folk medicine and herbal medicine belongs to that period that lasted decades – of cultural mingling and adaptation, but it isn’t documented.”
Enslaved people were able to apply their pharmacological skills on the Sea Islands since plant and animal life along the Carolina coast slightly resembled west Africa’s. They likely treated their ailments by themselves using herbal remedies and sought help from plantation doctors as a last resort, Mitchell wrote in her book. They also practiced magical medicines by using feathers, bones, blood, leaves, sand or water to cast spells on people or to counteract magic directed toward them. Black folk medicine was likely also practiced clandestinely prior to emancipation since enslaved people could face punishment for practicing any type of medicine.
When Mitchell first arrived to the South Carolina Sea Islands in the early 1970s, she met elders who shared some of this knowledge with her by pointing out plants that could be used as medicines as they walked along the road. “You had these oral traditions, but the middle generation wasn’t there to pass them down to and then there were little kids who would come there in the summer when their parents were working,” she said. So Mitchell wrote the book to document some of the oral traditions that the working generation were not on the island to learn because they were pursuing job opportunities elsewhere.
In the decades since the book was originally published, Mitchell said, she’s seen a growing interest in Gullah herbal remedies. She credits the renewed interest to a malaise around the pharmaceutical industry, and a desire to tap into ancestral roots fueled by greater access to information. She now sees youth citing the book, as well as Gullah traditional practices on social media.
Page, the Gullah tour guide, uses TikTok to disseminate information about natural medicine and herbal traditions. In one video, she swishes around a jar of stinging nettle, which reduces inflammation and is believed to offer spiritual protection and help break curses. In another video, she pours rice in a waterway as an offering to heal her enslaved ancestors from the middle passage.
Her foster mom taught her how to harvest elderberries and make them into a syrup to help treat colds and flus. But she advised Page not to share the skill with anyone because it might be viewed as witchcraft. “The practice of hoodoo, people still look at that as evil or demonic,” Page said. “But when you call it herbalism, then it’s like: ‘Oh, that’s great.’”
Now she conducts tours at a former rice plantation, where she educates visitors on Gullah practices including praying over Spanish moss and then stuffing it into shoes to help treat asthma and high blood pressure. Page regularly visits elders to learn about the natural medicine they’ve used to heal ailments, but she’s found that some are reticent about sharing their traditions or being recorded due to the fear of stigma associated with the spiritual practice of hoodoo.
As a workaround, Page documented the elders’ teachings in her recent book, Gullah Geechee Adventures: Hoodoo Magick, which is about an elder who passed away and left her descendants a hoodoo magic book that included instructions on various herbal remedies. Through her storytelling, Page hopes to keep the ancestral practices alive and help destigmatize spiritual traditions that were demonized by slavery and colonialism.
‘Without good health, you can’t experience life’
Herbs have also linked Hutip with his elders throughout his life. When he was growing up as a child with asthma, his older family members taught him to drink natural medicines including life everlasting and chickweed to help clear his respiratory tract before he played outside. And as he began to develop a passion for the craft in high school, an elder in the neighborhood named Ms Mack became his first patient as he helped her manage her diabetes symptoms. Hutip instructed her to eat the dandelions in her yard to help heal her pancreas, eat raw string beans and drink tea with gymnema leaves to help regulate her blood sugar. After implementing the changes for several months, she eventually weened herself off insulin after having relied on it for decades. He recalled her saying: “This is your calling. This is what you got to do.”
After college and a visit to Ghana, where he learned to create tonics from bitter roots and herbs that aid in digestive health, Hutip decided to dedicate his life to herbalism. In 2012, he started Sacred Rootz and sold herbs out of a stall at a flea market in Charleston before eventually opening up a storefront in Summerville.
“Without good health, you can’t experience life,” Hutip said. “You can’t even fulfill your purpose.”
At his store, he sells more than 200 herbs imported from the Caribbean or that he has harvested from the nearby forest. He also hosts monthly classes to educate the local Gullah Geechee and Black communities on how to treat common illnesses including diabetes and high blood pressure with lifestyle changes and natural medicine.
“These doctors don’t really explain to them what is going on in their body, what it is, how you get it, how you can reverse it,” Hutip said. “And since they lack the information, they suffer because of it.”
In recent years, Hutip said, younger generations have visited his shop after hearing about the power of herbal medicine on social media. He uses it as an opportunity to teach them about some of the Gullah herbal traditions that were passed down to him by his elders. To keep the traditions alive, he is working on a children’s herbal book written in the Gullah Geechee language that’s about a girl who can communicate with plants and uses her power to help people heal their ailments through natural medicine.
At home, Hutip also imparts his skills to his children through regular lessons. During walks, he notes different plants and quizzes them on their names to ensure that the knowledge is carried on. The teachings have translated to his 10-year-old daughter’s playtime: she often whips up concoctions with various plants that she harvests in the yard and then seeps in cups of water, to which he’ll tell her: “You just made medicine.”
“They’re doing it subconsciously, because it’s something ancestral,” Hutip said. “So it’s just our job to point out what it is.”
