Posted on March 19, 2006
Actor Isaiah Washington from ABC’s popular primetime drama “Grey’s Anatomy” donated $25,000 to JMU professors Joseph Opala and Gary Chatelain to do a computer reconstruction project of Bunce Island, an 18th-century British slave-trading castle on Africa’s west coast in Sierra Leone.
In May 2006, Opala unexpectedly met Washington on the small island — measuring 1,600-feet long and 350-feet wide — and watched as the actor sailed in on speedboats with a film crew.
Washington recently discovered his own ancestral connections to Sierra Leone through DNA testing.
“The stories of innumerable Sierra Leoneans that were forced into slavery have yet to be extensively told,” said Washington in a recent press release. “I believe this project will begin to shed some much-needed light on the region, both past and present.”
Though the castle was one of many involved in the African slave trade, Bunce Island was the most important to North America because of the number of slaves it sent to the colonies, particularly South Carolina and Georgia, to grow rice crops.
“Bunce Island was the most important historic sites in Africa for the United States,” Opala said. “Not a lot of people know that.”
Opala admitted that even he had not heard of Bunce Island until he went to Sierra Leone.
“What it essentially was, was a slave-trade ghost town,” he said. “You get a really eerie feeling.”
Aside from the computer animation component, much of the project’s research began while Opala was living in Sierra Leone. He said the castle has been abandoned for 150 years, and he has tried to write the castle’s history, further understand its connection to the United States and figure out exactly what it looked like.
By the time he left the country in 1997, Opala developed a mental image of what the castle looked like when it was still in use.
“I’ve been searching everywhere in the world for documents relating to the castle,” he said.
Currently, the two professors have five drawings and sketches of Bunce Island, the earliest from 1680 and the latest from 1805.
“Everyone was pushing for more and more connections [to Sierra Leone]. All of this research began with Bunce Island,” Opala said.
Then in late 2003, Opala recruited Chatelain to help him recreate a historically accurate computer image of the castle, using a sketch from April 20, 1805. Although no photographs and few sketches of the structure exist — many of which are conflicting depending on the artist and time period — Chatelain said his love of history and other research on England led him to be knowledgeable about what Bunce Island should look like.
“[The project] combines my background of history with my computer design skills,” Chatelain said. “It’s a perfect mix.”
He added: “That image gives us insight into the basic layout and political needs of the British at the time. [The animation] is based on ruins that were there and the British architecture of that time.”
Before Washington’s donation, Chatelain had already recreated the castle’s exterior buildings using computer-aided design. This donation, he said, will help them take the project to the second level — creating the castle interior and lighting, and filling it with furniture, manuscripts, books, maps and other objects.
Chatelain said the extensive detail required makes this segment the hardest part of the project.
“It’s a time-consuming task,” he said. “It’s going to take a while.”
All the same, both professors said the project is advancing. Opala said last week, he found out that Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., proposed a $10 million bill in Congress to fund the preservation of Bunce Island. The project also plans to make an educational CD, a documentary film and a traveling exhibit of Bunce Island.
Education, Opala said, is one of the biggest and most important parts of the project. He hopes a concrete image of the castle will help many understand how large a role this island played in the United States’ history.
“Reality is so complicated,” Opala said. “This is something purely of the imagination. We want to make it real.”
