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Anonymous
Posted August 23, 2007
Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America
Drawn to the title, startled by its premise you continue to read. Hoping to read something new, it became immediately clear that Sylviane Diouf has, indeed, composed something different. Within the pages of Dreams of Africa in Alabama a world, previously unknown, is opened and refuses to allow you to close the door without the full story. January 1808 the international trade in slaves was outlawed by the United States. Unfortunately, there were plenty of white men, such as Captain William Foster who continued to profit from the capture and sale of Africans along the western coast of Africa long past the abolition date. More appalling is the fact that the financier and receiver of the majority of the last recorded African contraband had yet to become an American citizen himself? Timothy Meaher was a plantation owner and ship builder who had been heard bragging proudly, that he could bring a shipload of Africans across the Atlantic and into the American population, undetected. And so he did with the help of William Foster, a duped ship's crew, and various nefarious characters in the backwoods and canebrakes of Alabama. Standing on and sometimes correcting research done by other writers such as notable Zora Neale Hurston (Hurston completed the manuscript Barracoon in April 1931), Sylviane Diouf has produced a book that is truly worth adding to your personal library. From the details concerning trekking across the West African coast in a coffle and being stripped of all clothing before being herded into the bowels of a ship to being ostracized by those who look like you, but are not your neighbors, the lives of the 110 women, men, and children of the slaver Clotilda are played out before you. At times your heart bleeds for the unknowing Africans and at other times you want to respond out loud to the success of the founders of African Town.
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Anonymous
Posted April 27, 2007
An amazing story
A wonderful book. Reading like a novel, this book is incredibly well-researched and documented. I have read many books on the slave trade but it is the first time I ever found so many details on Africans who arrived in America through the transatlantic slave trade. Diouf does not write about unknown ¿numbers¿ but about individuals who have pictures, names, personal stories, and whole lives before capture in Benin and Nigeria that she reconstructs with great care. We discover them in their hometowns walk with them to the coast, witness their last moments in the barracoon, and feel their pain during the Middle Passage. But this book is not about grief, it¿s a celebration of the unity, ingenuity, and love for their homelands of a group of young people who created their own Africa in Alabama. It¿s about what in their cultures helped them survive and prosper in America, how they raised generations of men and women who were Africans in America and still live in the town their ancestors founded. It¿s gripping. Anybody with interest in African American history NEEDS to read this book, it's truly wonderful.
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