Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America

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Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (eBook) Pub. Date: 3/9/2007 Publisher: NetLibrary, Incorporated
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Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (New Edition) Pub. Date: 2/18/2009 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
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Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America Pub. Date: 3/9/2007 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

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Overview

In the summer of 1860, more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda , to Africa, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet.

This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive.

The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marks the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association (2007)

What People Are Saying

Howard Jones

In a tale worthy of a novelist, Sylviane Diouf provides a well-researched, nicely written, and moving account of the last slave ship to America, whose 110 captives arrived in Mobile in 1860 and, after the war, created their dream of Africa in Alabama and called it Africa Town. (Howard Jones, author of Mutiny on the Amistad)

Loren Schweninger

This remarkable story of how a group of captured Africans were torn from their native land in the kingdom of Dahomey, transported across the Atlantic Ocean to Mobile, Alabama shortly before the Civil War, and struggled to recapture their former lives by creating an African town during the postwar era, offers a unique perspective on American history. The narrative is at once tragic, uplifting, and engrossing. (Loren Schweninger, co-author of In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South)

Paul E. Lovejoy

Dreams of Africa in Alabama is an excellent example of the new scholarship on the African diaspora that reconstructs the individual life stories of enslaved Africans-- in this case the people brought from West Africa to Alabama in 1860 on the Clotilda. Diouf has sensitively revealed how these people built on their shared misfortune in being enslaved to form the vibrant community of African Town in the midst of an increasingly racist society, a testimony to unshakeable memories of their African homelands. ( Paul E. Lovejoy, Harriet Tubman Research Institute, York University)

Robert Harms

An amazing story! Diouf shows how the African captives on the last American slave ship not only survived slavery, the civil war, and reconstruction in Alabama, but also fought to preserve African memories, culture, and community. The exhaustive research and graceful writing of Sylviane Diouf has brought this epic journey to life. (Robert Harms, author of The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade)

Toyin Falola

Without question, this is the richest narration of the history of the last set of African slaves who came to the United States. The book carefully illustrates how they they were able to construct a semi-independent existence, navigating the treacherous experience of bondage during the Civil War years and of the constricted freedom that followed. Not only do we gain access to precious, invaluable details about how the marginalized made their own history, we receive additional profound knowledge of the process through which African practices were retained. (Toyin Falola, University of Texas, and Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters)

Editorial Reviews

Choice

Provides readers with the opportunity to consider African culture, its survival even under slavery, its sense of community with roots in West Africa, and the difficulties of maintaining community in a segregated and increasingly Jim Crow South in the late 19th century. Highly recommended.

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From The Critics

Diouf immerses the reader in the diversity and complexity of Africa.... The narrative is patient, disciplined, compelling, and brave, never shying away from the central role that Africans played in the enslavement of other Africans.... One puts down this compelling book convinced both of the significance of the Africans at the center of it, and that Diouf has given us a superb history.
—Eric Love

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780195311044
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date: 3/9/2007
Pages: 352
Product dimensions: 9.30 (w) x 6.40 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Meet the Author

Sylviane A. Diouf is an award-winning author of books on African and African diaspora history and culture. She has taught at Libreville University and New York University and is currently a curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York.

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Known Africans Deported to Mobile on the Clotilda 6

1 Mobile and the Slave Trades 7

2 West African Origins 30

3 Ouidah 55

4 Arrival in Mobile 72

5 Slavery 90

6 Freedom 126

7 African Town 151

8 Between Two Worlds 182

9 Going Back Home 207

Epilogue 233

Appendix: The Numbers of the Illegal Slave Trade 241

An Essay on Sources 245

Notes 251

Bibliography 295

Index 329

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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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Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America

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Choice

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Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America

An amazing story