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

by Sylviane A. Diouf

Book 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...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195382935
• ISBN13: 9780195382938
• Release Date: February 2009
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.20 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 6.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Required Reading

I learned a lot from this book. It should be reuqired reading for all high school students in Alabama.

A book that is long over due

For 300 years the Atlantic Slave Trade brought 12 million people from Africa to the New World. But in spite of the huge numbers of people who made the trip there have been only a handful of first-person accounts left by those who made that horrible trip. Most of the slaves lived and died without having a chance to tell their story. It was not until the advent of the Civil Rights Movement that much needed attention was finally given to one of the saddest chapters in American history. That makes Dreams of Africa in Alabama, The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America such a welcome addition to the field of African-American and Southern history. In Dreams, Dr. Sylviane Diouf, who is the curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York, tells the story of the last Africans brought to the United States on the ship Clotilda.The slave trade was outlawed in 1807, but that did not stop slave traders from bringing slaves into the United States. In 1860, the year before the outbreak of the Civil War, Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Mobile businessman from Maine, bet a group of friends that he could bring a shipful of Africans right into Mobile Bay "under the officers noses." He won the bet. The 110 people that Meaher brought from the kingdom of Dahomey on the west coast of Africa were named Oluale, Pollee Allen, Zuma, Ossa Keeby, and Cudjo Lewis, who would be the last of the shipmates to die in 1935. Slaves for only five years before they won their freedom at the end of the war, they failed in their quest to get back home and instead carved out a life for themselves in their own town outside of Mobile, Africa Town. Forgotten for years, their story is brought to life by Svlviane Diouf, who thanks to her outstanding research and writing skills brings to life the dreadful trip during the Middle Passage,and then the dehumanzing, backbreaking life of a slave in Alabama during the Civil War. Even years later, the shipmates would break down when they tried to talk about the trip on the Clotilda. Looked down upon by whites and other blacks as "savage Africans," a bias that would haunt them and their families into the 20th century, they lived through slavery, war,and Jim Crow and created the only town of its kind in the United States, a town founded and lived in by people who had been brought to this country as slaves from Africa. For 50 years, memebers of the shipmates' families and others have worked to preserve the history of Africatown and the story of the men and women who founded it. There is still much that is needed to be done to save that legacy before it is too late. Hopefully Dr. Diouf book will help to raise awareness about this important and little known chapter from American history.

Absolutely Loved Dreams

I am a history buff. I loved this book. I highly recommend it,if history turns you on. Ashe' Ashe'

A reference book, a novel, a history book - highly educative, encompassingly tender

I cannot recommend this book any more feverishly. It is incredibly well researched and written. The author lays down the historical facts in a clear manner and then leaves the characters to entice you into their lives and speak to you. The stories are never sensationalized, if anything, it is this lack of dramatization that enables the stories to unfold naturally. The book clearly shows how within a relatively short space of time certain aspects of a culture may vanish, but other aspects which form the core of a community's make-up are improvised regardless of the circumstances and continued down the line (the communal spirit of the Africans, reverence to authority, conflict resolution etc). Cudjo's life was the one delved into in the greatest detail and it evolved to be as remarkable as it was melancholic. After the last of the African deportees dies, I can only imagine the loneliness that would have haunted him - being alone in America, a land that he had lived in for three quarters of his life, but one that was still alien to him, one where no other local born Africans were in his immediate vicinity would surely have quelled his tenacious will and defiant spirit. For him to have lived the rest of his years, not being able to converse in his native tongue or to express his innermost feelings in a manner capable of being immediately understood by his neighbors would surely have been unbearably painful. There is an African proverb that states that "you know who a person really is by the language they cry in". When all he had ever known was gone and he lamented for them in his native tongue, I wonder, did the people around him understand the depth of his despair? After all his personal losses and tragedies in America, he finally relents of his desire to go back to Africa and surmises that he was indeed alone on earth - his family in America was no more and he figured that his family in Africa would also be no more - an unbearable set of circumstances to accept. The author should be commended for unearthing and bringing to life such a great story, but even more importantly, for doing so in as lucid a manner as is possible. My only question is how on earth do we let a story as remarkable as this just dawdle with no attempt to publicise it more. It would be great if we could have a children's book on the story. A trip to AficaTown in Alabama is in the offing for my family.

Wonderfully researched personal stories

Dreams of Africa in Alabama is a beautifully written and meticulous book. It's evident that Ms. Diouf spent a considerable amount of time and detail with her research. The author describes the Alabama slave trade and the events that lead to the maiden voyage of the modified schooner, Clotilda. She devotes two chapters to the lives of the "shipmates" - one prior to their capture and the other chronicling their imprisonment in the barracoons (slave pens) and their subsequent Middle Passage voyage. The remaining chapters recount the lives of the deported Africans during their enslavement and post emancipation. In 1808 the United States abolished the international slave trade. In order to circumvent the law, many Southerners modified existing ships to camouflage their true intent and evade naval officials. The Clotilda was one such ship. Seeking to make a profit on the sale of Africans, the Meaher brothers and their associates went about the business of arranging a slaving run. Many of the captured Africans were placed into slavery as a result of lost tribal wars and/or suspect alliances between African Kings and European and American merchants. When the humiliation and brutality of slavery was over, the shipmates endured Jim Crow, disenfranchisement and other forms of maltreatment. In spite of those obstacles, the Africans purchased land just outside of Mobile, Alabama, and became a self-sufficient community with a bank, farms, schools and churches. The shipmates limited their interaction with non-African people. Other than their contact with Americans and African Americans in the workplace, the Africans made little effort to interact anyone who wasn't from the continent in their personal lives. Intermarriages between Africans and African Americans occurred in small numbers. There were attempts to return to their families and homes in Africa; run-ins with the law; and a desire to dispel the rumors of their savagery and cannibalism. This book is a sobering and painful account of some of the atrocities Africans endured. Ms. Diouf interviewed the descendants of the Mobile, Alabama slaves, and poured over mountains of archives in libraries and private collections to give the reader an up close and personal view of the lives of the shipmates of the Clotilda. There are many more stories and details to be discovered when you read Dreams of Africa in Alabama.