Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua (1830? – 1860s?), originally from the village of Djougou in present-day Benin, was captured and exported to the Brazilian state of Pernambuco in the first half of the nineteenth century. “Slave narratives” about bonded life in colonial Brazil are indeed rare, and thus Mahommah’s account takes on added significance. Ultimately, he was able to travel from Brazil to New York, Haiti, and finally Canada, where he related his account less than a decade after he was exported from his homeland.
Brazil
The Research Process
Essays2 CommentsToward the end of the nineteenth century, Mohammed Ali Ben Said settled in Alabama, where his narrative and the paper trail for his life ends, but where the research for my Transatlantic Africa book began. Transatlantic Africa: 1440-1888 retold the story of transatlantic slaving through the lived experiences and intellectual history of Africans who lived through it. In that way, uncovering Mohammed’s story was fortuitous because Mohammed was an African, a Muslim, and an enslaved or indentured person for most of his remarkable life. For all these insights Mohammed’s extraordinary story provided, it left an equal amount of questions. These questions became the legs of my research, conveying it along an exploratory journey.
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