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  • The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America
  • Robert Harms
Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy , eds. The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America. Revised and expanded second edition. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2007. xix + 278 pp. Illustrations. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $69.95. Cloth. $22.95. Paper.

Slave-route narratives—memoirs written or narrated by Africans who had been caught up in the vortex of the trans-Atlantic slave trade—have long been an indispensable source for understanding the operations of the slave trade within Africa, the horrors of the middle passage, and the experience of slaves in the new world. It is unfortunate and frustrating that there are so few of them. Philip Curtin's Africa Remembered, published some forty years ago, provided scholars with an invaluable compendium of all the slave-route narratives known at the time. Despite enormous amounts of research on the slave trade in the ensuing years, surprisingly little of the canon has changed. One development is that the accuracy of the best-known work of this genre, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the African, has been questioned in Vincent Caretta's recent biography of Equiano, raising serious doubts as to whether [End Page 229] Equiano was really born in Africa.

Nevertheless, several new slave-route narratives have been discovered in recent years, and these exist mostly in the form of memoirs, pamphlets, or broadsides. The University of North Carolina Library's extensive collection of North American Slave Narratives (http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh) contains five slave-route narratives that were not in Curtin's original 1967 collection: the narratives of Cugoano Ottobah, Boyrereau Brinch, Venture Smith, Abdul Rahhaman, and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, all of which are now available online. The 1828 pamphlet on Abdul Rahhaman was used by Terry Alford in writing the story of Ibrahima in Prince Among Slaves (Oxford University Press, 1977). The memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, originally published in 1810, were recently edited by Karl J. Winter and republished (University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, under review here, was first published as a pamphlet in 1854. It has now been edited and republished with a long introductory essay and extensive footnotes by Robin Law and Paul Lovejoy.

Born in Djougou (in modern Benin) around 1830, Baquaqua was captured in a local war and shipped out through the Dahomian port of Whydah as part of the illegal trans-Atlantic slave trade. Arriving in Brazil, he began life as a slave in Pernambuco and was subsequently sold to a sea captain from Rio de Janeiro. In 1847 he escaped with the help of free black abolitionists while the ship was docked in New York City and spent two years in the free black Republic of Haiti with the American Baptist Free Mission Society. With the support of the mission society, he attended New York Central College in upstate New York from 1850 to 1853 and published his autobiography the following year.

Baquaqua's story is significant for several reasons. First, it gives a detailed account (comprising over half the text) of life and conditions in his home region before his enslavement. This section is written in the third person, probably by his editor Samuel Moore, based on information supplied by Baquaqua. Once Baquaqua is captured, however, the narrative switches to a first-person account. Second, Baquaqua's story is unusual in that his travels took him from Whydah to Brazil, the United States, Canada, and Haiti, thus illustrating the wide reach of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery. As Lovejoy writes, Baquaqua was a man of the Black Atlantic.

Originally published in 2001, the edited book has now come out in a revised and expanded second edition. A model for the editing of historical texts, the book contains a biographical introduction that is almost as long as the narrative itself, with extensive footnotes, four maps, twenty-seven illustrations, a glossary, a bibliography, and five appendixes containing letters written by Baquaqua and other source material.

Robert Harms
Yale University
New...

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