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

This year historians and others mark the bicentennial of the abolition of the British and U.S. slave trades from Africa. Yet as Sylviane Diouf’s account reminds us, enslaved Africans were forcibly carried across the Atlantic—even to the United States—much later than 1808. Dreams of Africa in Alabama tells the story of the last shipload of captive Africans brought to the U.S. and their struggles for survival and community in slavery and freedom.

These 110 men, women, and children originated in what is now Nigeria and Benin; most were captured by the armies of Dahomey and boarded the schooner Clotilda at Ouidah in mid-1860. They were imported as part of a bet between two Mobile, Alabama, businessmen that “a shipful of niggers” could be brought into Mobile Bay under the noses of government authorities. After spending six weeks at sea, the captives became Alabama slaves, working on plantations and other enterprises in and around Mobile. They did not blend imperceptibly into the larger African American enslaved population, however. Culturally distinct, speaking Yoruba and other West African languages, and sometimes forcefully defending one another from abuse, the Mobile Africans both maintained their own community and kept their distance from many other enslaved people. After emancipation in 1865 they were unable to attain their dream of returning to Africa. Instead, they pooled their resources to buy land and found their own settlement. In “Africa Town” (which persists as “Africatown”) the Clotilda Africans made a living through agriculture and trades, selected a chief and judges, and taught their children the languages and values they had brought from Africa. When giving interviews to the press (and to such luminaries as Zora Neale Hurston and Booker T. Washington), they insisted that writers use their African names so that their family members in Africa might know that they were still alive.

Diouf traces the experiences and ordeals of the Clotilda Africans and their African American descendants from the towns and villages of West Africa, through the middle passage, in Alabama slavery, through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and into the Jim Crow era and beyond. Her goal is not only to detail a previously little-known slice of American history, but also to emphasize the ways in which cultural practices and values brought from Africa were retained and adapted in the United States. For example, like other first-generation immigrants, the Africans portrayed in this book gave their children names from their homelands or—more poignantly—mourned them with African funeral practices. Yet these Africans also converted to Christianity: one of the first structures built in Africa Town was a church. There was no polygyny in Africa Town, English was used increasingly, and the Africans and their descendants sometimes skillfully navigated mainstream institutions. Part of what is so compelling about the story of the Clotilda survivors is that they arrived in the United States on the verge of momentous historical transformations shaping African American life from the mid-nineteenth century. Diouf contextualizes their experiences in terms of, for example, Confederate impressments, the Freedman’s Bureau, and the postbellum convict leasing system—thus illustrating the conditions under which many African Americans struggled, not only those with direct African connections. Although little of this material will be new to Americanist readers, rarely are such accounts joined with background narratives on the expansion of the Kingdom of Dahomey or the Middle Passage.

Dreams of Africa in Alabama does not enter into questions of historical memory or ethnic identity, and it generalizes about “African” ways of doing things as if culture were autonomous and timeless. For example, in a less than satisfactory analysis Diouf claims that the cultural adaptation she describes was a specific mark of their Africanity: “the cultural and linguistic borrowing” of the residents of Africa...