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

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 302 Professor Burnett has done extensive primary and secondary research to place Hotze in context and to elaborate the relationships that defined his life. He has also arranged the writings selected so that, taken together , they constitute a narrative of Hotze’s life. The result is a work that will be essential reading for scholars of scientific racism and the Confederate propaganda effort in England. HENRY M. MCKIVEN JR. University of South Alabama Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America. By Sylviane A. Diouf. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. x, 340 pp. $30.00. ISBN 978-0-19-531194-4. In the dark of night on Sunday, July 8, 1860, more than fifty years after Congress had passed a law prohibiting the transatlantic slave trade, Captain William Foster secretly guided his schooner Clotilda through Mobile Bay, past the city of Mobile, and up the Alabama River; the ship was carrying an illegal cargo of African slaves. Sylviane Diouf’s Dreams of Africa in Alabama tells the story of the unwilling passengers of the Clotilda and their descendants. The book’s thesis, reflected in its title, is that the men and women of the Clotilda desperately wanted to return to Africa, but when they could not, they did the next best thing: they recreated Africa in Alabama. The book is organized chronologically. It begins with a description of Mobile on the eve of the Civil War, just before the Clotilda departed on its clandestine journey, and ends with the death in 1935 of Cudjo Lewis, the longest living and most well-known of the ship’s passengers. In her introduction, Diouf makes two major claims. First, she states that “precious information can be found in the Clotilda Africans’ own words, those of the Americans who met them or lived among them, and the words of their descendants” about the lives and experiences of “ordinary people” enslaved in Africa and taken to America (p. 4). Second, Diouf asserts that “the Clotilda Africans’ experience offers a unique view into what practices Africans retained, those they adapted, and those they adopted” (p. 4). In addition to these comments on the Middle Passage and African cultural survivals, the book also speaks to the illegal slave trade, the relationship between American-born and African slaves, and the transition for blacks from slavery to freedom. In a broader sense, however, Diouf’s book is about Africa as a symbol of freedom in America. As soon as they disembarked in Alabama, the O C T O B E R 2 0 0 9 303 author tells us, the Clotilda Africans yearned to return home. This desire only increased after the end of slavery when they learned that they would not be given land in America. Yet Diouf found that, “Although they failed at executing their plan, the shipmates did not give up their dream. If they were going to stay in Alabama, it had to be on their own terms” (p. 150). These terms involved acquiring land on which to build their own community, a settlement they “proudly named African Town” (p. 181). Moreover, according to Diouf, the descendants of the Clotilda Africans inherited this vision of, and affinity for, Africa. “Raised with a deep longing for the homeland while living in the cruel Alabama reality, the second generation held on to Africa as the dream, the hope, and the safe haven where one could return in his or her mind when real life was too hard to bear” (p. 216). For the shipmates and their children, therefore , Africa had become not just a place but a state of mind. In some respects it seems that the passengers’ African identity was created in southern Alabama. Diouf tells the reader, for example, that the shipmates were a diverse group. Coming from all corners of the Dahomey region of West Africa, these “Muslims and non-Muslims; farmers, traders, and fishermen; victims of kidnapping, raids, and wars, thus formed part of the group that was to board the...