The Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: His Passage from Slavery to Freedom in Africa and America (review)

Some scholars will already be familiar with Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua's account, either through collections of primary documents edited by Robert Edgar Conrad and Allan Austin or indirectly through the literature on Brazilian slavery. But the appearance of Law and Lovejoy's edition represents a significant advance in the scholarly interpretation and presentation of the Biography. Their conclusions are based on extensive and often collaborative research, which is marshaled in the introduction, footnotes, and 56 pages of appendixes.

Born between 1824 and 1831 in Djougouo (in what is today the Republic of Benin), Baquaqua was captured, transported from the West African port of Ouidah, and sold as a slave in Brazil. He remained there for two years, bound first to a baker in Pernambuco and later to a merchant in Rio de Janeiro. When his ship docked at New York Harbor in 1847, Baquaqua gained his freedom with the aid of an abolitionist group. After living in Haiti under the auspices of the American Baptist Free Mission Society, he returned to the United States in 1849, where he attended New York Central College. Several years later he moved to Ontario, where he wrote his narrative. With the editorial assistance of Samuel Moore, the Biography was published in Detroit in 1854. When sales of his book failed to raise the funds needed for the author's return to Africa, Baquaqua traveled to Liverpool in 1855, after which he disappeared from the historical record.

The modern editors' most substantive interventions are twofold. First, they convincingly argue that the Biography was more Baquaqua's own work than was previously believed. As with other former slaves, Baquaqua was presented to a reading public only through the mediation of a white amanuensis. While efforts to distinguish between the two voices are necessarily speculative, Law and Lovejoy have skillfully examined the style, structure, and context of the Biography to sort out its composite character. Second, they have established the reliability of Baquaqua's account of his youth in Africa. While the Biography includes relatively little on the author's life during enslavement, nearly half of the narrative is dedicated to describing his homeland. This detailed depiction is probably unique among slave writings, particularly if Vincent Carretta is correct in arguing that Olaudah Equiano's African origins were fictionalized. Jerome Handler's recent survey of African slave life histories suggests one explanation for the richness of the African portion of the Biography: Baquaqua was older than most autobiographers when he left his homeland, and he wrote his account comparatively soon after leaving.

Particularly provocative is Law and Lovejoy's reading of the commercial and cosmopolitan background of Baquaqua's kin and community and his consequent diverse ethnic, religious, and linguistic inheritance. Entering into ongoing debates about African ethnicity and American creolization, they conclude that perhaps scholars have underestimated the degree to which African-born slaves in the Americas had "a choice among alternative ethnic identities" (p. 25).

Law and Lovejoy thus establish both the authorial role of Baquaqua and the ethnographic value of the Biography. Given the editors' scholarly rigor, the book under review represents the authoritative edition of Baquaqua's narrative.