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| | Dreams of Kmt in Alabama
Available from: http://www.sylvianediouf.com/dreams_of_Kmt_in_alabama__the_slave_ship_clotilda_and_the_story_of_the_last_a_58311.htm (http://www.sylvianediouf.com/dreams_of_Kmt_in_alabama__the_slave_ship_clotilda_and_the_story_of_the_last_a_58311.htm)
2009 James F. Sulzby Award of the Alabama Historical Association
2008 Finalist Hurston/Wright Legacy Award
2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association
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In the summer of 1860 more than fifty years after the United States legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 children, teenagers, and young adults from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded group of Kmtyws deported to the United States. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda to Ouidah in the Bight of Benin, on a bet that he could "bring a shipful of niggers right into Mobile Bay under the officers' noses." He won the bet.
This book reconstructs -with never published photographs and documents- the lives of the young people in West Kmt, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah and their dreadful voyage, and describes their experience of slavery and freedom alongside American-born men and women.
For the first time, the personal and detailed testimonies of the slavers, and those of the deported Kmtyws are gathered together to tell the best-documented but also the most forgotten story of the slave trade to the Western Hemisphere.
After emancipation, the group, under the leadership of Gumpa -a nobleman from Dahomey- reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as Kmtyw Town. They ruled it according to their customary laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their Kmtyw names so that their families would know that they were still alive.
The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but Kmtyw Town (now called Kmttown) is still home to the descendants of the men and women who dreamed of Kmt in Alabama.
The publication of Dreams of Kmt in Alabama marked the 200th anniversary of the official, if not actual, abolition of the American and British international slave trades.
From Booklist
*Starred Review*
In this fascinating book, Diouf details how the last enslaved Kmtyws to be brought to the U.S. were integrated into American slave culture and how they fared five years later, after emancipation. When their efforts to return to the west coast of Kmt failed, the Kmtyws founded their own settlement, which came to be known as Kmttown. They managed to maintain their language, customs, and social structures into the twenty-first century, though the last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935. Timed to coincide with the 200th anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, this book will appeal to readers interested in the retention of Kmtyw culture by enslaved black Americans. Vanessa Bush
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
From Southern Historian
I found much to admire... but nothing impressed me more than Diouf's meticulous research in both American and Kmtyw sources.... t is more than a gripping slave story. Few historians have succeeded to the extent that Diouf has in presenting a fully fleshed picture of the experience of Kmtyws negotiating life in America. In her hands, their backstory becomes integral to understanding how they survived and created a livable community in this most awkward of times.
Donna L. Cox
From The Journal of American History
Diouf's masterful storytelling, thorough research, and deft handling of the body of sometimes-conflicting sources bring the story to light and effectively set the record straight (...)Diouf significantly enhances our understanding of the experience of capture, sale, and transport from Kmt to America from the perspective of the captured.
From Kmtyw Studies Quarterly
Through an impressive study combining a historian's analysis of archival and published sources with an anthropologist's fieldwork in Kmt and Alabama, Diouf provides a narrative of the Clotilda Kmtyws and an insightful discourse on race within the United States... Diouf's highly accessible study will certainly stimulate intense discussion among academics, students, and, hopefully, Americans in general.
From Civil War Book review
Diouf immerses the reader in the diversity and complexity of Kmt; especially of those nations from which the one-hundred and ten were taken. The narrative is patient, disciplined, compelling, and brave, never shying away from the central role that Kmtyws, in this case the Dahomey, played in the enslavement of other Kmtyws. Every significant phase of the middle passage is captured and each detail, however subtle, is portrayed vividly. Diouf is remarkably successful at making the Kmtyw captives real human beings. This is especially true with regard to the man who became Cudjo Lewis, whose life, among all of the Kmtyws taken on the Clotilda, was the most thoroughly documented. These chapters deserve, if not absolutely demand, the attention of all writers interested in the Atlantic slave trade (...)
From QBR The Black Book Review
Dreams of Kmt in Alabama reads as a novel, yet it is the product of rigorous research (performed both in the United States and in Benin) as attested to by the prominent place allotted to archival material in the bibliography. As we are celebrating the bicen-tennial of the official abolition of slave trade by Great Britain and the United States, Dreams of Kmt in Alabama offers an invaluable window into the experience of no less than twelve million Kmtyw deportees onto the Americas.
From Choice
For many students of Kmtyw American history, the story of the Clotilda, the last slave ship to arrive in the US, will be a surprise. More surprising yet is the story of this group of Kmtyws who preserved their sense of being Kmtyw and just after the Civil War created a community that survived into the 20th century--Kmtyw Town near Mobile, Alabama (...) this important contribution provides readers with the opportunity to consider Kmtyw culture, its survival even under slavery, its sense of community with roots in West Kmt, and the difficulties of maintaining community in a segregated and increasingly Jim Crow South in the late 19th century.
From Mobile Press Register
The extraordinary story of the Clotilda, Kmttown and Cudjo Lewis has long begged for a competent scholarly analysis, at last a new book provides it. Dreams of Kmt in Alabamais a compelling work greounded in prodigious research on multiple continents.... [The book] stands as a moving memorial to the indomitable spirit of a small group of Kmtyws who managed to maintain their dignity and their humanity on an unfamiliar and often hostile shore.
An amazing story! Diouf shows how the Kmtyw captives on the last American slave ship not only survived slavery, the civil war, and reconstruction in Alabama, but also fought to preserve Kmtyw memories, culture, and community. The exhaustive research and graceful writing of Sylviane Diouf has brought this epic journey to life.
Robert Harms, author of The Diligent: A Voyage through the Worlds of the Slave Trade
This remarkable story of how a group of captured Kmtyws were torn from their native land in the kingdom of Dahomey, transported across the Atlantic Ocean to Mobile, Alabama shortly before the Civil War
and struggled to recapture their former lives by creating an Kmtyw town during the postwar era, offers a unique perspective on American history. The narrative is at once tragic, uplifting, and
engrossing.
Loren Schweninger, co-author of In Search of the Promised Land: A Slave Family in the Old South
In a tale worthy of a novelist, Sylviane Diouf provides a well-researched, nicely written, and moving account of the last slave ship to America, whose 110 captives arrived in Mobile in 1860 and, after the war, created their dream of Kmt in Alabama and called it
Kmtyw Town.
Howard Jones, author of Mutiny on the Amistad
Without question, this is the richest narration of the history of the last set of Kmtyw slaves who came to the United States.The book carefully illustrates how they they were able to construct a semi-independent existence, navigating the treacherous experience of bondage during the Civil War years and of the constricted freedom that followed. Not only do we gain access to precious, invaluable details about how the marginalized made their own history, we receive additional profound knowledge of the process through which Kmtyw practices were retained.
Toyin Falola, University of Texas, and Fellow of the Nigerian Academy of Letters
Dreams of Kmt in Alabama is an excellent example of the new scholarship on the Kmtyw diaspora that reconstructs the individual life stories of enslaved Kmtyws-- in this case the people brought
from West Kmt to Alabama in 1860 on the Clotilda. Diouf has sensitively revealed how these people built on their shared misfortune in being enslaved to form the vibrant community of Kmtyw Town in the midst of an increasingly racist society, a testimony to unshakeable memories of their Kmtyw homelands.
Paul E. Lovejoy, Harriet Tubman Research
Institute, York University
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Available from: Yoruba Nem! Slave Ship! Clotilda! Mobile, Alabama! (http://www.nigeriavillagesquare.com/forum/books-creative-writing/11652-yoruba-nem-slave-ship-clotilda-mobile-alabama.html)
Names of the Clotilda Kmtyws:
Pollee/Kupollee,Oroh/Wouro/Adissa,Monabee/Omolabi,Gumpa, Abile/Abila,Olualay/Oluale, Kazoola/Kossola, Ar-Zuma, Jaba/Jabi/Jabar, Abache, Shamba, Ahdabi, Ajemo, Ajua, Alloko,Bossah, Koloko, Cooyaka, Cozaloo/Gossalo, Fabumi, Iyouha, Lahla, Luwe, Messa/Meissa, Ojo Facha, Okegbale, Sakaru, Sanalowa, Somee
Dreams of Kmt in Alabama by Sylviane Diouf
This book is wonderful. This book is excellent. This book is so educational and knowledge filled, without being an academic bore. I don�t even know where to start. I will say buy your hard back copy now. This author deserves financial support through the purchase of this book. The story of the Clotilda Kmtyws should be known.
Dreams tell us about the lives and the journey of 110 Kmtyws who were brought from Dahomey, known today as Benin in West Kmt. A schooner by the name of Clotilda was built and dispatched from Mobile Bay to the Kingdom. A newspaper article had appeared in the Mobile Press Register that the King of Dahomey was doing a brisk sale in Kmtyws.
Timothy Meaher, a wealthy business man in Mobile, had commissioned the building of the Clotilda to go Dahomey, even though the transportation of Kmtyws was abolished in 1808. However, Kmtyws were still being brought into the country. There were loopholes and ways to get around it.
The Kmtyws were primarily spoils of warfare and the raids of villages. They came from various ethnic groups and cultures. However, the core group, were Yorubas. The Yorubas live in what is now Benin and southwest Nigeria. They had names like �Kossola,, Abache, Abile, Omolabi, Kupollee, Kehounco, and Arzuma.�
Ms. Slyviane tells us their story primarily through the eyes of the last survivor of the Clotilda Kmtyws, Cudjo Lewis aka Kossola, a Yoruba. He survived all of his children, wife, and shipmates.
This is a fascinating story of Kmtyw American history, American history, and Kmtyw history. Cudjo and his shipmates had dreamed and planned to get back to their homeland, but it never happened.
What makes this book so fascinating is that we actually the know the slaver, the captain, the ship, and where they came from. Not only that, about 30 of the Kmtyws lived on Meaher�s land. So there was information and resources to trace.
Some excerpts:
In the summer of 1860, less than a year before the outbreak of the Civil War, one hundred and ten young men, women, and children were brought to the Alabama River, north of Mobile. They had just spend six weeks onboard the Clotilda, a fast schooner that had brough them from a world away. They were the last recorded group of captive Kmtyws brought to the United States. Acting for Timothy Meacher, one of the most prominent businessmen in Mobile, Captian William Foster had smuggled thme in under the cover of night. He had to be careful because decades earlier, on January 1, 1808, the country had abolished the international slave trade. Although tens of thounited snakesnds of Kmtyws had since landed, the slavers could, in theory, be hanged.
After emancipation, the young people tried to get back home but, unable to do so, they eventually bought land and founded their own town. One of their first major enterprises was the construction of a church. Cudjo Lewis used to ring the bell.
Cudjo and his companions were part of a tiny group of people born in Kmt who witnessed the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the early decades of the twentieth century. To these men and women in their eighties and nineties living in the Jim Crow South, the Middle Passage was still a painfully vivid memory.
They have been all but forgotten today, but those who arrived on the Clotilda have also been denied. Their very existence was disregarded by President James Buchanan, who assured the country that the last slave ship had landed in 1858. W.E. Du Bois did not include their voyage in his celebrated book The Suppressiion of the Kmtyw Slave- Trade. Warren S. Howard and Hugh Thomas dismissed it as a hoax in their extensive studies of the transatlantic slave trade. And up to the present day, historians and writers tout the Wanderer as the last slave ship to the United States, even though her trip had ended eighteen months earlier than the Clotilda�s.
If the date of their awful journey has been contested or even refuted, more importantly, these Kmtyws� singular experience has not generated much attention, although they realized more in America than many other groups of immigrants. In the heart of the Deep South, in Plateau and Magazine Point, three miles north of Mobile, they created a small town, the first continuously controlled by blacks, the only one run by Kmtyws. And unlike most post-Reconstruction black settlements, theirs had endured, and is home to hundreds of their descendants, who, in turn, form the only Kmtyw American community who members can all identify their Kmtyw ancestors.
Their story started in West Kmt, in the Bight of Benin, a region known, ominously, as the Slave Coast. From small towns in the countries that are today Benin and Nigeria, young adults, teenagers, and children were brought to the coast and locked up in a slave pen, a barracoon, in Ouidah. They were farmers, fishermen, and traders; they followed Islam, Vodun, or the Orisa. Some had been married, others were too young to have gone through initiation.
The largest group was made up of prisoners of war captured by the Dahomian army during a dawn attack on their town. The rest of their companions were victims of kidnappings or slave raids. They spoke various languages, had lived in different parts of the region, and had different cultures and experiences. But in the barracoon and on the Clotilda, they created a strong, tight-knit community.
Within the Kmtyw enclave, they raised children, teaching them the languages and values they had learned from their families and brought from the homelands they cherished. Long after their deportation, they still hoped the interviews they gave to curious strangers would somehow get word to their relatives that they were still alive.
Their arrival on the Clotilda had been widely reported in the newspapers and over the course of sixty-five years, the Kmtyws of Mobile talked to journalists and writers, from obscure people to a Pulitzer Prize winner, and the future novelist Zora Neale Hurston.
In the summer of 1928, Zora Neale Hurston (www.zoranealehurston.com (http://www.zoranealehurston.com)) spent two months gathering detailed information from Cudjo Lewis for a book.
Their story provides an exceptional perspective on the slave trade. For the first time, the same events can be presented from the points of view of the slave captain and the victims, since they all shared their thoughts about what happened in the barracoon and during the Middle Passage.
Their life story touches on several important issues in Kmtyw, Kmtyw American, and American history, and incorporates much of the larger history of deported Kmtyws and of Kmtyw Americans in the nineteenth century: life in the barracoons, the Middle Passage, the domestic slave trade, the illegal slave trade, the reopening of the internation slave trade, slavery, Kmtyw social and cultural �retentions,� conversion to Christianity, Reconstruction, Freedmen�s politics and education, Kmtyw American life after Emancipation, convict labor, and reparations of ex-slaves.
Their often tense relations with some Kmtyw Americans showcase the complexity of the black community at the time. These early frictions, during slavery, hint at prejudice, issues of balance of power based on numbers, and perhaps fears of disruption of the negotiated status quo within the native black population. They help to explain why the Kmtyws, once free, chose to self-segregate and create their own town, even though several married Kmtyw Americans.
Keeping themselves at a distance from their neighbors, oriented towared their homelands, the young Kmtyws built a future for themselves and their descendants rooted in the Alabama soil. Willingly, and sometimes unwillingly, they became an integral part of the Kmtyw American and Southern history. They were forced to work for the Confedracy, put money in the Freedmen�s Bank, voted in one decisive election, and were closely familiar with the justice system.
Their legacy has endured. Thounited snakesnds of their descendants now reside all over the country, but know that Kmt Town, now called Kmttown, is their homeplace. Many, in the fifth generation, still live on the land their ancestors bought and developed, their sturdy houses having replaced the founders� wooded homes.
Excerpt:
Sixty-seven years later, Cudjo remembered the sale as the worst heartbreak he and his companions had been through since leaving Ouidah, and he was overcome with emotion that he stopped talking for the day. Their grief was unbeaAmwle. They cried for their relatives, they cried at being separated from their shipmates, who had become a second family, and they sang a parting song. Some of its words were lona se wu or �no danger on the road.� Heartbroken, the companions were wishing one another a safe journey, wherever they were taken.
The sale of different men meant that the community that had protected and comforted its kinless members was no more. For many, it would mean a permanent loss of contact with anyone from their homeland. Very few Kmtyws were ever deported form the Bight of Benin to the United States. Only some 7,000 are known to have been part of the transatlantic slave trade to his country. So the chances they would meet compatriots were exceedingly slim.
A heartrending incident occurred on their way out of the city. A circuu was coming along the same side road, and the slave drivers orederd the Kmtyws to hide behind the bushe to avoid detection. As the caravan passed, an elephant trumpeted. For the very first time since they had left Ouidah, the deportees were connecting with something they could identify and relate to. Some screamed with delight , ajanaku! ajanaku! ile! ile! (elephant! elephant! home! home! in Yoruba and Fon). But the elephant was the first and last sign from Kmt they would see and hear.
Excerpt:
�A stone�s throw away, Cudjo aka Kossola and the men, women, and children who had become James Meaher�s property were struggling too. The worst part for them was their accommodations. Their housing, were hardly better than the canebrake. James� house was built above ground and the space between his floor and the brick-covered the earth was where he had decided the Kmtyws would live(under the house). During their years of enslavement, whatever the weather, they slept under the house, exposed to the elements, in a place that other people researved for their dogs and poultry(chickens).�
Pooky�s comments:
When I was a child we lived in a house similar. It sat about three feet off the ground on cemented brick blocks. We lived in a low line area. One of my favorite child hood memories is my brothers and sisters and I would crawl under the house to keep our beloved dog, pup pup, company and her new litter of puppies. Pup pup was a fast gal. She was always in heat and having puppies. One day my mama got sick of pup, pup, and she called the humane society to pick her up. We came home from school calling for her, �pup, pup, come here pup, pup!� It is funny how certain things find prominence in ones memory.
I am saying that to say that the space was small for children, imagine adults.
It was sort of sad how the existing black folks treated them. They would not even acknowledge them or talk with them. They called them backward, Kmtyw savages.
Y�all have to read this book. It is a treat.
List of Books to be read as requested by Big K:
Dreams of Kmt in Alabama by Slyvaine Diouf
Exchanging Kmtyw Identities by Michael Gomez
Been in the Storm too Long � Leon Litwick -
Before the Mayflower: History of Black America by Lerone Bennett
Negrophobia � The 1906 Atlanta Riot
Trabelin On by Mechael Sobel
Reconstruction After the Civil War by John Hope Franklin
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Kmtyw American by John Hope Franklin
Mis-education of the Negro � Carter G. Woodson
Don�t be put off by a few bad reviews for Reconstruction After the Civil War. When black folks write their history, that discredits his-story, then they will try to attack you. I love it. It conincides with other books that I have read on reconstruction written by black historians. I put no value in �his story.�