Unpublished for several decades, Zora Neale Hurston's Barracoon is finally available for readers in the United States and around the world. In 1927, Hurston, by then a young anthropologist, conducted a series of interviews with Oluale Kossola, also known as Cudjo Lewis. Sent to Alabama by Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas, Hurston's mission was to obtain from the 86-year-old former enslaved man a report of his enslavement in Africa to be provided to historian Carter G. Woodson, the editor of The Journal of Negro History. In 1927, Kossola was the only living survivor of the human cargo brought to the Americas on board the slave ship Clotilda, the last known vessel that carried enslaved Africans to the United States. Although the international slave trade to the United States was officially abolished in 1808, the Clotilda entered the Mississippi Sound on 8 July 1860.
The academic community became familiar with Clotilda’s story with the publication of Sylviane A. Diouf's Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (2007). Barracoon illuminates not only the history of the slave ship Clotilda, but also offers one of the rare first-hand testimonies of an African-born man brought into slavery to the United States. Hurston's manuscript lay forgotten on the shelves of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University until 2003, when a few excerpts from it appeared in Valerie Boyd's biography Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston. Drawing from hours of interviews conducted by Hurston with Kossola, the manuscript's vernacular language, as well as its focus on how ruling elites in West African states participated in the Atlantic slave trade, were among the obstacles that prevented its publication for so many years.
Kossola was born around 1841. His place of birth and his ethnic origins are not entirely clear. Very likely, Kossola was an Isha whose native language was Yoruba. He was born in a village he identifies as Bantè, which seems to have been north of the Kingdom of Dahomey, in what is the present-day Collines department of the western region of the Republic of Benin. Like other men living in regions devastated by the wars fueled by the Atlantic slave trade, Kossola received military training in his youth. In 1860, the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey attacked Bantè. The raid was probably motivated by a refusal on the part of the Bantè king to share his crops and cattle with the Dahomean monarch.Footnote 1 During the incursion, Kossola was captured, along with 115 other men, women, and children. They were then brought to Ouidah, a slave port under Dahomean control. There, they were purchased by a family of merchants from the United States, the Meaher brothers (Jim, Tim, and Burns) who, along with Captain William Foster, had sailed the Clotilda from Alabama to the Bight of Benin. The Clotilda arrived in Alabama carrying on board the last known African human cargo to enter the United States.
On the eve of the Civil War, the Meahers secretly sold the newly arrived human cargo to different Alabama plantations. Following the abolition of slavery and end of the war in 1865, the freed Africans formed the village Africatown, which is present-day Plateau, Alabama. According to Hurston, Kossola was the only living formerly enslaved man who, by that time, had a memory of the African continent. Yet, she was probably wrong. In 1927, countries such as Brazil and Cuba certainly had among their freed population African-born individuals. Unfortunately, scholars failed to collect their testimonies, as Hurston masterfully did with Kossola.
Barracoon highlights Hurston's skills as a sensitive anthropologist, who for several months listened to Kossola and recorded his words. To obtain the manuscript telling the history of his enslavement, Hurston had to persist even during those days when Kossola did not want to talk about the past, but rather preferred to share a meal or have conversations about other matters. Unlike slave narratives of other African-born individuals such as Gustavus Vassa (Olaudah Equiano), Venture Smith, and Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, all of which were published as texts in the eighteenth century, this manuscript is based on a lively interview format. The reader can identify the gaps and silences of Kossola's narrative, and therefore obtain a better understanding of the memory work of traumatic events.
Despite being a first-rate primary source, the book could have provided a more detailed picture of the historical context of the Atlantic slave trade that led to the enslavement of Kossola. The book's endnotes are rather brief and fail to engage with the extensive scholarship on West African history and the Atlantic slave trade. The Introduction, by Deborah Plant, also contains a few inaccuracies. For example, unlike what Plant suggests, Dahomey did not control the slave trade in the entire Bight of Benin, but only the slave port of Ouidah, which was the second largest slave exporter after Luanda (xviii). Indeed, along the Bight of Benin, other neighboring kingdoms controlled important ports such as Porto Novo, Lagos, and Badagry. Also, although symbolically important, the so-called ‘Door of no return’, which is located in Gorée Island's House of Slaves in Senegal, and whose image is featured in the account's opening page, was not an actual place of embarkation of enslaved Africans. Since visual representations are important, an image of Ouidah would have been more appropriate.
Nevertheless, these issues do not alter the book's contribution to the scholarship of the Atlantic slave trade and African American history. Thanks to this first edition of Hurston's Barracoon, students, scholars, and wider audiences can now read a first-hand account that brings to light not only the realities of slavery in the Americas, but also the complex dynamics of the Atlantic slave trade on African soil. By making accessible a wealth of details about the early life of a man born in West Africa who fell victim to the illegal Atlantic slave trade, survived the Middle Passage, and became a freedman in the United States, the book also introduces the reader to the complex engines of this tragic chapter of human history that created enduring ties between Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
