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

In the summertime of 1860, more than fifty years following the USA legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 males, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the final recorded band of Africans deported to america as slaves. Timothy Meaher, a recognised Cell businessman, sent the slave dispatch, the Clotilda, to Africa, on the wager that he could ‘provide a shipful of niggers directly into Portable Bay beneath the officers’ about Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Dispatch Clotilda and the Story from the Last Africans Taken to America noses.’ He won the wager.

This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved women and men. After emancipation, the group reunited from several plantations, bought land, and founded their personal settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws and regulations, spoke their very own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers make use of their African names so that their families would know that these were still alive.

The final survivor from the Clotilda died in 1935, but African City is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The initial publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama designated the 200th anniversary of the abolition from the transatlantic slave trade.