From forgotten history to extraordinary endurance, African scholar-slaves rewrite the narrative of transatlantic trade. Learn about their intellectual resilience and unwavering cultural identity in the face of adversity
Historic marker for Omar Ibn Said outside of a mosque named after him. Photo: Gerry Dincher.
Only a merchant who sees amorphous material where there is great complexity would abduct a highly educated man like Ayyuba Suleiman only to sell him to a slave plantation in America for field work.Diallo was kidnapped and shipped across the Atlantic to a main port of the slave trade In 1731. Photo: TRT Afrika
Raised to pursue a scholarly career, nothing prepared him in his early life in Bondu to bear the hardship and intense labour that would be his living conditions from that point on. A somewhat fantastic tale credits the English minister for rallying a network of administrators in order to reconnect the notable slave with his family.
Those around him were particularly impressed with his clear-mindedness unaffected by years of hardship. Many years later, he was eventually allowed to return back to his homeland and deeply changed social conditions. Everything predisposed young Omar Ibn Said to a comfortable scholarly career in his native Futa Toro .But those were perilous times to be West African. Around 1807, he was kidnapped and sold to a cruel slaveholder in Charleston, South Carolina. After a failed escape, he was jailed in harsh conditions as a runaway slave.
The fifteen pages he penned in a neat maghrib script, following the West-African Mahdara seminaries’ method, are considered “the only Arabic slave narrative written in the United States known to exist today”, confirms the Lowcountry Digital History Initiative.
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