Sylviane A. Diouf reconstructs the lives of 110 men, women, and children from Benin and Nigeria who were brought ashore in Alabama in 1860 under cover of night, recounting their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describing their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought land, and founded their own settlement, known as African Town. They ruled it according to customary African laws, spoke their own regional language and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African names so that their families would know that they were still alive. African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. --from publisher description.

Sylviane A.Diouf is an independent scholar and a former Senegalese diplomat who directs the Schomburg-Mellon Humanities Institute, edits an African-American migration web site, and has appeared in several PBS documentaries.

• Introduction


• 1: Mobile and the Slave Trades


• 2: West African Origins


• 3: Ouidah


• 4: Arrival in Mobile


• 5: Slavery


• 6: Freedom


• 7: African Town


• 8: Between Two Worlds


• 9: Going Back Home


• Epilogue


• An Essay on Sources


• The Illegal Slave Trade in Numbers


• Bibliography