In Survivors, Hannah Durkin tells the stories of the survivors of the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the US in 1860, decades after such importations were federally prohibited. Durkin draws on extensive archival material, foregrounding first-hand accounts from survivors describing their capture and imprisonment in Africa, the voyage across the Atlantic and their lives once they reached the US. Durkin’s detailed, sensitive narrative makes this a vital contribution to our understanding of the human experience of chattel slavery and its reverberations today, writes Camila Andrade.
“An estimated 10.7 million Africans were displaced to the Americas between the turn of the sixteenth and the late nineteenth centuries, an additional 15 per cent – about 1.8 million people – died on the Atlantic voyage, and perhaps as many as six million more people died in slave raids, on the journey to the West African coast, and in the barracoons (slave pens) that held them prisoner before they could be shipped across the ocean. An African person enslaved in the Americas had a life expectancy of around seven years” (Survivors,10).
The horrors experienced by enslaved persons in the baracoons and on the Middle Passage, the journey on slave ships that took them across the Atlantic from Africa to the Americas, is perhaps beyond our comprehension today. Research projects like Slave Voyages, Freedom Narratives and Bristol and Transatlantic Slavery, primary resources like Baquaqua’s memoir and artistic works like Amiri Baraka’s play Slave Ship or Yaa Gyasi’s novel Homegoing are great attempts to bring it to life. Hannah Durkin’s book Survivors: The Lost Stories of the Last Captives of the Atlantic Slave Trade does an excellent job of compiling vivid first-hand descriptions of this devastating experience.
The book’s focus is the Clotilda, the last known US slave ship to bring captives from Africa, arriving at Mobile Bay in 1859 or 1860, depending on different accounts. Durkin draws on “vital archival material held” (274) in universities, national archives, Library of Congress, and other institutions such as Mobile Public Library and Souls Grown Deep Foundation, interviews with the survivors and their descendants, along with “[…] ground-breaking archaeological, historical, and genealogical work relating to the Clotilda, its survivors, and the community of Africatown” (273) to reconstruct the story of the ship Clotilda’s survivors as they travelled from Africa to America.
For the diaspora and descendants of those who survived such conditions, it is hard to grasp just how unbearable these conditions were. To add insult to injury, this enforced squalor and indignity was then used by white people against Africans to characterise them as filthy and primitive
Durkin’s aim is to reconstruct the emotional and psychological, as well as the physical experience. With the archival material she assembles, she attempts to conjure for readers the enslaved people’s perception of what was happening, as well as their feelings when they witnessed their fellow countrymen being killed during the capture and bodies being thrown overboard during the crossing.
The book follows a linear narrative over fourteen chapters. The first five recount the events leading up to the Africans’ capture, their journey and arrival in the US; the following chapters chronicle their immediate struggle for survival in Mobile, as well as the development of their lives and those of their descendants. Strikingly, chapter nine, Africa Town, describes the life of the Clotida’s survivors as freed people. Since it was hard for them to save money in an attempt to return to Africa, they began to construct their own house in the US. As Kossula stated, “[…] We call our village Affican Town. We say dat ’cause we want to go back in the Affica soil and we see we cain go. Derefo’ we makee de Affica where dey fetch us” (140).
Not only were Africans dehumanised, they were also denied the right to speak their languages and to embrace their distinct cultural characteristics
In addition, the book includes information about the condition of the ship and barracoons: “The stench of urine was overwhelming, a section of the prison wall serving as a toilet. One contemporary eyewitness described the barracoons at Ouidah [Dahomey’s city, now Benin] as a site of “filth, disease and famine’’ (32). For the diaspora and descendants of those who survived such conditions, it is hard to grasp just how unbearable these conditions were. To add insult to injury, this enforced squalor and indignity was then used by white people against Africans to characterise them as filthy and primitive. As Aimé Césaire explained in Discourse on Colonialism, this was a tactic to maintain the binary between “good” and “bad” in the European hierarchical perspective on the world and justify their dehumanisation of non-white people.
Durkin’s narrative highlights the relentless humiliation to which enslaved people were subjected, such as when they were stripped of clothing while travelling on the Clotilda: “Nearly seventy years later, tears sprang to his [Kossula’s] eyes and his voice cracked when he shared the memory of it. ‘Oh Lor’, I so shame! We come in de ’Merica soil naked and de people say we naked savage. Dey say we doan wear no clothes. Dey doan know de Many-costs snatch our clothes ’way from us’ (43). Apart from the nudity, there were continuous physical examinations to assess their health, ergo their value in their ability to work:
“To Kossula, the inspection seemed endless. His mouth was pried open and his teeth inspected to assess his age and general health; his bare skin was examined for depth of muscle tone and for signs of skin disease” (38).
Not only were Africans dehumanised, they were also denied the right to speak their languages and to embrace their distinct cultural characteristics: “To the identity of a Yoruban youth such as Kossula, dress was everything. Clothing, hairstyles and body adornments indicates one’s place in society […]. That made the removal of his hair and clothing particularly devastating; without the signifiers of his personhood, Kossula felt his Yoruba identity being stripped away” (43-44). Through historical recovery, it is possible to observe what was stolen from us, Africans and the diaspora, encapsulated by Redoshi’s words: “Redoshi was among many Middle Passage survivors who described their exile as a form of human theft. Tragically, she lamented not just that she had been stolen from home, but that home had been stolen from her” (42-43).
Recovering history in the first person enables us to reframe and centre the subjectivity of people that remain marginalised today under a racial hierarchy established to support the growth of capitalism. Whites versus non-Whites, civilisation and primitivism, and other dichotomies were established and perpetuated by European and American colonial powers to claim and profit from people and land they could figure as “other” or “lesser”. Durkin’s book puts across the ways in which enslaved people attempted to hold on to a sense of belonging to their homelands, passed down through their descendants, exemplified in Dinah’s story: “But Dinah told her great-granddaughter Arlonzia that she managed to save from Africa a small piece of raffia cloth, which she called ‘African grass pattern or something like that’. For Dinah and her descendants, that piece of cloth was her one physical connection with home” (52).
Understanding our ancestors’ past has an impact on the African diaspora’s self-affirmation, since we were denied access to our own historicity.
The United Nations International Decade for People of African Descent is due to come to an end this year, however a ten-year extension is being proposed. Presenting the history of enslaved people requires highlighting the continued quest for remembrance, reparations, and documentation in this context. As with the grandchildren of survivors’ involvement in the Civil Rights Movement in the US, the book highlights the vital role that past generations play in assisting the entire population in reckoning with the legacies of slavery and moving forward. The Black Lives Matter Movement, which gained momentum in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020, showed us that the struggle against racism, the dehumanisation and brutalisation of Black life continues. Like the Clotilda’s survivors and their descendants, we can carry the stories of the past with us to inform and build better lives for future generations.
Reading the book evoked a wide range of feelings in me as a cis, Black, Afro-Brazilian woman who is a part of the African diaspora in the Americas, or Améfrica Ladina. Sadness was one of those feelings, because slavery is a crucial and devastating historical event for Africa and its diaspora. Understanding our ancestors’ past has an impact on the African diaspora’s self-affirmation, since we were denied access to our own historicity. It is imperative that we continue to discuss this historical era to understand its complex legacies and to ensure that it never occurs again. The significance of this project of understanding has been discussed inside the African Union (AU) and the United Nations (via the Permanent Forum on People of African Descent). The AU specifically regards the African diaspora as its sixth region; in August of this year, it organised the Conference of the African Diaspora in the Americas in Salvador, Brazil.
By bringing together the stories of Redoshi, Kossula, Dinah, and other enslaved people who were unable to express themselves freely, Durkin enables us, and specifically Afro-descendants, to better understand and reckon with this part of our history. I am because we are, as Ubuntu philosophy teaches us.
Note: This review gives the views of the author and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, nor of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
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