Bibee Zuhoorun’s testimony paints a picture of deception, ill-treatment and injustice.
Bibee Zuhoorun was one of 13 lakh Indian labourers recruited in Caribbean and Indian Ocean sugar plantations after slave labour was abolished in the British Empire. She migrated to Mauritius in the 1830s and on her return to India, testified in an official inquiry committee set up to investigate transgressions in the Indian indenture trade.
As the earliest voice of female indentured labourers, Zuhoorun’s testimony offers a rare insight into early migration – painting a story of deception, ill-treatment and injustice.
In Calcutta, she was persuaded by a labour-recruiter to travel to Mauritius and work as a servant. After her departure, however, she realised she had been deceived: “I got no clothes given to me, nor blankets, nor brass pots”. Nor did she receive the quality of wages, or the six-month wage advance that the recruiter had promised.
In Mauritius, she spoke of the injustice meted out to fellow labourers – a story of overworked men subjected to ill-treatment and corporal punishment. Labourers were often confined within plantations and denied wages if they refused to work. She felt stuck in a foreign land with no means of returning to her homeland, urging “every one would leave if there was a land journey; not one would advise any of their friends to go there”.
Zuhoorun’s testimony attested to the gendered experience of indentured migrants. While men tended to cultivate and process sugar, women often worked in the households of plantation-owners. Zuhoorun testified to “making salt, climbing tamarind trees to pick them, sweeping the house, and cutting grass for cattle”. She even learnt French to communicate with her French “master”.
Her testimony also highlighted instances of sexual harassment and the expectation of sexual favours – a common occurrence in plantations. Zuhoorun complained that her plantation-owner Dr Boileau asked her to be his mistress.
She refused, saying “I have degraded myself by going on board ship; I would not further degrade myself’’. Her attempts to complain to the police were met with a three-month stint at a house of correction, and then a return to Boileau’s house, where she was beaten and harassed further. Eventually, she decided to return to India before the end of her five-year contract, even if it meant not receiving any wages for her 2.5 years of service.
Zuhoorun’s bitterness towards the indenture system is evident in her testimony. She urged: “I would not return to Mauritius on any account; it is a country of slaves; […] I would rather beg my bread here”.
Overseas migration had also damaged her social position. She implored, “even my mother will not drink water from my hand or eat with me”; a sign of social ostracization tied to a taboo on crossing the Indian Ocean.
Indian and Chinese Indentured Labourers in British Guiana. Image from Edward Jenkins, The Coolie, His Rights and Wrongs (1871) from Wikimedia commons
Zuhoorun’s story is not just one of tragedy, injustice and violence, but also strength and resilience. She not only resisted Boileau’s advances and ended her contract early, but even complained to his wife, sacrificing her livelihood at the same time.
Although relegated to the footnotes of history, her testimony remains the earliest account of a female indentured migrant, characterised by its strength, detail and passionate criticism of the indenture system.
Further reading:
Read the testimonies of Zuhoorun and other indentured migrants in Letter from Secretary to Government of India to Committee on Exportation of Hill Coolies: Report of Committee and Evidence. Parliamentary Papers (House of Commons) 1841, Vol. 16, No. 45.
Discover the life stories of indentured labourers -
Amid the global debate about race relations, colonialism, and slavery, some of the Europeans and Americans who made their fortunes in trading human beings have seen their legacies reassessed, their statues toppled and their names removed from public buildings.
Nigerian journalist and novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes that one of her ancestors sold slaves, but argues that he should not be judged by today's standards or values.
Getty Images
My great-grandfather, Nwaubani Ogogo Oriaku, was what I prefer to call a businessman, from the Igbo ethnic group of south-eastern Nigeria. He dealt in a number of goods, including tobacco and palm produce. He also sold human beings.
"He had agents who captured slaves from different places and brought them to him," my father told me.
Nwaubani Ogogo's slaves were sold through the ports of Calabar and Bonny in the south of what is today known as Nigeria.
People from ethnic groups along the coast, such as the Efik and Ijaw, usually acted as stevedores for the white merchants and as middlemen for Igbo traders like my great-grandfather.
Several European nations had slave compounds in what is now Nigeria
They loaded and offloaded ships and supplied the foreigners with food and other provisions. They negotiated prices for slaves from the hinterlands, then collected royalties from both the sellers and buyers.
About 1.5 million Igbo slaves were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean between the 15th and 19th Centuries.
More than 1.5 million Africans were shipped to what was then called the New World - the Americas - through the Calabar port, in the Bight of Bonny, making it one of the largest points of exit during the transatlantic trade.
The only life they knew
Nwaubani Ogogo lived in a time when the fittest survived and the bravest excelled. The concept of "all men are created equal" was completely alien to traditional religion and law in his society.
It would be unfair to judge a 19th Century man by 21st Century principles.
Assessing the people of Africa's past by today's standards would compel us to cast the majority of our heroes as villains, denying us the right to fully celebrate anyone who was not influenced by Western ideology.
Igbo slave traders like my great-grandfather did not suffer any crisis of social acceptance or legality. They did not need any religious or scientific justifications for their actions. They were simply living the life into which they were raised.
That was all they knew.
Slaves buried alive
The most popular story I've heard about my great-grandfather was how he successfully confronted officials of the British colonial government after they seized some of his slaves.
The slaves were being transported by middlemen, along with a consignment of tobacco and palm produce, from Nwaubani Ogogo's hometown of Umuahia to the coast.
My great-grandfather apparently did not consider it fair that his slaves had been seized.
Buying and selling of human beings among the Igbo had been going on long before the Europeans arrived. People became slaves as punishment for crime, payment for debts, or prisoners of war.
The successful sale of adults was considered an exploit for which a man was hailed by praise singers, akin to exploits in wrestling, war, or in hunting animals like the lion.
Igbo slaves served as domestic servants and labourers. They were sometimes also sacrificed in religious ceremonies and buried alive with their masters to attend to them in the next world.
Slavery was so ingrained in the culture that a number of popular Igbo proverbs make reference to it:
Anyone who has no slave is his own slave
A slave who looks on while a fellow slave is tied up and thrown into the grave with his master should realise that the same thing could be done to him someday
It is when the son is being given advice that the slave learns
The arrival of European merchants offering guns, mirrors, gin, and other exotic goods in exchange for humans massively increased demand, leading people to kidnap others and sell them.
How slaves were traded in Africa
European buyers tended to remain on the coast
African sellers brought slaves from the interior on foot
Journeys could be as long as 485km (300 miles)
Two captives were typically chained together at the ankle
Columns of captives were tied together by ropes around their necks
10%-15% of captives died on the way
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Resisting abolition
The trade in African people continued until 1888, when Brazil became the last country in the Western hemisphere to abolish it.
When the British extended their rule to south-eastern Nigeria in the late 19th Century and early 20th Century, they began to enforce abolition through military action.
But by using force rather than persuasion, many local people such as my great-grandfather may not have understood that abolition was about the dignity of humankind and not a mere change in economic policy that affected demand and supply.
The Missionary Society was formed in London in 1799 by British anti-slavery campaigners. Getty Images
"We think this trade must go on," one local king in Bonny infamously said in the 19th Century.
"That is the verdict of our oracle and our priests. They say that your country, however great, can never stop a trade ordained by God."
As far as my great-grandfather was concerned, he had a bona fide trading licence from the Royal Niger Company, a British company that administered commerce in the region in the last quarter of the 19th Century.
So when his property was seized, an aggrieved Nwaubani Ogogo boldly went to see the colonial officers responsible and presented them with his licence. They released his goods, and his slaves.
"The white people apologised to him," my father said.
Slave trade in the 20th Century
Acclaimed Igbo historian Adiele Afigbo described the slave trade in south-eastern Nigeria which lasted until the late 1940s and early 1950s as one of the best kept secrets of the British colonial administration.
Adaobi's father, Chukwuma Hope Nwaubani, lives on land that was owned by Nwaubani Ogogo. ADAOBI TRICIA NWAUBANI
While the international trade ended, the local trade continued.
"The government was aware of the fact that the coastal chiefs and the major coastal traders had continued to buy slaves from the interior," wrote Afigbo in The Abolition of the Slave Trade in Southern Nigeria: 1885 to 1950.
He added that the British tolerated the ongoing trade on political and economic grounds.
They needed the slave-trading chiefs for effective local governance, and for the expansion and growth of legitimate trade.
Sometimes, they also turned a blind eye rather than jeopardise a useful alliance, as seems to have been the case when they returned Nwaubani Ogogo's slaves.
That incident deified Nwaubani Ogogo among his people. Here was a man who successfully confronted the white powers from overseas. I have heard the story from relatives, and have read about it.
It was also the beginning of a relationship of mutual respect with the colonialists that led to Nwaubani Ogogo being appointed a paramount chief by the British administration.
He was the government's representative to the people in his region, in a system known as indirect rule.
Records from the UK's National Archives at Kew Gardens show how desperately the British struggled to end the internal trade in slaves for almost the entire duration of the colonial period.
British traders were at the heart of the slave trade, before the UK government abolished the trade. Getty Images
They promoted legitimate trade, especially in palm produce. They introduced English currency to replace the cumbersome brass rods and cowries that merchants needed slaves to carry. They prosecuted offenders with prison sentences.
"By the 1930s, the colonial establishment had been worn down," wrote Afigbo.
"As a result, they had come to place their hope for the extirpation of the trade on the corrosive effect over time of education and general civilisation."
How the UK abolished slavery
1833 Parliament outlawed slavery in most British colonies
1834 Law took effect
800,000 slaves were freed
£20m allocated to pay for "damages" suffered by owners
0 compensation for freed slaves
Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Working with the British
As a paramount chief, Nwaubani Ogogo collected taxes on behalf of the British and earned a commission for himself in the process.
He presided over cases in native courts. He supplied labourers for the construction of rail lines. He also willingly donated land for missionaries to build churches and schools.
The house where I grew up and where my parents still live sits on a piece of land that has been in my family for over a century.
Nwaubani Ogogo donated land to Christian missionaries. ADAOBI TRICIA NWAUBANI
It was once the site of Nwaubani Ogogo's guest house, where he hosted visiting British officials. They sent him envelopes containing snippets of their hair to let him know whenever they were due to arrive.
Nwaubani Ogogo died sometime in the early 20th Century. He left behind dozens of wives and children. No photographs exist of him but he was said to have been remarkably light-skinned.
In December 2017, a church in Okaiuga in Abia State of south-eastern Nigeria was celebrating its centenary and invited my family to receive a posthumous award on his behalf.
Their records showed that he had provided an armed escort for the first missionaries in the area.
My great-grandfather was renowned for his business prowess, outstanding boldness, strong leadership, vast influence, immense contributions to society, and advancement of Christianity.
The Igbo do not have a culture of erecting monuments to their heroes - otherwise one dedicated to him might have stood somewhere in the Umuahia region today.
"He was respected by everyone around," my father said. "Even the white people respected him."
Faryal was kidnapped along with thousands of other Yazidi women and forced into sexual slavery
One of the Yazidi women abducted by Isis in 2014 has escaped the caliphate with her five-year-old son after spending four years as an Isis slave.
“He was terrified,” she said, recounting their escape this month. “I held his hand and we just kept walking.”
The walk to freedom lasted 53 hours, and the little boy cried all the way. It wasn't their first escape attempt – Faryal had tried five times before to flee Isis – but they would be shot on the spot if the militants caught them now.
They passed corpses in the darkness, and when exhaustion overwhelmed them, they huddled together and slept on the dusty path. Faryal whispered reassurances to her five-year-old son, telling him that his grandparents were waiting and that, after four years as prisoners of Isis, they were finally going home. He wouldn't believe her.
As members of Iraq's Yazidi minority, a largely Kurdish-speaking religious group, the pair had escaped what the UN has called a genocide.
Isis militants kidnapped thousands of Yazidis on a single day in August 2014, massacring the men and dumping them in mass graves, and forcing the women into sexual slavery.
Women and children flee the Islamic State’s last holdout of Baghouz which is surrounded by US-backed forces ( DELIL SOULEIMAN/AFP/Getty Images )
During her captivity, Faryal said she had six different owners, at times being passed on when a fighter wanted a new sexual partner or simply to settle a debt. “Monsters who treated us like animals,” is how she described them.
The atrocities committed against the Yazidis had initially prompted the US to launch airstrikes against the militants and begin a military campaign to roll back Isis's caliphate that now, four years later, could end within days. US-backed forces have the last Isis holdouts surrounded in the eastern Syrian hamlet of Baghouz.
In photographs, taken by aid workers on the night of her escape, a male companion hides his face but Faryal looks straight out at the camera. Her hazel eyes are fixed in a quiet stare. Her son's face is wet with tears, and he is sobbing. “I can't put into words how I was feeling at that moment,” she said. “All I could think was: 'Please, take me away from here.' ”
Faryal, 20, told her story last week in the northern Syrian town of Amuda after being transferred there by the US-backed Kurdish forces that rescued them. Throughout the interview, she kept a watchful eye on Hoshyar, her son, pulling him close as he cried and then trying, without success, to make him laugh.
Details of her account were corroborated by members of her family in northern Iraq and through a team of Yazidi activists that had communicated with her secretly for months before the escape in attempts to smuggle her to safety.
The day before Faryal's life changed forever in 2014 had dawned like any other in the Iraqi village of Tel Banat. She pottered around the house looking after her infant son Hoshyar, she recalled. By midday, the sun was roasting, and although rumours had swirled for weeks that Isis forces were drawing closer, few in Tel Banat were aware of the coming storm.
The Islamist militants arrived at dusk.
“We couldn't run fast enough,” Faryal remembered, describing how she and 10 members of her extended family had piled into a car and joined an epic exodus. Yazidi towns and villages around Mount Sinjar in northern Iraq emptied within hours as more than 100,000 people fled to higher ground. Faryal and her husband, Hashem, made it only a few miles before militants blocked their path.
Yazidis have long faced persecution from more powerful religious groups for their beliefs, in part because of a false but commonly-held impression that they worship the sun, or the devil. There are fewer than one million Yazidis worldwide, and according to the UN, Isis had intended to entirely wipe out those within their reach.
Yazidi men and boys who had reached puberty were separated from the women and other children and often shot dead at roadsides. Women were bused to temporary holding sites and then sold to Isis fighters at slave markets.
Isis clerics had decided that having slaves was religiously sanctioned, institutionalising sexual violence across their caliphate. Women have reported being tied to beds during daily assaults. They were sold from man to man. Gang rape was common.
Many women and girls committed suicide in the opening months of captivity, according to Yazidi rights groups. Others harmed themselves to appear less appealing to fighters who might consider buying them.
Faryal recalled that an Isis fighter who was Iraqi and called himself Abu Kattab was her worst abuser. Hoshyar was abused, too, Faryal said. Abu Kattab beat him so badly there were hand prints on his face. Another had forced the boy's arm onto a hot plate.
“He was so small, but for some reason the fighters hated him,” Faryal said. “I could never explain to him why.”
As the boy sat beside his mother last week, his eyes moved slowly from side to side as if scanning the room for threats. His blond hair was cut in jagged chunks. He did not speak and he did not smile.
At its height in 2014, Isis's self-proclaimed caliphate covered territory in Syria and Iraq the size of Britain, and the movement drew recruits from around the world. In the intervening years, thousands of Yazidi women fled the territory held by the militants, but Faryal couldn't escape.
With each unsuccessful attempt to escape, the punishment grew harsher, she said. By 2017, she said, she had given up. Keeping her head down and accepting the abuse seemed the only way to keep Hoshyar alive, and the child was fraying badly. Their owners starved him and often forbade him to go to the toilet.
“I knew that if I fought back, they would take him from me forever,” she said. “They did that to so many women.”
There was one final act of resistance, though: a tattoo of her husband's name, inked in kohl and water on the back of her right hand. It took five days to complete, and the pain lasted even longer. It was, she sometimes told herself, a reminder of a life that could still be hers. At other times, she lost all hope.
In its final months, as the caliphate shrank to a sliver, her captors were moving weekly to outrun US airstrikes. But the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces were closing in.
Food supplies ran so low that Faryal said she sometimes went days without eating, spending her money instead on small sandwiches for Hoshyar.
When the pair was struck by shrapnel in the Syrian hamlet of Baghouz in January, no medical care was available. The village clinic had been abandoned, left littered with empty drug packets and syringes.
“We were pushed out onto the street, still bleeding. There were no drugs left, and we saw people in the road being left for dead,” she said.
Their chance to escape came when several Isis fighters grew desperate and plotted to use Faryal and Hoshyar as their ticket out. After years of abusive behavior, the militants decided to style themselves as the Yazidis' guardians and surrender to the forces surrounding their last stronghold.
At 2.30pm one afternoon, they all set out from their tent in Baghouz. An Uzbek fighter and his family pushed the young mother out in front of them as they started down the dusty path. They walked for two days in the cold, following the only path out of what had once been the caliphate.
At 8pm on the second day, they heard shouting. Beams from flashlights bounced off the sky. It was the US-backed soldiers.
Isis fighters raised their hands above their heads and cried out for mercy. They claimed that they were helping a Yazidi escape and had kept her safe, according to someone present at the screening point that night. The appeal fell on deaf ears, and the men were detained as Faryal and Hoshyar carried on walking.
It took three days for the pair to finally believe they might be free. They still fear that the extremists will come back for them.
“As long as I'm alive, I'll be scared of them,” Faryal said, tensing her shoulders as she gripped her tattooed hand with the other. “My spirit might be strong, but my mind will never rest.”
Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon was written in the 1930s, but has only just been published. Why has it taken so long for the remarkable story of Oluale Kossola to be made public?
“We stand as living monuments,” wrote the historian Len Garrison, of the black British descendants of slavery and empire. “For those who are afraid of who they must be, are but slaves in a trance.” For Garrison, the idea of the African diaspora as “living monuments” was to some extent figurative. But a new book makes it literal. Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave presents the remarkable fact that there were people alive in America who had experienced abduction from Africa – being examined, displayed, traded and enslaved – well into the 20th century.
Oluale Kossola was taken from the Yoruba kingdom of Takkoi to Alabama in the 19th century. Photograph: Courtesy of McGill Studio Collection, The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of South Alabama
The book is the story of Cudjo Lewis; a man born Oluale Kossola in the Yoruba kingdom of Takkoi. Kossola was the last survivor of the last known slave ship to sail from the African continent to America with a human cargo. Written in the 1930s, but hidden away from a public audience until now, it is also perhaps the last great, unpublished work by the Harlem Renaissance writer Zora Neale Hurston.
The word “barracoon” refers to the enclosures in which captives were held on the coast before being loaded on to ships. In Kossola’s case it was the Alabama vessel the Clotilda, which played its own gruesome part in the slave trade in 1860, half a century after its official abolition, transporting 130 men and women from the west African kingdom of Dahomey – modern day Benin.
By 1931, when Hurston interviewed Kossola – sweetening him with peaches, Virginia hams and late summer melons –, he was around 90 years old, and yet able, over a period of three months, to recall his life in Takkoi in great detail; his grandfather, an officer of the king; his mother and siblings; law and justice; love and adolescence. He spoke in heartbreaking detail of watching his community annihilated during a raid by Dahomey’s female warriors, leading to his capture and enslavement, the torture of the “middle passage”, and life in 19th and 20th century Alabama. Through all these years – many more lived in America than he had spent in his African birth nation – he never let go of the unspeakable loss of his homeland. When Hurston takes his photograph, Kossola dresses in his best suit, but removes his shoes, telling her: “I want to look lak I in Affica, ’cause dat where I want to be.”
The Point of No Return monument in Ouidah, Benin. Photograph: Gallo/Getty Images
The uniqueness of the story and that of the writer who tells it are layered and intertwined. The old, poetic Kossola, generous with his parables and storytelling, is one of almost four million Africans enslaved late in the history of the transatlantic trade. And while the full history is documented in countless accounts of slave traders, merchants, plantation owners and masters, ledgers and auction records and court documents, the number of first-hand accounts of Africans forced to become Americans can be counted on two hands. It is Hurston, and perhaps Hurston alone, who could have drawn this heavy tale out of the often melancholy old man, and have the vision and skill to make it sing, in the way that Barracoon does, for reasons rooted deeply in her own life story.
Hurston was born in 1891 in Eatonville, Florida, a small town with an entirely black population, which she would later describe as “the city of five lakes, three croquet courts, 300 brown skins, 300 good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools and no jailhouse”. She would keep close links to her hometown, despite leaving when she was just 13, and then drifting – working as a manicurist and achieving a degree part time at Howard University – until she arrived in New York in 1925. By then she was in her mid 30s (but convinced those whom she met that she was a full decade younger) and had – as she wrote later in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road – “$1.50, no job, no friends, and a lot of hope”.
Hurston began studying anthropology at Barnard College and, having received a fellowship to gather material in her home state, set about documenting African American folk traditions in towns like Eatonville, and later in the southern states, the Bahamas and Haiti. It was during this period, right at the beginning of her career, that she first met Kossola, interviewing him several times in the late 1920s. It was her first major project, but also her first major failure. An article she published about Kossola in the Journal of Negro History would be accused of plagiarism, allegations which scholars now contest, and which in any event drove Hurston to return to Alabama, to conduct the series of interviews that would form the core of Barracoon, and, this time, to do so in a manner that would cast the work beyond any doubt.
Around this time, black art began asserting itself brazenly in an America still emerging from four centuries of slavery and legalised white supremacy, and the belief that the African had no civilisation to offer. By the time of her death in 1960, Hurston would have published more books than any other black woman in America. But it wasn’t until she caught the attention of sociologist Charles S Johnson, champion of the Harlem Renaissance and the editor of Opportunity, the official journal of the National Urban League (which published her work as well as that of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen), that she got her break.
Even within the Harlem Renaissance, Hurston’s approach was radical. Inspired by her Eatonville roots, she was instinctively compelled by the folklore, the idioms, customs, worksongs, spirituals, sermons, children’s games, folktales and practices of African American communities of the south. While other members of the black intelligentsia were celebrating racial uplift, and while hundreds of thousands fled the rural south in the “great migration”, in search of what they imagined to be progress in northern cities, Hurston was interested in “the Negro farthest down”. Her goal as an author, anthropologist and essayist, was – the scholar Karla Holloway has said – “to render the oral culture literate”.
“The unlettered Negro,” Hurston wrote, was “the Negro’s best contribution to American culture.” It was this belief which inspired Barracoon – a book in which there is little of Hurston herself, but plenty of her ideology, in capturing Kossola, a man whose culture slavery both created and destroyed. Like the language of some of Hurston’s later works – Mule Bone, the play she would write with Hughes in 1931; Mules and Men, a compilation of oral folklore in 1935; and her most famous work, the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God in 1937 – Kossola’s narrative plays the music of history itself within its tonalities, rhythms and inflections. But the narrative, like Kossola, stands apart from Hurston’s others; his speech is more a recognisably African Creole than the African American vernacular, and despite all his decades living in America, Kossola is steeped in the thought of Africa, the world – as he calls it – “in de Affica soil”. Hurston’s fidelity to the manner and content of Kossola’s storytelling is the book’s strength. Yet within it were also contained the seeds of Barracoon’s downfall. When Hurston took the manuscript to publishers, they wanted her to anglicise his English, which she resolutely refused to do.
American slaves on a plantation in South Carolina, 1862. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo
“Hurston was not interested in, as Toni Morrison might put it, the white gaze, and how ‘they’ would perceive us,” explains Deborah Plant, a Hurston scholar who edited Barracoon. “She was interested in what was specific in African American culture, those aspects which were rooted in African tradition, African history, African civilisation, because in that authenticity lay the genius – the spirit, as Hurston describes it – that which the soul lives by.”
For Cheryl Wall, Zora Neale Hurston professor of English at Rutgers University, “this impatience with Hurston’s determination to transcribe Kossola’s speech faithfully is enormously frustrating”. It was “part of the pattern of Hurston’s life that she had to fight so hard to have her voice heard, and the voices of those whose stories she wanted to tell. We are told the dialect is too difficult. Is it really any more difficult than the dialect of Mark Twain or James Joyce? Yes it requires some extra effort, but it’s the kind of effort we usually put into a literary text without complaint.”
The irony is astounding. Kossola, a man denied his home and his voice by American racism, would have the telling of his story silenced too. Barracoon, having been met with intransigence by publishers, remained unpublished, ending up in a private collection that was passed to the archive at Howard University in 1956, where it remained inaccessible to all but a handful of scholars who read it and cited it in their work.
Hurston found her own life mirroring this cycle of narration and dispossession. After the success of her work in the 1930s and 40s, her hugely productive career spiralled downwards. She lived hand to mouth, writing articles for magazines while working at odd jobs, including one stint in Miami for an employer who saw her byline in the Saturday Evening Post and tipped off a reporter that the author was her maid. Hurston was humiliated, and spent the next decade in a series of small towns in Florida, plagued by health and money problems, until she ended up in a welfare home where she died, penniless, of heart disease in 1960.
A slave’s cabin at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Edisto Island, South Carolina. Photograph: Courtesy of NMAAHC
At the time of her death, none of her seven previously published books was in print. Neighbours collected money for her funeral and it made front page news in the local black weekly, the Fort Pierce Chronicle. But she was buried in a segregated cemetery, in an unmarked grave.
For the novelist and feminist Alice Walker, who in 1973 set out to discover what had become of Hurston, finding this grave in a “field full of weeds” was a devastating experience. “There are times,” wrote Walker, “and finding Zora Hurston’s grave was one of them, when normal responses to grief, horror and so on do not make sense because they bear no real relation to the depth of emotion one feels.” Walker was determined to restore Hurston’s legacy and reputation. She obtained a gravestone, and had it inscribed with the words: “Zora Neale Hurston – A genius of the south. Novelist. Folklorist. Anthropologist.”
Their Eyes Were Watching God, still considered Hurston’s greatest work, was soon back in circulation. That edition, by the University of Illinois Press, sold more than 300,000 copies, making it, as Wall says, “one of the most dramatic chapters in African American literary history”.
The publication of Barracoon thus represents a recovery within a recovery; the works of Hurston having been so dramatically resurrected, but this one languishing in obscurity until now. And its publication comes at an emotive moment in the African American experience – an experience loaded not just with historical trauma, but very contemporary pain. Alice Walker writes, for example, in the foreword to the book, that in reading Kossola’s story, African Americans “are struck with the realisation that he is naming something we ourselves work hard to avoid, how lonely we are too in this still foreign land”.
Karla Holloway, professor of English at Duke University, says: “The irony is that the loneliness that echoes through Kossola’s account, and that Walker so poignantly notices, is our collective legacy.
“We work hard to escape and slip past that loneliness, but inevitably we are captured, again, by the wake of slavery, a tidal wash as reliable as moonrise.”
The era of Black Lives Matter, of harassment in coffee shops, of a president who has been both overtly racist and also dismissive of racism, and of the disappointment at the first black president having been able to make little real change to poverty, criminalisation and exclusion, has produced a moment in which the struggle has never been more apparent, yet the cultural expression of that suffering has never been more visible.
Illustration by Swain, from 1835, of slaves being put into the hold. Photograph: Rischgitz/Getty Images
“I do think one of the reasons that the book is so attractive right now is that there is this longing for African Americans to have access to a pre-US life – a connection to Africa,” says Autumn Womack, an assistant professor of English and African American studies at Princeton University. “If nothing else, Barracoon announces the desire for this kind of connection, even if it’s never really fulfilled. People are searching for a vocabulary to make sense of that.”
That struggle is finding expression in film, TV and theatre that focuses on the experience of slavery; from the Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave, the remake of the memorable series Roots and the multi-award-winning musical Hamilton. It is present in pop culture, with the recent phenomenon of Childish Gambino’s “This Is America”, whose video references the violent brutalisation of African Americans. There are new museums – America’s first of African American history, which opened in 2016; the Whitney Plantation, the first plantation museum on American soil; and the nation’s first memorial to the horrors of lynching, in Alabama.
It is abundant in literature too; Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and other influential books such ass Isabel Wilkerson’s The Warmth of Other Suns, which tells the story of the Great Depression in new and profound detail; Stamped from the Beginning, by Ibram X Kendi, which chronicles the lifespan of American racism; Angie Thomas’s The Hate U Give, radicalising readers of young adult fiction to the injustice of police killings; and Jesmyn Ward’s devastating Sing, Unburied, Sing.
The pathos of the African American experience, told with such tenderness in Barracoon, is matched by its complexity. Hurston herself remarked that in writing Kossola’s harrowing account of how the king of Dahomey profited from raiding and selling members of neighbouring kingdoms, she was deeply affected by the question of African complicity in the slave trade. “The inescapable fact that stuck in my craw,” Hurston wrote, “was my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. That did away with the folklore I had been brought up on – that white people had gone to Africa, waved a red handkerchief at the Africans and lured them aboard ship and sailed away.”
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And yet Barracoon also helps deepen the understanding of the context in which slavery took place. “This idea of ‘African complicity’ is more myth than a reality,” Plant says. “Because at that point in history, there was no such thing as an ‘African’. People on the African continent did not self identify as Africans; instead there was a self identity in relation to specific ethnic groups and specific kingdoms, religions or language. So many of us don’t know, because we don’t have these nuances about our history.”
The absence of stories like Kossola’s has hardly helped bring these nuances to the fore. There are other difficult questions arising from the book about the extent to which the African American victims of slavery internalised the attitudes of their oppressors. Kossola recalls how his children in particular endured bullying from neighbouring African Americans, for having two African-born parents.
“All de time de chillun growin’ de American folks dey picks at dem and tell de Afficky people dey kill folks and eatee de meat,” Kossola recounts in Barracoon. “Dey callee my chillun ig’nant savage and make out dey kin to monkey … It hurtee dey feelings.”
“Those acculturated African Americans could have been more open, more receptive, compassionate, and they weren’t,” Plant says. “They were a source of hostility to Kossola and his community. We can explain or rationalise it, but it doesn’t justify it.” The book’s uniqueness is in its recounting of a story in which we are all equally bound up by this cycle of oppression – the former slave plagued by the trauma of losing his homeland and family, the writer whose work survived the desire of intellectuals for white approval, the reader forced to challenge their own ideas about race and the internalisation of oppression. But more than anything it brings an African past up close to an African American present, at a time of great searching. “Throughout her life, Hurston fought against this idea that there was no connection to Africa once people arrived on these shores, and everything was forgotten,” Wall says. “We know that’s not true. But a book like this really brings that to life.”
Note: Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave by Zora Neale Hurston is published by HarperCollins.
Two Bombays played a dominant role in the life of Michael Hogan, writes Anu Kumar in the Scroll. Read on:
In 1804, when Michael Hogan appeared in New York with his wife, Frances Hogan nee Richardson, he was greeted with a warm reception. The Irish-born ship captain, merchant, land speculator and also, slave trader and privateer, had arrived with a big fortune that, he claimed, was due to his wife – an “Indian princess”.
For the newspapers of the time, the arrival was grist for the newsprint mill: they called Frances a “dark-skinned Indian princess”, and fell in with most of Hogan’s braggadocio, which included the claim that on his marriage, he had received a dowry of “400,000 English sovereigns, or about two million dollars”, or according to other sources, “40,000 pounds in gold”.
In no time, Hogan bought land in the city, and then some months later (in 1806) in northern New York, the region measuring several thousand acres that lay only a few miles to Canada’s south. The land Hogan acquired, he soon renamed Bombay, for his wife, a native of Bombay, which was then in the East India Company’s possession.
Today, the town of Bombay in north New York has, according to the US census, a population of around 1,300. Within it are two smaller hamlets – Hogansburg (Hogan named it after himself) and South Bombay. Its website proudly lists two country clubs and a casino among the town’s attractions. A history section briefly mentions the founder, but doesn’t really answer the question – who was Michael Hogan.
Bombay, Franklin County, New York, USA | Wikimedia Commons CC-BY-SA-3.0
The well-networked merchant
Believed to have been born around 1765 (though this is not certain) in County Clare, in West Ireland, Hogan acquired his sea legs early. As a teenager, he served in the Royal Navy and then only a few years later, in his twenties, references in a book by Michael H Styles (his great-great-great grandson) have him operating as a trader on ships that plied on the lucrative Asian trade route of Calcutta-Canton and then in Macau. Hogan also sailed between western India and South Africa.
Hogan had a gift for striking up relationships with go-getters, those who had the ability to sniff out business opportunities. In another few months, he branched out into the rice trade that led to his first voyages to the United States. He had links with Robert Henshaw, the East India Company’s custom-master who would soon be indicted for his role in hoarding and stockpiling rice during the shortage and famine years of the late 1780s. Soon after, with the help of some Bombay financiers in the early 1780s, Hogan bought the ship Il Nettunno built at the Calcutta docks.
An enduring partnership
Several of Hogan’s early business partnerships were shaped by his fortuitous friendship with William Richardson, a merchant trader, a mentor to Hogan and later his father-in-law. When he was in his early twenties, Hogan married Frances, who was born to Richardson and his ethnically Indian housekeeper referred to as Anna Marie Lacy from Tirhut state in present-day Bihar.
Richardson acquired a charter enabling him to function as a privateer; the “letter of marque” displayed on Hogan’s ship was both a warning and statement of fact. This meant that while Richardson (and Hogan) weren’t employees of the East India Company, they could trade, and as privateers, attack and plunder ships belonging to other nations.
The years of the Napoleonic wars between Britain and France inspired Hogan to play the patriot’s card. Not only did he offer his services first in transporting convicts to Australia, his ship could help Britain by attacking French trading ships, based at Madagascar, the Reunion Islands and southern India, that sailed frequently in the southern Atlantic and Indian Oceans.
The convict ship
Portrait of Il Netunno, later Marquis Cornwallis. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons Public Domain
The ship Il Nettunno was renamed Marquis Cornwallis, and is commemorated in a well-known painting by Balthazar Solvyns. The Marquis Cornwallis made its first convict journey from Cork in Ireland on August 1796, with several convicts (nearly 160 men and 70 women) and soldiers who would form part of the New South Wales guards. At Cape Verde in mid-Atlantic, close to the Portuguese coast, Hogan, as the ship’s captain, received news of a mutiny – planned by one of the guards in liaison with several convicts.
The ship’s log, recently auctioned, records the force with which the mutiny was put down: several mutineers were flogged and the ringleaders, after being tonsured, were put in irons for the duration of the journey. The log also tells us that several of the convicts, women included, were young and were being deported for petty crimes such as stealing watches and gloves.
Ship's log that was auctioned recently. Photo credit: NSW Government
After the ship reached Port Jackson in Sydney in February 1796, an inquiry absolved Hogan. He also bought land at a nominal price in New South Wales and, as is believed, settled his servants/indentured slaves there for some years. His ventures after this involved him in shipping cattle to Australia.
In these years of Britain’s war with France, Hogan had his fair share of controversy. One related to his, or rather his ship’s captain, David Smart, claiming the seizure of French weaponry, and ships off the coast of Mozambique. To the British officials at the Cape of Good Hope, this was impressive, until it was revealed that bribes had been paid to the French authorities for them to give up their ships, albeit in a dishonourable way.
South Africa and the secret slave trade
Hogan made a conscious decision around the end of the 1790s to base himself and his activities in South Africa. The Cape was a location he found ideal, as he immersed himself privateering, slave trading secretly and trading other goods. He was a familiar figure to those engaged in the opium and tea trade with China. An old associate Alexander Tennant, based at the Cape, also cleverly persisted in slave trade, hoodwinking the British authorities by sailing under the Portuguese flag.
Through Richardson, Hogan was introduced to well-known traders who had worldwide links – they sold rice and slaves to the Americas and conducted silk, tea and opium trade in China and the east. Hogan became agent to Robert Charnock, the rich merchant financier based at Ostend (in Western Europe). Hogan also had links with the people who made up a veritable who’s who of international trade back then: David Scott, a friend of Henry Melville, Lord Dundas (the latter would later be impeached as War Secretary), John Parrish, the British merchant who had links with Robert Morris, who in turn came to be popularly labelled the financier of the American Revolution, and Robert Lenox and other merchants who engaged in the slave trade in the southern American states.
Bombay, New York
Bombay is located in New York. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons CC BY 3.0
He moved to New York in 1804, sensing more business opportunities, and because corruption and his hitherto covert operations had made him somewhat suspect in British eyes. For a decade, he thrived in land and trade deals. Despite losing considerably in his trade investments in the Caribbean and South America when the 1812 war with Britain broke out, forcing Hogan to sell some of his property in New York City, he continued to live among high society. He cultivated even more influential friends such as William Bayard, the merchant and close associate of one of the Founding Fathers and the first Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton.
In 1820, he was appointed as US trade consul for Chile and moved to Valparaiso – furthering US political influence in the region and was even called upon to settle sea disputes. Hogan would remain in Valparaiso till 1833, the year he died, presumably in Washington DC. Michael Hogan’s son, William, who had spent his early years in South America, served for a term in the US Congress.
The rest of Hogan’s family – including an Indian-origin indentured servant called Vinissa – that had remained in South America, soon moved to New York. The ship they travelled in, called the Bristol, ran aground close to New York. Hogan’s son-in-law, Arthur Donnelly, who was on board the ship, gave his life up to ensure that women and children were rescued first – an act of heroism that would be commemorated by an impressive gravestone at his burial site in New York.
Alex Tizon struggled to write about Lola, the woman who helped raise him. He was 11 before he realized she was his family’s slave.
The pulitzer prize–winning reporter Alex Tizon built an exemplary career by listening to certain types of people—forgotten people, people on the margins, people who had never before been asked for their stories. Alex’s wife, Melissa Tizon, told me recently that her husband was always impatient with small talk, because he believed that all people had within them an epic story, and he wanted to hear those epic stories—and then help tell them to the world. “Somewhere in the tangle of the subject’s burden and the subject’s desire is your story,” he liked to say.
His mission aligned well with The Atlantic’s, and we were pleased to publish, in the April 2016 issue, “In the Land of Missing Persons,” a beautifully rendered story about ordinary people who mysteriously disappeared in the Alaska wilderness. And we were thrilled when Alex offered us the chance to publish a story he had been waiting much of his life to tell, the remarkable tale of Lola, the woman who was his family’s secret slave in the Philippines, and who remained their slave when they moved to America.
And we were heartbroken to learn on Friday, March 24, that Alex Tizon had died. His story editor here at the magazine, Denise Kersten Wills, found out late that evening that Alex had been found dead in his home in Eugene, Oregon. He had died in his sleep, of natural causes. He was 57 years old.
His death is a tragedy for Melissa; their daughter, Maya; his daughter from an earlier marriage, Dylan; and Alex’s brothers and sisters. His death represents a loss for his students at the University of Oregon, where he was a beloved journalism professor. And his death is a loss for the editors and readers of this magazine, who were just coming to know Alex and his gifts.
Alex Tizon at a journalism workshop in 1991. He believed that all people have within them an epic story.
Alex was a much-admired reporter in the Pacific Northwest. He shared a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 while on the staff of The Seattle Times, and he served as the Seattle bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. He was also a well-reviewed author; his 2014 memoir, Big Little Man: In Search of My Asian Self, was a self-lacerating examination of the complexities, humiliations, and small victories of Asian men trying to adjust to life in America.
His interest in the lives of people situated far outside the mainstream was abiding and deep. When he came to us with the enthralling, vexing story of his immigrant family and its terrible secret, we recognized that this was the sort of journalism The Atlantic has practiced since its inception. The magazine was founded in 1857 by a group of New England abolitionists eager to advance the cause of universal freedom. When I first read a draft of Alex’s piece, I imagined that the founders—people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Harriet Beecher Stowe—would not have believed that 154 years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, humans would still be enslaving other humans, in America and across the planet. The eradication of all forms of slavery remains an unfinished goal of civilization, and of this magazine, and stories like Alex’s help us understand slavery’s awful persistence.
Melissa told Denise and me that Alex wanted, more than anything else, to bring Lola’s story to the world. “This was his ultimate story,” Melissa said. “He was trying to write it for five or six years. He struggled with it. But when he started writing it for The Atlantic, he stopped struggling. He wrote it with such ease.”
Alex did not know that we would be putting his piece on the cover of this issue; he died the day we made that decision, before we had a chance to tell him. His death, quite obviously, could have derailed publication of what turned out to be his final story, but his family, led by Melissa and his siblings, worked with us during this uniquely trying time to make publication possible. We are grateful to them. And we are grateful that Alex shared his story—his epic story—with us.
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