fter a night’s heavy drinking at the court of a strange king, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua found his companions gone and his hands tied.
It was the start of a nightmarish journey that saw the low-ranking Muslim civil servant from west Africa sold into slavery and shipped to Brazil in the middle of the 19th century.
Years later, a free man living in Canada, he recounted the horrors of his experiences in a dictated memoir – the only autobiographical account of an African-born slave in Brazil.
“I imagine there can be but one place more horrible in all creation than the hold of a slave ship, and that place is where slaveholders and their myrmidons are the most likely to find themselves some day,” he wrote.
Brazil imported more African slaves than any other country in the Americas – for every one European who immigrated to the country, eight Africans were imported as slaves – but until now, no memoir by a Brazilian slave has ever been published in the country.
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