ABSTRACT
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was an unambitious, undisciplined, modestly intelligent boy and man who loved his mother, liked alcohol, and got in trouble out of mischief or boredom rather than malice—a not-unusual case on any continent. But this young African’s troubles led him a long way from home. He was born around 1830 in Djougou, a large city in present-day Benin. Uninterested in school and religion, his father’s and older brother’s rigorous Islam, or physical labor, Baquaqua became a victim of others at home and abroad. He was captured during a distant war and was released; became a petty servant of a petty non-Muslim chief; was tricked by drinking friends into slavery; was marched toward the coast by male and female purchasers; suffered a long passage across the sea; and was owned by a harsh baker and then a cruel shipmaster and his wife in Brazil. He was a mistreated steward and near alcoholic on board a ship that sailed to New York City; a lonely fugitive there and in Boston; an uneasy convert to Christianity in Haiti; a mistreated student and a dubious missionary candidate in upstate New York and in Canada; a published storyteller in Detroit, Michigan, in 1854; and in 1857, a sojourner in England on his way, he hoped, home to Africa.
