ABSTRACT
The "interesting narrative" of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua is one of the longest and most detailed accounts of someone enslaved in Western Africa and transported to the America's under slavery. Baquaqua was born in Djougou, apparently in the mid-1820s, into a Muslim family of local prominence. In the late 1820s and 1830s, when Baquaqua was growing up, Djougou was one of the most important towns between Asante and the Sokoto Caliphate, and his account attests to its role. Baquaqua's account serves as an example of how biography can inform our understanding of the African Diaspora and how individuals fitted into the history of Trans-Atlantic slavery. The details of biography allow the possibility of subjecting ethnic stereotypes, ascribed signs of identity, and the historicism of tradition and memory to the scrutiny of rigorous methodology. References to ethnicity are frequent in the study of enslaved Africans in the Americas, but how the concept is used is the subject of considerable debate and disagreement.
