Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀

He wrote a letter in Arabic from a Maryland prison, and that letter reached London and bought him free. What the English public of 1733 made of him, and how he himself looked at all of it, is the sharpest knife with which we can cut into the early eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade.

Life

He was born around 1701 in Bundu (Boundou), a small Fulani-Muslim sultanate between the Senegal and Gambia rivers in what is today eastern Senegal. His full name was Ayuba ibn Suleiman ibn Ibrahim Diallo. His father was imam and qadi in a village called Bondu; his family belonged to the Toronkawa Fulbe scholarly caste. He received the classical training: Qur’an memorization, Arabic, Maliki fiqh, tafsir. By his thirties he was imam in his own family mosque and had three wives and four children.

In February 1731 he was sent by his father with two servants and a number of herds to the Gambia River to trade with an English factory. On the way back he was captured by a Mandinka raid, ironically at a moment when he himself was trying to sell two slaves on his father’s behalf, and that river is the place where the Atlantic broke his life in two. He was carried off to the British fort at Joar, sold to a slave ship, and after an Atlantic crossing put ashore at Annapolis, Maryland, where he was bought by Alexander Tolsey, a planter on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay.

He worked there in the tobacco fields. He fled, was caught in Kent County and locked up in the county jail, and there a visitor saw him writing Arabic characters in the sand, an observation which through several intermediaries produced a letter to his father in Bundu. That letter traveled via London, via Oxford Arabists who translated it, into the hands of the director of the Royal African Company, Sir Hans Sloane. In 1733 the RAC bought his freedom and arranged passage for him to England.

In London he was lionized for a season. He was introduced to the royal family, portrayed by William Hoare (a painting with the Qur’an around his neck, today in the Qatar Museums Authority), and interviewed by an English schoolmaster Thomas Bluett, who published in 1734 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa, the only extensive first-hand source we have on him. Ayuba ﵀ returned to Bundu in July 1734. He found at home that his family had given him up for dead, that his father had passed away, and that one of his wives had remarried. He resumed his role as imam, and he died in 1773, seventy-two years old.

Faith and culture

Everything we know about his faith comes from Bluett’s account and from the Arabic letters that he wrote to English scholars in London and later from Bundu. He prayed the five prayers faithfully during his time in London, and he refused pork and alcohol in a society in which that was socially painful. He recited the Qur’an from memory, and repeatedly he wrote out for Oxford scholars complete surat al-Fatiha and other passages from memory, without error, which left British Arabists of that period astonished.

He was a Fulani Toronkawa of the generation that immediately preceded the great reform movements in Futa Toro (Sulayman Bal, 1776) and Futa Jallon (Karamoko Alfa, from 1725). His intellectual climate was precisely the one out of which, half a century later, Usman dan Fodio ﵀ would emerge. Had the Mandinka raid of 1731 unfolded three days differently, he would never have ended up in Maryland, and we would have known nothing of his life.

Legacy

Bluett’s Some Memoirs became a European bestseller, translated into French and German, and it formed, together with a later account by Francis Moore (Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa, 1738), the picture that eighteenth-century Europe came to have of West Africa.

Here it gets complicated, and we may not pretend it is simple. Ayuba ﵀'s history was instrumentalized by two camps at once. Abolitionists, especially from the end of the eighteenth century onward, cited him as proof that Africans, given the chance, were fully human and therefore could not be enslaved. The Royal African Company, which had bought his freedom, used his case at the same time to defend the slave trade in general, pleading that “we are humane, look how we return exceptional Africans to their land”, while the RAC itself shipped tens of thousands of others to Jamaica. Bluett, his biographer, was himself involved in the RAC networks, and his book mentions Ayuba ﵀'s civilization in the same breath as the thesis that the ordinary African may remain enslaved.

This sort of “exception proves the rule” reasoning we see arising again and again in the history of Atlantic slavery, and it was the intellectual lubricant that kept the trade running for decades. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ was the victim, not the cause, of that reasoning, but his story provided its earliest raw material.

He himself brought back from London something that meant more to him than the English could see: that he was confirmed in his learning, that his Qur’an handwriting was at the level of the Oxford Arabists, that his faith had remained intact through an Atlantic detour. He returned as imam, not as a monument shaped by England. Family oral tradition in Bundu preserved his story into the nineteenth century, when French researchers still heard it there.

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Uncertainties:

The birth year “c. 1701” rests on Bluett’s statement that he was thirty-two in 1733. The naming of the kidnappers as “Mandinka” follows Bluett, and modern historians warn that Bluett’s ethnography was sketchy. The date of return in July 1734 is documented in RAC ship records, while the date of death in 1773 is according to Senegalese traditional sources, Park having heard him referred to in 1795 as “recently deceased”. The Hoare portrait (1733) is today in the Qatar Museums Authority collection after a purchase in 2009.

Sources

• Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa (London 1734): the life story authorised by Ayuba ﵀ himself, the first published biography of an African enslaved in America, as summarised in Austin, pp. 52–58, and quoted in Diouf, pp. 94, 121–122, 192.
• Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (London 1738): the account of the landing in the Gambia, the encounter with his kidnappers and the news from Bundu, as quoted in Austin, pp. 59–61, and Diouf, pp. 233–234.
• Allan D. Austin, African Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles, Routledge, New York/London 1997, pp. 27, 50–61.
  • pp. 50, 53–54: the William Hoare portrait of 1733; the name Hyuba boon Salumena boon Hibrahema of the Jallo clan and the age of thirty-one or thirty-two that places the birth around 1702; the family with religious offices and his assisting his father as imam at fifteen; two wives, three sons and a daughter; the trading journey to the Gambia with two servants, the capture in Mandingo territory, Captain Pike, Annapolis and Tolsey’s tobacco on Kent Island; the flight, the jail and Bluett’s visit in June 1731.
  • pp. 55–56: the Arabic letter to his father, Oglethorpe who arranged the bond, the crossing of March 1733 with the five prayers in public; the royal family, the three Qurans written from memory and the translation work for Sir Hans Sloane, a founder of the British Museum.
  • pp. 27, 51–52, 57–58: Bluett as a Christian missionary who elevated Job above the other Africans shipped by the RAC and presented him as a near-English gentleman in the service of English trade; the later writers who made him a Moor or an Arab; in 1734 nobody yet criticised slavery as a system.
  • pp. 59–61: the RAC letter of 4 July 1734, the landing on 8 August 1734, the news of February 1735 that his father had died and his first wife had remarried, the return to Bundu in June 1735 and the death in 1773.
• Sylviane A. Diouf, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas, 15th anniversary edition, New York University Press, New York 2013, pp. 29, 40–41, 44, 47, 63, 72, 86, 94, 106, 119, 121–122, 171–172, 191–193, 196, 233–234.
  • pp. 29, 40–41, 44, 47, 63, 72: Bundu between the Senegal and the Gambia, in 1690 the second theocracy of West Africa, and Ayuba ﵀ born ten years later; Karamoko Alfa and Futa Jallon in 1725, Suleyman Bal, Abdel Kader Kane and Futa Toro in 1776; the sale to a British slaver in the Gambia in 1731 and his father’s slaves who came too late; two wives and four children at thirty-one; the interrogation of June 1731 in which he answered with the shahada.
  • pp. 86, 94, 119, 121–122, 171–172: the secret prayer in the woods beside the cattle and the boy who threw dirt in his face; the abstinence recorded by Bluett, the refused wine and the pork; the hafiz who wrote three Qurans from memory in England.
  • pp. 191–193, 196: the letter in Arabic that reached John Gagnier at Oxford via Denton, Hunt and Oglethorpe, deputy governor of the RAC, and the purchase of his freedom in June 1732 for forty-five pounds after eighteen months of servitude; the letters from England to his father.
  • pp. 106, 233–234: the portrait of 1733 in his own country dress; the translations for Sloane, the royal family and the salons, the landing on 8 August 1734, the encounter with his kidnappers, the death of his father and the remarried wife, the forty years of contact with the RAC and the death in 1773 at the age of seventy-two.
• Omar ibn Said ﵀, A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said, ed. and trans. Ala Alryyes, University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 2011, pp. 83, 108, 110, 119, 124, 136, 148, 166–167: Jameson’s note on Bluett (1734) and Moore (1738); Gomez’s essay on the birth around 1701, the father as a leading cleric of the Senegal valley and the prayer despite the mockery; Austin’s essay on the letter from Annapolis and the Quran from memory; the National Portrait Gallery’s campaign for the portrait; Diouf’s essay on Bundu as a refuge and the return in 1734.