So they worked to buy land from the man who had bought their bodies, and founded a settlement near Mobile, called Africatown. They couldn’t get passage back to Africa. They didn’t fit in with African Americans they met, who looked down on them. Kossola and his fellows labored in bondage for about five years, until the Civil War, at the end of which they were freed. This fact was hardly a secret (the New York Times covered the arrival in Mobile Bay), but the men behind the transaction went essentially unpunished. Upon reaching Alabama in 1860, the Clotilda, now implicated in a crime, was burned after delivering its human cargo. had already banned participation in the global slave trade. He and more than 100 others were brought onto the schooner Clotilda for the Atlantic crossing, despite the fact that the U.S. He was only a teenager when his village in what is now Benin was raided and he was taken to the barracoon–the stockades in which captives waited for sale. Kossola didn’t get much of a chance to do that.

“And we have to do it because people are still wrestling with this very fundamental issue about freedom, about humanity, about the right to live a life on one’s own terms.” Plant, the scholar who edited the new volume. “There is a willingness of people at this point in time to look at this issue, to interrogate it, to question it, which is what we have to do,” says Deborah G.

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