The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown, USA: Spirit of Our Ancestors

The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Making of AfricaTown, USA: Spirit of Our Ancestors is a superbly researched monograph that reconstructs the transatlantic voyage of the schooner Clotilda, America’s last slave ship, during the slave trade’s illegal period. Aided and abetted by the U.S. Constitution and by corrupt law enforcement officials, the Clotilda smuggling scheme was hatched on a bet wagered in defiance of federal anti-smuggling laws. This book dramatizes the plight of the Clotilda Africans from their points of capture in West Africa to their point of disembarkation in Mobile, Alabama in 1860. Thirty members of that fateful cargo established AfricaTown where some of their descendants still reside. In 1927, Zora Neale Hurston interviewed Cudjo Kazoola, a Clotilda survivor. Through diligent, scholarly transatlantic field research, Robertson uses the Clotilda’s log, ethnography, cartography, linguistics, and oral histories that she collected from the Clotilda descendants as well as from the descendants of Fon Africans who sold the Clotilda captives into slavery at the port of Whydah to metaphysically connect Cudjo and some of his shipmates back to specific cultures and villages in Nigeria and the Republic of Benin. Therefore, the book draws on both primary, transatlantic field research and historical memory to mesh diverse voices into a narrative that reveals the centrality of slavery, Africanisms, and resistance in American culture even today, highlighting the 2019 discovery of the Clotilda wreckage in the eastern branch of the Mobile River. The book argues that the Clotilda smuggling voyage was a crime that victimized 110 West Africans for sport, thereby, making the Clotilda a trope of injustice. However, the greater story is the extent to which the Clotilda captives empowered themselves to triumph over that injustice, symbolized by AfricaTown and by their descendants who endure.

https://www.clotildacrime.com/