Of the 130 million books published (estimated by Google) 204 are Slave Narratives; autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs written about Africans enslaved in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Only one Narrative about an African enslaved in Brazil has been published, that of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua.

Dictated to Irish abolitionist Samuel Moore in Canada in 1854, Baquaqua’s Narrative is the only known Narrative of the approximately 5.5 million Africans brought to Brazil as slaves (4.8 million of whom survived the travel). (blackwomenofbrazil.co) Of the 10.7 million Africans who survived the Trans-Atlantic Trade (12.5 million were traded), approximately 6,000 Slave Narratives, including broadsheets and about 2,500 oral histories have been recorded, according to Marion Wilson’s 1964 dissertation, “The Slave Narrative: Its Place in American Literary History.” Baquauqua’s account is thus incredibly unique and valuable, and tragically brief, at just 20 typed pages, and with much commentary by Moore.

Brazil has been as reluctant as the United States in facing it’s dark history; Baquaqua’s Narrative was published in Portuguese (Brazil’s official language) for the first time at the end of 2015. The country has only mandated the teaching of Black History in schools since 2003.

There is no national mandate for teaching Black History in the United States. Only seven of 50 states have mandated Black History education in public schools. (King, LJ “The Status of Black History in U.S. Schools and Society” Social Education, 2017, National Council for the Social Studies). More embarrassingly, in 2014, the Teaching Tolerance project by the Southern Poverty Law Center graded 20 states as “failing” in their education standards for the civil rights era, and in five states civil rights education was completely absent. Of the 388,000 Africans traded to the US approximately 150 Narratives have been published.

Baquaqua’s Narrative depicts an Africa in which slavery is fairly common place between peoples of varying origin- slavery was used as a punishment for those who broke the rules of the kings of the lands they were living in. Prisoners of war also became slaves, and were often ransomed to their families, if they were of sufficient means. The treatment/status of those enslaved within Africa as described by Baquaqua was comparatively highly preferable to what he experienced in Brazil. The enslaved in Africa could one day be the master, and the master become enslaved, depending on which side won that day. This was not true in Brazil, where the enslaved had no chance of gaining their freedom.

After having been betrayed by his own people and sold into slavery to a rival army (a not uncommon practice), Baquaqua was sold to an African trader whose business it was to sell enslaved persons far from the individual’s home. Baquaqua was bought and sold several times as he was marched through Africa, finally to be placed in the hold of a slave ship. Before he was shipped by river to be sold to a slave ship bound for Brazil, Baquaqua fell into despair, “When we arrived here I began to give up all hopes of ever getting back to my home again…at last, hope gave way; the last ray seemed fading away and my heart felt sad and weary within me, as I thought of my home, my mother.”

In his narrative, Baquaqua seeks to educate those whom he sees as ignorant to the obvious fact of the humanity of the enslaved African. He is at times imploring, “Some persons suppose that the African has none of the finer feelings of humanity within his breast, and that the milk of human kindness runs not through his composition; this is an error, an error of the grossest kind; …the same impulses drive them to action, the same feelings of love move within their bosom the same maternal and paternal affections are there, the same hopes and fears, griefs and joys, indeed all is there as in the rest of mankind; the only difference is their color, and that has been arranged by him who made the world and all that therein is… therefore why should any despise the works of his hands which has been made and fashioned according to his Almighty power, in the plentitude of his goodness and mercy.” At other times his incredulity and sarcasm comes through, “Oh! friends of humanity, pity the poor African, who has been trepanned and sold away from friends and home, and consigned to the hold of a slave ship, to await even more horrors and miseries in a distant land, amongst the religious and benevolent.”

Baquaqua converted to Christianity in Haiti, after gaining freedom in New York where abolitionists forced the courts to interview the enslaved on trade ships harbored. He traveled to Canada when Haiti began drafting for militia. He dictated his memoirs, and looked to the future of humanity through the lens of his new, cherished faith, “Oh! Christianity thou soother of man’s sufferings, thou guide to the blind, and strength to the weak, go thou on thy mission, speak the peaceful tidings of salvation all around and make glad the heart of man, ‘then shall the wilderness be glad and blossom as the rose.’ Then will slavery with all its horrors ultimately come to an end, for none possessing thy power and under thy influence can perpetuate a calling so utterly at variance with, and repugnant to all thy doctrines.”