A Slave Who Wrote His Own Bio (Washington, European, slaves)

[Motion]

A Muslim slave wrote about his experiences.

I'm guessing that the large army that came and killed many people were fellow Africans or Muslims. He then was captured and sold to the European slave traders. It's an interesting history of Senegal and Islam along with many slaves being Muslim when they arrived here the US. Any links to the full manuscript?

I found this translation from Issac Bird.

https://www.loc.gov/resource/amedsai...4,2.94,1.169,0

[Cida]

Just heard about him - a 19th century Arab slave in America who, improbably, wrote a memoir, now at the Library of Congress.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/histo...=.018b692b7e79

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/17/us/mu...rary-congress/

I keep thinking how lonely he must have felt.

[residinghere2007]

I attended an HBCU and in one of our literature courses we went over slave narratives and autobiographies. I was happy to see the translation on LOC website pop up recently but had reviewed this before when I was a college student almost 20 years ago. There are quite a few slave narratives. The one by Omar Ibn Said is unique because it is the only slave narrative from America that was written in Arabic by a Muslim.



He was not an Arab though, he was an African Muslim.



On the army being African, I personally always find it funny that on the internet today many have this idea that a large amount of people didn't/don't know that the African Slave Trade both in the east and west heavily involved Africans themselves. Only issue I have with internet folks speaking of this is that often they say that "Africans sold their own people" as if all Africans are of the same ethnic group. IMO that would be like saying the the English enslaving the Irish in their home country was the English "selling/raping/enslaving their own people."



But folks who are aware of history know that the parts that are often ignored, the African tribal involvement in "the trade," is not some secret. If you read about this era, it is plainly evident and is involved in nearly all the narratives of African slaves who were brought via the Middle Passage to the Americas. Some of them name the tribes who captured them (in "Barracoon" Kudjo Lewis named the Dahomey who were major players in the slave trade - Kudjo was not Dahomey and FWIW we also learned about his background and the work/legend/interesting life and work of Zora Neale Hurston in an autobiography/biography class I took the following year).



Many of the early black American activists also referenced Africans selling their grandparents to Europeans to be enslaved as a reason for them not to support the ACS and other similar political schemes/organizations who were focused on sending black Americans to Liberia or other parts of Africa in order to rid the country of black people. Even Frederick Douglass, whose autobiographies were written by himself and he was/is well known, wrote pieces that referenced not going to Africa for this reason. Some of the first books written on this subject actually was compiled and written about in depth by black historians/sociologists, most notably Dr. Carter G. Woodson who also wrote about black slave owners in America.



Omar Ibn Said's narrative is very short but interesting.

[Motion]

Since it was illegal for slaves to be taught to read and write I wonder if these literate Muslim slaves were handled a certain way?