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BiographyI am the author of Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (Oxford University Press, 2007), a winner of the 2007 Wesley-Logan Prize of the American Historical Association. This book is a detailed account of the lives of the young people from Benin and Nigeria who were on the last documented slave ship to the U.S. On March 2, 1807, Thomas Jefferson had signed the Act to abolish the international slave trade (effective January 1, 1808) but, as this story shows, it went on for another fifty-two years. The 110 children and adolescents who had been forced to board the Clotilda arrived in Mobile, Alabama in July 1860. Freed in 1865, they tried unsuccessfully to go back home and finally founded their own settlement, African Town, where their descendants still live today. The last survivor of the original group died in 1935. Another of my books, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (New York University Press, 1998) also deals with the experience of Africans in the Americas during slavery. It is the first book to retrace the 500 year-old story of West African Muslim communities in the New World. Named a 1999 Outstanding Academic Book, Servants of Allah also received Honorable Mention for the Outstanding Books Award from the Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights. A few years ago, I edited Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies (Ohio University Press, 2003), a collection of essays presented at an international conference I initiated and co-organized at Rutgers University in 2001. I have written several contributions to academic books and journals, and when I was a journalist, I published extensively in European and African magazines. Some of my recent academic works are studies on West African Muslims in New York; African immigrants in France and in the United States; Manding in the Americas during the transatlantic slave trade; and West African Muslim reformists and the transatlantic slave trade. I am co-editor -with Howard Dodson- of In Motion: The African-American Migration Experience, which was published by National Geographic in January 2005. I am also the Content Manager of the Web site on which this book was based. The only one of its kind, this site presents 17,000 pages of text (books, book chapters, articles, and manuscripts) 8,300 images, maps and lesson plans. I have also written history books for younger readers. Kings and Queens of West Africa –part of a four-book series—received the 2001 African Studies Association Africana Book Award for Older Readers, and the following year I published a book on the life of children enslaved in the United States, Growing Up in Slavery. I tried my hand at fiction with Bintou's Braids, an illustrated book that has been selected by the Cooperative Children’s Book Center as one of 2002 best books and has also been published in Brazil and in France where it was voted Best Book for 2003 (3-6 years) by the "Mommies' Committee." I received a doctorate from the University of Paris, and taught at the University of Libreville and New York University. I have appeared on television in ABC Like It Is; the PBS documentaries This Far by Faith: African-American Spiritual Journeys and Prince Among Slaves; and the PBS series History Detectives. I have lived in France, Senegal, Gabon, and Italy, and have been residing in New York for several years. I am a curator at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. |
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