Author: By Neringa / Source: Bored Panda
On one warm and unsuspecting day of July in 1860, a schooner named Clotilda, with the Captain William Foster and 110 African slaves on board, arrived in Mobile Bay, Alabama. Clotilda was the last known U.S. slave ship to bring captives from Africa to the United States.
Among more than one hundred enslaved African people, there was also Cudjo (sometimes spelled as Cudjoe) Kazoola (or Kossula) Lewis – the last known survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States.
Cudjo Lewis, originally named Kossula (American listeners would later transcribe Cudjo’s given name as “Kazoola”), was born around 1840 into the Yoruba tribe, in the Banté region, which today belongs to the West African country of Benin. His father’s name was Oluwale (or Oluale) and his mother’s – Fondlolu. Kossula had five siblings and twelve half-siblings, who were the children of his father’s other two wives.
Mobile Bay and wreckage of slave ship Clotilda are pictured above.
In the spring of 1860, when Cudjo was only 19 years old, he was taken as a prisoner by the army of the Kingdom of Dahomey. After the Dahomian tribe captured him, Cudjo was taken to the coast. There, he and more than one hundred other men and women, were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda – the last slave ship to reach the shores of the continental United States. The captives were brought to Mobile Bay, Alabama. The international slave trade was not legal at that time already for more than 50 years.
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