Cudjo Lewis, originally named Oluale Kossola, never forgot home – and he ensured that his descendants would remember a place that they might never see with their own eyes. Captured from the Bantè region of Benin, west Africa, Lewis was trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean and enslaved in rural Alabama in 1860, just one year before the onset of the US civil war and 52 years after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed.
He was one of the last survivors of the Middle Passage when he died on 17 July 1935, and one of the 110 survivors of the Clotilda, considered to be the last slave ship to illegally traffic Africans to the United States. Conspirators burned and sunk the Clotilda – a hull from the ship was not recovered until 2019 – and refused to facilitate the survivors’ return to Africa, even after the civil war.
