Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀
He wrote a letter in Arabic from a Maryland prison, and that letter reached London and bought him free. What the English public of 1733 made of him, and how he himself looked at all of it, is the sharpest knife with which we can cut into the early eighteenth-century Atlantic slave trade.
Life
He was born around 1701 in Bundu (Boundou), a small Fulani-Muslim sultanate between the Senegal and Gambia rivers in what is today eastern Senegal. His full name was Ayuba ibn Suleiman ibn Ibrahim Diallo. His father was imam and qadi in a village called Bondu; his family belonged to the Toronkawa Fulbe scholarly caste. He received the classical training: Qur’an memorization, Arabic, Maliki fiqh, tafsir. By his thirties he was imam in his own family mosque and had three wives and four children.
In February 1731 he was sent by his father with two servants and a number of herds to the Gambia River to trade with an English factory. On the way back he was captured by a Mandinka raid — ironically at a moment when he himself was trying to sell two slaves on his father’s behalf. He was carried off to the British fort at Joar, sold to a slave ship, and after an Atlantic crossing put ashore at Annapolis, Maryland. He was bought by Alexander Tolsey, a planter on Kent Island in the Chesapeake Bay.
He worked there in the tobacco fields. He fled, was caught in Kent County and locked up in the county jail. There a visitor saw him writing Arabic characters in the sand — an observation which through several intermediaries produced a letter to his father in Bundu. That letter traveled via London, via Oxford Arabists who translated it, into the hands of the director of the Royal African Company, Sir Hans Sloane. In 1733 the RAC bought his freedom and arranged passage for him to England.
In London he was lionized for a season. He was introduced to the royal family, portrayed by William Hoare (a painting with the Qur’an around his neck, today in the Qatar Museums Authority), and interviewed by an English schoolmaster Thomas Bluett. Bluett published in 1734 Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa — the only extensive first-hand source we have on him. Ayuba ﵀ returned to Bundu in July 1734. He found at home that his family had given him up for dead, that his father had passed away, that one of his wives had remarried. He resumed his role as imam. He died in 1773, seventy-two years old.
Faith and culture
Everything we know about his faith comes from Bluett’s account and from the Arabic letters that he wrote to English scholars in London and later from Bundu. He prayed the five prayers faithfully during his time in London. He refused pork and alcohol in a society in which that was socially painful. He recited the Qur’an from memory — repeatedly he wrote out for Oxford scholars complete surat al-Fatiha and other passages from memory, without error, which left British Arabists of that period astonished.
He was a Fulani Toronkawa of the generation that immediately preceded the great reform movements in Futa Toro (Sulayman Bal, 1776) and Futa Jallon (Karamoko Alfa, from 1725). His intellectual climate was precisely the one out of which, half a century later, Usman dan Fodio ﵀ would emerge. Had the Mandinka raid of 1731 unfolded three days differently, he would never have ended up in Maryland, and we would have known nothing of his life.
Legacy
Bluett’s Some Memoirs became a European bestseller. It was translated into French and German. It formed, together with a later account by Francis Moore (Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa, 1738), the picture that eighteenth-century Europe came to have of West Africa.
Here it gets complicated, and we may not pretend it is simple. Ayuba ﵀'s history was instrumentalized by two camps at once. Abolitionists — especially from the end of the eighteenth century onward — cited him as proof that Africans, given the chance, were fully human and therefore could not be enslaved. The Royal African Company, which had bought his freedom, used his case at the same time to defend the slave trade in general: “we are humane, look how we return exceptional Africans to their land” — while the RAC itself shipped tens of thousands of others to Jamaica. Bluett, his biographer, was himself involved in the RAC networks. His book mentions Ayuba ﵀'s civilization in the same breath as the thesis that the ordinary African may remain enslaved.
This sort of “exception proves the rule” reasoning we see arising again and again in the history of Atlantic slavery. It was the intellectual lubricant that kept the trade running for decades. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo ﵀ was the victim, not the cause, of that reasoning — but his story provided its earliest raw material.
He himself brought back from London something that meant more to him than the English could see: that he was confirmed in his learning, that his Qur’an handwriting was at the level of the Oxford Arabists, that his faith had remained intact through an Atlantic detour. He returned as imam, not as a monument shaped by England. Family oral tradition in Bundu preserved his story into the nineteenth century, when French researchers still heard it there.
On the map
Bundu (~14.4°N, -12.3°W) as homeland. The Gambia River (~13.47°N, -16.58°W) as the point of capture in 1731 — the exact place where the Atlantic broke his life in two. Kent Island, Maryland (38.97°N, -76.32°W) as plantation. Annapolis (38.98°N, -76.49°W) as the prison where he wrote Arabic in the sand. London (51.51°N, -0.13°W) as the season of 1733. Six points, one trans-Atlantic arc, one life that was at both ends.
Primary sources: Thomas Bluett, Some Memoirs of the Life of Job, the Son of Solomon, the High Priest of Boonda in Africa (London, 1734). Francis Moore, Travels into the Inland Parts of Africa (1738). A few preserved Arabic letters of Ayuba ﵀ in British archives.
Stage pronunciation: “Ayuba Suleiman Diallo” as A-joe-ba soe-lei-MAAN DJAL-lo; “Bundu” as BOEN-doe; “Toronkawa” as to-ron-KA-wa; “Bluett” as BLOE-et.
Uncertainties:
- Birth year “c. 1701” rests on Bluett’s statement that he was thirty-two in 1733.
- The naming of the kidnappers as “Mandinka” follows Bluett; modern historians warn that Bluett’s ethnography was sketchy.
- The date of return (July 1734) is documented in RAC ship records.
- Date of death 1773 is according to Senegalese traditional sources (Park heard him referred to in 1795 as “recently deceased”).
- The Hoare portrait (1733) is today in the Qatar Museums Authority collection after a purchase in 2009.