Muhammad gardo baquaqua biography template
Biography of Mahommah G. Baquaqua, a Native of Zoogoo, in the Interior of Africa..
Scholars disagree.
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was an African who escaped slavery and who was a noted abolitionist and author of an exceptional nineteenth-century slave narrative.
Baquaqua was born around to a Muslim merchant family in Djougou, in today’s Benin.
After attending a Koranic school and training to be a merchant, Baquaqua was kidnapped around age twenty-one, sold into slavery, and shipped to Brazil.
In Brazil, Baquaqua was initially sold to a baker in Pernambuco. When he refused to comply, he was sent south to Rio de Janeiro and sold to a ship’s captain.
Baquaqua served as the cabin steward on the Lembrança, a ship that made two trips to southern Brazil before sailing from Rio to deliver a consignment of coffee in New York. There, Baquaqua became the object of a legal dispute between local abolitionists who helped him jump ship, and his Brazilian master who attempted to recover him.
When two judges refused to free Baquaqua, his abolitionist supporters helped him to escap