The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges

Abstract

The Red Atlantic:Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges Jace Weaver (bio) O, Wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,That has such people in't. Shakespeare, The Tempest, 5.1 I. Prologue The roots of Georgia, the place where I have plied my trade for the past nine years, were planted long ago and far away across the Atlantic Ocean. That is hardly surprising. James Oglethorpe, its founder, was born in London and reared in Surrey. The deepest roots of Georgia, however, stretch back not to England but to Africa. In 1730 a merchant named Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, the son of a Muslim imam, was captured on the Gambia River by Mandinkas (those formerly called Mandingoes) and sold to British slavers, who in turn sold him to the owner of a Maryland tobacco plantation. Diallo was himself a devout Muslim. In Maryland, he was befriended by Rev. Thomas Bluett of the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. Bluett convinced the plantation owner to allow his slave to write a letter to his father. Written in Arabic, the letter eventually found its way into the hands of Oglethorpe during the summer of 1732, a few months prior to the founding of the Georgia colony. Oglethorpe had served briefly as deputy governor of the Royal African Company, a corporation set up to exploit the West African slave trade. He sent the letter to Oxford to [End Page 418] be translated. When he read the translation, he was greatly moved by the enslaved African's story. He arranged to purchase him and have him sent to England, where the African was manumitted. Although he never met him, the Diallo incident greatly affected Oglethorpe. He sold his stock in the Royal African Company and severed all ties with it. He established Georgia as an antislavery colony. Only after his governorship, in 1750, did Georgia reverse itself and legalize the peculiar institution. During his twelve-month sojourn in England, Job ben Jalla (as Diallo was known there) became what one document refers to as "a roaring lion" of English society. He helped Sir Hans Sloane, founder of the British Museum, organize its large collection of Arabic manuscripts, and he was sponsored into membership in the Gentleman's Society of Spalding, a club whose members included some of the country's most distinguished scholars. (Sir Isaac Newton had been a member until his death five years earlier; Alexander Pope was a current member.) Finally, he returned to his father in Gambia in July 1734, a free man. 1 That's the story of Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. To borrow from my Cherokee friend Thomas King in his book The Truth about Stories: It's yours. Take it. Do with it what you will. Tell it to friends. Forget it. But don't say in the years to come that you would have lived your life differently if only you had heard this story. You've heard it now. 2 In the early 1990s, British scholar Paul Gilroy defined the "black Atlantic," examining the diasporic peregrinations of Africans around the Atlantic basin. Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, though not discussed by Gilroy, would seem to be a paradigmatic case study. Gilroy looks at the cultural imbrications between Europe and its peoples, on the one hand, and the peoples they encountered as they sallied forth, on the other. He writes: If this appears to be little more than a roundabout way of saying that the reflexive cultures and consciousness of the European settlers and those of the Africans they enslaved, the "Indians" they slaughtered, and the Asians they indentured were not, even in situations of the most extreme brutality, sealed off hermetically from each other, then so be it. This seems as though it ought to be an obvious and self-evident observation, but its stark character has been systematically obscured by commentators from all sides of political opinion. 3 [End Page 419] It is certainly true, as I have written before, that all of us, as scholars and as human beings, have our own particular blinders. It begs saying, however, that in the processes of colonization and empire, it was not...