Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua
writer and escaped slave
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was a former slave, native of Zooggoo, West Africa, a tributary kingdom of Bergoo kingdom. He worked in Brazil as a captive; however, he escaped and fled to New York in 1847, assuring his freedom. He was literate in Arabic at the time of his capture, and recited a prayer in Arabic before an audience at New York Central College, where he studied from 1849 to 1853. He wrote an autobiography (slave narrative), published by American abolitionist Samuel Downing Moore in 1854. His report is the only known document about the slave trade written by a former Brazilian slave.
Early life
Baquaqua was born in Djougou (currently in Benin) between 1820 and 1830 in a prominent Muslim trader family. He learned the Quran, literature and mathematics in an Islamic school. Still as an adolescent, he and his brother took part in the succession wars in Daboya, where he was captured and then rescued.
Enslavement
Returning to Djougou, he became the servant of a local dignitary, perhaps the chief of Soubroukou, whom he called 'king'. The abuses he committed in that period made him target of an ambush in which he was imprisoned and transported to Dahomey; he was embarked into a slave ship in 1845 and taken to Pernambuco in Brazil.
“Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua” enters the record as writer and escaped slave. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Mahommah, Gardo and Baquaqua can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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“Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Mahommah, Gardo and Baquaqua provides the most credible route into that argument.
Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q9648111. VIAF identifies the subject as 17447841. The Library of Congress control number is nr98029520. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1847, 1849, 1853 and 1854.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.