# THE SLAVERY AND FREEDOM NARRATIVE OF MAHOMMAH GARDO BAQUAQUA  
in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World ${ }^{1}$<br>Bruno Rafael Véras  
Its horrors, ah! who can describe? None can so truly depict its horrors as the poor unfortunate, miserable wretch that has been confined within its portals. Oh! friends of humanity, pity the poor African, who has been trepanned and sold away from friends and home, and consigned to the hold of a slave ship, to await even more horrors and miseries in a distant land, amongst the religious and benevolent (Baqulaqua and Moore, 1854, p. 42; Law and Lovejoy, 2007, p. 53).  
Those words, drawing on the experience of nearly two months inside one of the worst inventions of humankind, a slave ship, and revealing the despair common to the millions of individuals participating in the Atlantic slave trade as its captives, come from one of the few biographical or autobiographical accounts in the literary genre of 'slave narratives' discovered to date that relate the lived experience of an enslaved African person in Brazil (Véras de Morais e Silva, 2014). ${ }^{2}$  
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[^0]:    1 For more information on the life of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, including documents, educational content and videos, see the 'project Baquaqua' international digital public history initiative at: https:// profbrunov.wixsite.com/baquaqua (Accessed 14 June 2022.)
2 As self-accounts, such narratives can be regarded as the privileged loci where the inner life of the subject - and sometimes the editor - meets the social and cultural context into which he/she has been thrust. For another published example, dictated by an Ijebu man named Osifekunde (born 1795), see D'Avezac-Macaya (1845, p. 18).