Baquaqua had built a complex and multi-layered new identity for himself in the United States, where he was labelled and referred to as a 'nigger'. ${ }^{15}$ First of all, he presented himself not just as a Mina, Hausa or member of a 'Wangara' family of Muslim traders, but as a generic African man - a strategic term also adopted by Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa, the African) and Ottobah Cugoano in other contexts in Great Britain (Lovejoy, 2006a, pp. 317-347). Secondly, he was a Baptist Christian and, although he reverted to using his Muslim name Mahommah after reaching Haiti, it was useful to him to belong to the Baptist community. We do not know how sincere he was in his Christian faith, but the fact is that he had a practical relationship with the Baptist abolitionist circles; they used him as a live speaker to illustrate the evils of slavery and he was able to keep up his hope and endeavours to return to Africa and very likely, in the depths of his heart, to his mother's arms in Katsina.  
Even when narrating the events from his past, Baquaqua did so in accordance with his present-day criteria and aims. Born into a Muslim Hausa commercial family, speaking Dendi and Hausa and writing Arabic, he had undergone an identity shift and developed various personas over the course of his diasporic trajectory. Even before his second enslavement and shipment to Brazil, his views of the world and behaviour had been altered by the experience of enslavement then freedom, joining the military and working as an official for the ruler of Soubroukou. In Brazil he was a boçal, a Mina and then a Hausa again, perhaps, when among his African peers. He is an interesting example of an 'interplay between self-understanding and interpolated identifications' creating 'complex, overlapping, and sometimes shifting "identities" that unfolded over the course of a given lifetime' (Sweet, 2009, p. 284).