our understanding of ethnicity, religion and more broadly culture and how these changed with the time'. (Lovejoy, 1997, p. 119).  
Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was born free. Like countless other Africans in the Americas, he had a home town and a family and, in his youth, had experienced the violence of war. Enslaved and exported to Brazil on a slave ship from the most important slave port in West Africa, the notorious Ouidah, or Whydah, in the kingdom of Dahomey, he was unloaded on to a beach in the northern part of Pernambuco province in 1845. At that time, the transatlantic slave trade had already been prohibited in Brazil, and hence his situation as an enslaved person was illegal. Baquaqua was sold first to a baker in Pernambuco and then, after trying to take his own life, to a ship's captain who travelled the Brazilian coast from his home port of Rio de Janeiro, especially to Rio Grande do Sul. During a trip to New York City in 1847, Baquaqua was able to escape from slavery and subsequently spent two years in Haiti, at a time of political turbulence. Under the protection of the American Baptist Free Mission Society, he returned to the United States in late 1849 to enrol in New York Central College, in McGrawville, NY, where he remained a student from 1850 to 1853.