In the summer of 1860, a lot more than fifty years after the USA legally abolished the international slave trade, 110 men, ladies, and children from Benin and Nigeria were brought ashore in Alabama under cover of night. They were the last recorded band of Africans deported to the United States as slaves. Timothy Meaher, an established Mobile phone businessman, sent the slave ship, the Clotilda, to Africa, on a bet that he could ‘bring a shipful of niggers directly into Mobile Bay under the officials’ about Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story from the Last Africans Brought to America noses.’ He won the bet.

This book reconstructs the lives of the people in West Africa, recounts their capture and passage in the slave pen in Ouidah, and describes their experience of slavery alongside American-born enslaved men and women. After emancipation, the group reunited from various plantations, bought property, and founded their very own settlement, referred to as African City. They ruled it regarding to customary African laws and regulations, spoke their own regional vocabulary and, when giving interviews, insisted that writers use their African brands so that their own families would know that they were still alive.

The last survivor of the Clotilda died in 1935, but African Town is still home to a community of Clotilda descendants. The initial publication of Dreams of Africa in Alabama marked the 200th wedding anniversary of the abolition from the transatlantic slave trade.