[Prince among slaves] provides not only an outline of Abd al Rahman Ibrahima's life, but a glimpse of the local politics of the late eighteenth century in the area we now know as Guineau, into slavery as practiced in Mississippi in the late 18th-early 19th century, and into the stumbling blocks to repatriating an enslaved African to his homeland.

Ibrahima, the son of a Fulani ruler, is educated at Timbuktu. At age 26 while returning from battle he is captured and sold into slavery, ending up in Natchez, Mississippi on the plantation of Thomas Foster. He rises to act as overseer for Foster, is married to another slave, Isabella, and they raise 9 children.

After about 30 years in slavery, a repatriation effort full of errors in communication eventually results in Ibrahima and Isabella being sent to Liberia.

This is more and less than a biography. I say it's less because there isn't as much documentation of what Ibrahima thought (and said) as I'm used to seeing in a biography. (Of course, that's because he didn't write English, and not many people valued his words enough to record and keep them.)

It's more than a biography in that it focuses more on the context in which Ibrahima lived because that is more easily documented, and on how and why he was eventually released from slavery, yet how who he was and where he was from weren't understood by the people who helped him.

I also enjoyed the foreward ("Why") that told of how Alford ran across a document related to Ibrahima's life as a graduate student and the years of research and writing that went into the book, as well as the afterword discussing the (non) reception of the book by the academic community.

Read for Muslim Journeys, American stories discussion at my local library ( )

The next time I criticize a novelist for relying too much on coincidence I’ll remind myself of Ibrahima’s story, recounted by Terry Alford in Prince Among Slaves. Ibrahima, born in the mid-18th century, was a son of the ruler of Futa Jalon in West Africa. He was literate in Arabic and educated in the Islamic faith. When Ibrahima was in his twenties, he was captured and sold into slavery, finally ending up as a slave on a plantation near Natchez, Mississippi.

Years later, Ibrahima met a familiar man in the street. Dr. John Cox had been a ship’s surgeon and had been stranded for a time in Timbo, Ibrahima’s African hometown. Dr. Cox got to know Ibrahima and his family well during the months he spent in Timbo. This chance meeting lent credibility to Ibrahima’s claims about his origins and brought him to the attention of men of influence. Eventually Ibrahima won his release from slavery and made his way back to Africa.

The acknowledgements, preface (labeled “why” in this book), afterward, and notes are all important reading. They explain how Alford developed a research interest in Ibrahima, describe sources and repositories he consulted during his research, explain the rationale for his interpretation of the facts of Ibrahima’s life, and, in the 30th anniversary edition I read, describe primary sources that have surfaced since the book’s original publication that reaffirm his conclusions about Ibrahima. Some of the index entries in this edition point to the wrong page numbers, suggesting that the updating of the index to match the new edition wasn’t as thorough as it should have been. Although Alford provides extensive end notes, readers with a scholarly interest in Ibrahima may be irritated by the absence of numbering within the text. Alford was targeting both a popular and a scholarly audience and the decision to omit numbering of end notes was probably a compromise for popular appeal. Highly recommended for a general audience. Academic readers should take note of the omissions in the scholarly apparatus. ( )

Abd al-Rahman Ibrahima was the son of the almaami of Timbo in Africa. He was an educated Muslim man, and when he was in a raiding party he was captured by an opposing tribe and sold to slavers. From there, he was taken to Natchez, Mississippi, and began a long attempt to be reunited with his people.

My public library recently was awarded the Muslim Journeys Bookshelf, twenty-five books and three DVDs related to diverse topics. This book is one of the "American Stories" books, focusing on Islam and Muslims related to American history, and is the topic of an upcoming book discussion. I knew little about Muslim slaves in the United States, so I thought the topic of the book had a lot of potential. Unfortunately, I had a hard time making my way through the book. It's very uneven, which seems to stem from what records were available: less is known about Ibrahima's time in Africa and even some of his experiences in Natchez than is known about his later touring of the northern states in an attempt to free his children. Greater detail is given for those events that have more evidence, which I sometimes found tedious. I really didn't need to know exactly how much money Ibrahima received from every town or city he visited, for example. Sometimes Alford went into great detail about something I thought only tangentially related to Ibrahima's story, and I thought he could have used a tighter narrative, making a 182 page story even shorter perhaps, but more focused. On top of this, I found the writing very dry. On balance, I did learn a lot and would be interested in learning more about not only Muslim slaves in general (which was barely touched upon in the biography itself, but in the afterword) but also Thomas Gallaudet, who was a friend and sponsor of Ibrahima's and instrumental in deaf education in the United States. ( )