Johanna Obenda

I think when the ship was rediscovered in 2021, it was obviously really big news, right? This was, um, sort of material evidence of the last slave ship to enter the United States some 50 years after the slave trade was abolished. Um, and so because of that, obviously there was a lot of media attention, many different narratives and books, um, written. And it was really a global news. But I think talking to some of the descendants and some of the residents. Through unfinished conversations, we learned that yes, it was important for that ship to be discovered. That ship sort of raised a lot of, um, the profile of their community in ways that some ways that perhaps are maybe harmful, but a lot of ways that are quite positive. Um, but for for the people who lived in Africatown, they didn’t really need that ship to confirm their history. That’s something that they already had. This is a knowledge that they had because their ancestors told them where they came from. Right? That they were from Benin, that they came over on the Clotilda, that they built Africatown. They’re three, sometimes four generations removed from the, uh, enslaved people who came on the Clotilda. And so they had been preserving that history with or without the ship. Um, and I think that’s that speaks to their credibility. Right? […] And so I think what that reveals is that there are different ways of keeping history. Um, and this oral histories are not a sort of alternative view of history or sort of an auxiliary way of understanding the past that, no, they’re they’re records within themselves. And in many ways, the, the sentence of Africatown knew, um, a lot more about the Clotilda than the rest of the world, which just many people learned about in 2021.