Day 6 - Tangier American Legation | طنجة
The relationship between American Chattel Slavery and Morocco.

"Where the sky meets the water, and the Light Pours In."

Juneteenth - Saturday, June 18th, 2022
American Legation; Tangier, Morocco

They [Europeans] stole millions of Black African scholars, daughters, doctors, sons, teachers, uncles, architects, entrepreneurs, aunts, astronomers, wives, husbands, men and women and they made them Slaves. They stole kings, queens, princesses, and princes.

If history is written on the side of the victors, this certainly meets the minimum threshold for preservation and illumination as a paramount victory for Black people. While we were being told the story of lion cubs gifted from the Moroccan Sultan to the US consulate, my attention was drawn to an image of a Black man and prince by the name of Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori, 1 of 1.25 million Black Africans captured and/or kidnapped and then transported to the “New World” between 1525 and 1866.

As my group mates and our tour guide burst into laughter about lion cubs growing too large, and not knowing what to feed them, I continued to read, often doubling back to make sure what I was reading was correct: a man captured, marched to the Atlantic, held in slave pins, transported miles and months across the Atlantic, to be sold for a few muskets and rum as a slave in the states, ending up in Mississippi. We moved to another room completely ignoring this set of frames on the same wall every other story got attention and acknowlegment for. Again, history and stories must be told, and who decides to tell them, is the great determiner of what gets told and what lives on as...history.

As a sidenote -> Sori was a highly educated aristocrat, meaning his story is more documented than many other enslaved Africans or those who chose the sea over bondage. Educated in Timbuktu, the speaker of 5 languages (including Arabic), and commander of a 2,000 person army, he found himself horrified at how primitive Mississippi was. He was enslaved there for 40 years.

Sori’s story is an insight not only into the brutalities of slavery, which undergirded the global economy for generations, but on the way some enslaved people managed to manipulate dire circumstances. Over decades of duplicative and dramatic storytelling, and due to the ignorance of white slave catchers, he was thought to be a Moor, from Morocco, because he was literate and Arabic speaking, and because of the nature of his writing. Sori’s fortunes changed one day while selling produce in the Natchez market, when he was reacquainted with an old friend, Dr. Coates Cox. Sori and his father had aided Dr. Cox during his travels in Africa. Dr. Cox tried to purchase Sori from Thomas Foster, but he refused the offer. Two decades later, Dr. Cox’s son, with the assistance of Andrew Marschalk, a local newspaper publisher, launched a campaign to liberate Sori.

Sori wrote a letter in Arabic to his family, and this letter was forwarded via United States Senator Thomas Reed to the U.S. Consulate in Morocco. The consul shared the letter with Sultan Abderrahmane II, who asked that U. S. President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay intervene for the release of Abdul Rahman in exchange for the freeing of several Americans illegally held in his country.

"His emancipation from slavery would be very agreeable to the Emporer of Morocco". - 17th day of January, in the year of our Lord 1829.

However, instead of returning to his original community of the Fulbe people, Abdul and his family were sent to Liberia. Unfortunately, shortly after his arrival, he died on July 6, 1829, at the age of sixty-seven.