In 1860 the town of Takon, forty miles from Benin, West Africa, was destroyed in a few hours. Its people were sleeping when King Gelele of Dahomey arrived with his army, including women warriors skilled at cutting off heads, armed with long knives and French guns. They surrounded all eight gates of Takon. The elderly, women and children trying to escape were caught, their jaw bones torn off, and decapitated. One of the survivors was Kossola, aged 19, who the day before had been contemplating marriage to a girl with gold bangles he’d seen in the local market.
He was tied into a line and marched first to Gelele’s palace, built out of dry human skulls: even the legs of his throne stood in them. From there on to the Barracoon, a Portuguese word for a barracks, a desolate holding pen from where Kossola and his fellow captives gazed out on to an ocean they’d never seen before.
At the Barracoon they saw white men for the first time and were selected in pairs, one man and one woman, until there were sixty- five couples. Taken to the port they saw Captain William Foster, who’d bought them on behalf of US businessman Timothy Meaher, saying goodbye to King Gelele.
Gelele (bigness), ma nyonzi (‘no way of lifting’ or too fat to carry, a compliment in his Yoruba culture) concentrated all his resources on providing slaves for the foreign market, sold for sixty dollars apiece. He kept a standing army of 12,000 warriors and the Dahoman year was divided into wars, when enemy settlements would be wiped out and slaves captured, and festivals, where slaves would be sacrificed or given to allies.
This is from Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston's interviews with Kossola in the 1920s, one of the last slaves smuggled to the US (importing slaves was illegal as of 1808 in the US)
After five years in slavery, Cudjo was emancipated by the Union army and faced the challenge of freedom on the bottom rung of American society. Hurston finds him haunted by the Dahomey raid.
‘His face was twitching in abysmal pain. It was a horror mask. He was thinking aloud and gazing into the dead faces in the smoke.’
Despite that, he made a good life for himself, his beloved wife Seely and six children. Along with other survivors
This is from Barracoon, Zora Neale Hurston's interviews with Kossola in the 1920s, one of the last slaves smuggled to the US (importing slaves was illegal as of 1808 in the US)
https://conservativewoman.co.uk/black-trailblazer-who-was-no-slave-to-victimhood/