Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua was born in the 1820s in Djougou, a town on the caravan route across West Africa from the Sokoto Caliphate in what is now northern Nigeria to Asante in what is now Ghana.

He was brought up in a Muslim household, his mother being Hausa from Katsina, and his father being Dendi from Borgu. He was enslaved and sold south to the kingdom of Dahomey and Ouidah, the most important slave port in West Africa. He was then taken to Pernambuco in Brazil in 1845, ultimately being sold to a merchant in Rio de Janeiro who traded along the Brazilian coast as far south as Rio Grande do Sul.

He escaped from slavery when his master took a ship load of coffee to New York City in 1847 and made his way first to Haiti before traveling to upstate New York under the patronage of the Free Will Baptists, where he attended Central College and became involved in the abolition movement in the United States and Canada, publishing his autobiography in 1854 and traveling to Liverpool with the intention of returning to Africa. The website contains an extensive amount of primary materials relating to Baquaqua’s interesting odyssey.