1THE LION OF LIONS
Enslavement was something that happened to other people. It was a punishment for convicted criminals and a fate of war captives. It wasn’t a normal condition for people born in Kossola’s town, especially not those from affluent families, families connected to the king.
Kossola’s grandfather sometimes spoke about the “Portugee,” the pale-skinned men who did business on the coast, far away, and were said to traffic in human beings. Once the child of an enslaved person was making too much noise while his grandfather was trying to sleep, so a guard brought him to the old man. “Where is dat Portugee man?” Kossola recalled him saying. He threatened to sell the boy for tobacco. “In de olden days, I walk on yo’ skin!” he said, meaning he would have made shoes from the little boy’s hide. He said he would have drunk water from the boy’s skull.
There were some West Africans who regarded Europeans as mythical creatures. Mahommah Baquaqua, who was born in the same general area a decade or two before Kossola, reported that people in his hometown imagined white men living in the ocean and cooking their food by the sun, which (they believed) sank deep into the water every night. More common was the rumor that white men were cannibals, and that when they bought captives from the traders on the coast, it was to eat them. By all accounts, most West African adults knew better. They had been trading with Europeans for centuries by this point, albeit with middlemen, and European goods, such as umbrellas and carpets, had become common in many of the region’s markets. But parents often let the rumors flourish among their children, in hopes of deterring them from wandering too far without supervision. Kidnappings by slave hunters were not, after all, unheard of.
At roughly age seventeen, Kossola was too old to be spooked by children’s stories and too young to have kids of his own. He was preoccupied with girls. His favorite pastime was visiting the market and seeing the beautiful young women walk by, with their arms covered from hand to elbow in gold bracelets. “Oh, dey look very fine to Cudjo,” he recalled some seventy years later, using a name he’d taken on later in life. Even as an elderly man, he could remember the sound of their bracelets clinking as they slung their arms.
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The limited information that survives about Kossola’s early biography comes from interviews he gave as an old man, when he was a widower living in the United States. He related anecdotes that show the texture of his day-to-day life in West Africa and the kind of future he anticipated. One of these stories occurred in this market. The setting is easy enough to picture. It would have been in the center of town, facing the house where the king lived with his many wives and servants. Palm trees probably surrounded the square, giving shade to the vendors who sat or stood along the periphery; and there would have been rows of earthen pots, of all shapes and sizes, filled with yam flour, corn flour, bananas, beans, plums, palm wine, and kola nuts. If the town was rural, the market would have been at its busiest in the afternoons, when women streamed in from the narrow, crooked streets, some carrying children. They wore flowing robes, or wide cloths wrapped around their torsos, with their hair done up in elaborate designs. The volume in the market would escalate as they haggled, shouting to be heard over the din and the vendors.
On this day a young woman brushed past Kossola. He didn’t recognize her, but he was arrested by her beauty. Perhaps the noises of the market—the rumble of the wagons, the clattering of cowries in the vendors’ hands—seemed to go silent for a moment. Perhaps the background behind her blurred. Kossola didn’t say anything to the woman; in his culture, it would have been unthinkable. But he couldn’t help but trail her for a few moments, hoping to catch another glimpse. Soon she was gone.
This episode might have been forgettable, except that an elderly man, who wielded some influence in the town, witnessed the whole scene. Later he approached the teenager’s father. Kossola was reaching adulthood, the elderly man said, and it was time for his initiation ceremony. His father ought to fetch some goats or a cow so they could put on a banquet. Kossola’s father agreed.
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There is some mystery as to where Kossola grew up. On two occasions, when he was elderly, he drew maps of his home for interviewers, but the markings are too vague to yield answers. The historian Sylviane Diouf, in her 2007 book Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America, has found ample evidence that he came from Bantè, now a city of around 100,000 people in western Benin, between Togo and Nigeria. Diouf took into account the dialect Kossola and others from his hometown spoke, as well as the information he gave about the geography, economy, architecture, defense systems, and culture. However, Kossola said in 1906 that he came from a place the interviewer wrote down as “Whinney,” and this has led another historian, Natalie Robertson, to conclude that he came from Owinni, a town two hundred miles east of Bantè in what is now Nigeria. When Robertson visited in 2004, a local scholar told her the name Kossola sounded like the regional surname Esuola, which has long since fallen out of use.
Either way, it’s clear that he hailed from the broader area called Yorubaland, a network of autonomous kingdoms that spanned fifty-five thousand square miles in present-day Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. The people were united by a common language, a common pantheon of gods and spirits, and a common currency of cowries, which facilitated a massive volume of trade.
Kossola was the second of six children born to his mother, Fondlolu; and she was the second of his father Oluale’s three wives. Kossola had twelve more siblings in his extended family. Together they lived in a compound, with his father’s dwelling in the center and the other quarters forming a circle around it, each wife occupying a section with her own children. It was likely a modest place: mud walls, low ceilings of mud, and a roof thatched with long blades of grass. Furniture would have been minimal; Yoruba families typically slept on mats and ate their meals sitting on the floor. Kossola remembered later how he and the other kids kept one another entertained: they wrestled, had footraces, climbed palm trees to fetch coconuts, and scoured the woods for bananas and pineapples.
As a rule, people in the town were not overly possessive about land. A Yoruba mantra said “all land belongs to the king,” but this was another way of saying it belonged to everyone; the king held it only in trust. Plots that weren’t being actively used were treated as communal property. Besides the tropical fruit that grew freely, the townspeople also raised sheep and hogs and planted corn, beans, and yams.
The town’s main industry was producing palm oil, a labor-intensive process that typically fell on the shoulders of women. The palm nuts—orange-colored balls about the size of walnuts, each one full of oil—had to be soaked, stomped on, and boiled until the oil could be skimmed off. The oil was sent to port cities, where Europeans bought it by the shipload. Across the ocean, it was used for making soap and candles and railway grease. Yoruba towns also had many skilled workers, including blacksmiths, coppersmiths, herbalists, and diviners, all of whom learned their trades as apprentices. The greatest prestige belonged to musicians and visual artists. A renowned sculptor could spend a lifetime traveling from city to city, under the patronage of kings, carving elaborate decorations for palaces and shrines.
Copyright © 2023 by Nick Tabor