X-Nico

The Book of Negroes

Aminata Diallo, the daughter of a jeweller and a midwife, is kidnapped at the age of 11 from her village Bayo, near Segu in West Africa and forced to walk for days to the sea in a coffle with hundreds of strangers and a handful of people from her village.

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"I used The Book of Negroes as the title for my novel, in Canada, because it derives from a historical document of the same name kept by British naval officers at the tail end of the American Revolutionary War.

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After several horrific months of voyage across the Atlantic Ocean she arrives in South Carolina where she begins a new life as a slave and her name is anglicized to Meena Dee.

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Its French translation, titled Aminata, was defended by Thomas Hellman in the 2013 edition of Le Combat des livres, and won that competition as well, becoming the only title to date to have won both the English and French editions of the competition.

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Proving that she served the British in the American Revolutionary War her name is entered in the historic "Book of Negroes" an actual historical document that is an archive of freed African American slaves who requested permission to leave the United States in order to resettle in Nova Scotia.

Book of Negroes

The Canadian author Lawrence Hill wrote the novel The Book of Negroes (2007, published in the United States as Someone Knows My Name).

see also

Book of Negroes

Notable people recorded in the Book of Negroes include Boston King, Henry Washington, Moses Wilkinson and Cato Perkins.