Location: Georgia
Lamine Kebe (Lamine Kaba) born about was a Koranic teacher in Futa Jallon (Guinea). he described his aunt as “much more learned than himself, and eminent for her superior acquirements and for her skills in teaching” (Diouf, 7). Married with three children he was captured going to buy paper for his school. He spent the next thirty years enslaved in the South. Commenting on ____ he wrote, “There are good men in America, but all are very ignorant of Africa” (Diouf 144). He gained his freedom by 1834 and returned to Africa then disappears from the historical record.
Born in the late eighteenth century to a prominent family in what is now considered Mali. Kebe was a teacher in Africa and had a family of his own, but was captured while traveling to buy paper and subsequently sold into slavery. Little is known of the time he spent as a slave in the United States during the early part of the nineteenth century, but by 1834 he had been freed and had made his way to New York City. There, he associated himself with the American Colonization Society, a controversial group whose mission it was to send emancipated blacks back to Africa, far from their still-enslaved relatives. Though a devout Muslim, Kebe claimed that he desired to become a Christian missionary in Africa and was able to garner the support necessary to give him passage back to Africa, specifically Liberia.
Diouf, Sylviane. Servants of Allah, Africa Muslims Enslaved in the Americas. New York University Press, 1998.
Parramore, Thomas C. “Muslim Slave Aristocrats in North Carolina. The North Carolina Historical Review, April 2000, Vol 77. No. 2. Accessed 10/13/2020.