英语翻译
AfricaTown is the site in Mobile,Alabama,along the Gulf Coast where the last cargo of Africans landed in 1860.Their landing marked the last recorded attempt to import Africans to the United States for the purpose of slavery.
The history of AfricaTown,USA,originated in Ghana,West Africa,near the present city of Tamale in 1859.The tribes of Africa were engaged in civil war,and the prevailing tribes sold the members of the conquered tribes into slavery.The village of the Tarkbar tribe near the city of Tamale was raided by Dahomey warriors,and the survivors of the raid were taken to Whydah,now the People's Republic of Benin,and put up for sale.The captured tribesmen were sold for $100 each at Whydah.They were taken to the United States on board the schooner Clotilde,under the command of Maine Capt.William Foster.Foster had been hired by Capt.Timothy Meaher,a wealthy Mobile shipper and shipyard owner,who had built the schooner Clotilde in Mobile in 1856.
in the 1850s,there was much talk of reopening the African slave trade,which had been outlawed since 1808.It was in this setting that Meaher and Foster planned the Trans-Atlantic voyage of the Clotilde for the purpose of bringing an illegal cargo of slaves back to Mobile.Captain Foster entered Mobile Harbor on the night of July 9,1860.He transferred his slave cargo to a riverboat and sent them up into the canebrake to hide them.He then burned his schooner and sunk it.The Africans were distributed to those having an interest in the Clotilde expedition,with 32 settling on the Meaher property at Magazine Point,three miles north of Mobile.This formed the nucleus of what came to be known,and still is known,as AfricaTown.
AfricaTown is unique in that it represents a group of Africans who were forcefully removed from their homeland,sold into slavery,and then formed their own,largely self-governing community,all the while maintaining a strong sense of African cultural heritage.This sense of heritage and sense of community continues to thrive today,more than 140 years after the landing of the Clotilde in Mobile Bay.