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Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today

Amazon.com Price:  $16.54 (as of 06/05/2019 17:07 PST- Details)

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When wealthy Mississippi cotton planter Isaac Ross died in 1836, his will decreed that his plantation, Prospect Hill, must be liquidated and the proceeds from the sale be used to pay for his slaves’ passage to the newly established colony of Liberia in western Africa. Ross’s heirs contested the will for more than a decade, prompting a deadly revolt in which a group of slaves burned Ross’s mansion to the ground. But the will was ultimately upheld. The slaves then emigrated to their new home, where they battled the local tribes and built vast plantations with Greek Revival-style mansions in a region the Americo-Africans renamed “Mississippi in Africa.” In the late twentieth century, the seeds of resentment sown over a century of cultural conflict between the colonists and tribal people exploded, begetting a civil war that rages in Liberia to this day. Tracking down Prospect Hill’s living descendants, deciphering a history ruled by rumor, and delivering the complete chronicle in riveting prose, journalist Alan Huffman has rescued a lost chapter of American history whose aftermath is far from over.

For most Americans, Liberia is a remote place in a distant continent with no connection to their daily lives. Few of us know that in the early 19th century, it was, if truth be told, an American colony, and to this day, contains communities called Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky, and Maryland founded by freed American slaves and populated by descendants of those slaves. Writer Alan Huffman tells this story in his remarkable Mississippi in Africa: The Saga of the Slaves of Prospect Hill Plantation and Their Legacy in Liberia Today. The book begins as the Writer’s attempt to flush out the details of a fascinating Mississippi family story about a prominent plantation owner’s (Isaac Ross) desire to repatriate his slaves in Africa, but ends up being a complex and sensitive exploration of the legacy of slavery in the American South and Liberia. As Huffman traces Ross’ descendants and those of his family’s repatriated slaves, an intricate story of displacement, cultural identity, immigration, oppression, and racial politics unfolds. Satirically, when The us’s freed slaves immigrated to Africa, they brought with them the only social paradigm they knew, that of the Southern plantation. Overcoming severe hardship, they recreated that culture, and by the time Liberia became Africa’s first independent republic in 1847, the minority American settlers had develop into the country’s ruling class. Huffman adeptly shows how this legacy contributes to the current crisis in Liberia.

Mississippi in Africa is at once historical and contemporary, personal and universal, local and global. As Huffman indicates, slavery “has existed all over Africa’s recorded history, and still has not entirely passed from the scene.” Its pernicious consequences continue to have an effect on the lives of millions caught in the devastating and endless civil war in Liberia, just as they continue to have an effect on American life. Yet, Huffman repeatedly shows that this ordinary story cannot be simply reduced to a polemical rendering of white oppression of blacks. It is so much more about the powerful versus the powerless. Thus, Huffman presents the subtleties that have shaped both the politics and human relations in this story with profound humanity and nuance. —Silvana Tropea

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