However oppressive the Africans’ circumstances were, they emerge in Diouf’s essay, not as victims, but rather as unsung common folk of extraordinary resilience who man-aged not only to survive, but to re-tain a relative economic autonomy and to instill ethic standards of pride, reserve and rectitude in their surroundings. The author excels at reconstituting their collective philo-sophy and dreams, sharp indivi-dualities, and personal triumphs and tragedies. She reports for in-stance, the shipmates’ rule of mutual protection from physical abuse on the plantation; and Cudjo’s audacious attempt, as the group’s spokesperson, to obtain from Meaher, their ex-owner, re-paration for their deportation and enslavement under the form of a land grant. She describes their con-version to Christianity, an undoubt-edly complex process through which they, as Muslims like Zuma, as servants of the orisas like Kupollee aka Pollee, or as prac-titioners of local worships as the majority of the group abandoned their former religious systems of thought; and also the letter of can-didacy as missionaries to Liberia that was written on their behalf in 1873 by preacher A. D. Phillips to the American Colonization Society. Their triumphs are well illustrated by the flourishing of their com-munity, in spite of all odds: at the end of the first decade of the 20th century, “African Town was wel-coming a fourth generation into the world and its founders were reach-ing the ends of their lives,” Diouf stresses. Cudjo himself, after los-ing his wife and six children over the course of fifteen years, still had four grand-children and four great-grandchildren, and passed away in 1935 at 94.
     Similarly to her previous historical essay, Servants of Allah: African Muslims Enslaved in the Americas (NYU Press, 1998), Diouf’s Dreams of Africa in Alabama is a major contribution to pan-African and Black trans-Atlan-tic studies, with its emphasis on the historical and cultural cross-currents in which the story of the Clotilda’s shipmates is steeped. Accordingly, the “West African origins” of the shipmates are the object of a thorough examination. Evidence regarding the ethno-linguistic, religious and social background of the shipmates en-ables Diouf to establish that the majority of those hundred and ten deportees were Yoruba-speakers, that is, hailing from a region located in today’s nation of Benin, which did not traditionally supply the United States with slaves. 
   Moreover, Diouf, impervious to trendy theories that privilege exile over home, routes over roots, shows that the deportees, regard-less of their various accomplish-ments, never “recovered from the shock of their capture, their separation from their families, and the Middle Passage”.   
     Dreams of Africa in Alabama reads as a novel, yet it is the product of rigorous research (performed both in the United States and in Benin) as attested to by the prominent place allotted to archival material in the bibliography. As we are celebrating the bicen-tennial of the official abolition of slave trade by Great Britain and the United States, Dreams of Africa in Alabama offers an invaluable window into the experience of no less than twelve million African deportees onto the Americas.