Descendant of Last Known U.S. Slave Ship Survivor Gains Benin Citizenship

Trafficked on the last US slave ship, Cudjo Lewis never returned home to Benin. But his descendant has

Cassandra Lewis’s Benin citizenship reflects a broader push by African countries to reconnect with diaspora descendants Cudjo Lewis, originally named Oluale Kossola, never forgot home – and he ensured that his descendants would remember a place that they might never see with their own eyes. Captured from the Bantè region of Benin, west Africa, Lewis was trafficked across the Atlantic Ocean and enslaved in rural Alabama in 1860, just one year before the onset of the US civil war and 52 years a...

By Adria R Walker