Top of the Morning column published in The Natchez
Democrat (Wednesday, April 1, 2026, page 4A)
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Top of the Morning
Prince Ibrahima marker dedicated April 8
By David Dreyer
Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago, Abdul Rahman aka
Prince Ibrahima was captured in an ambush in the fog of war. He was 26 years
old, educated in Timbuctoo and already a military hero in his father’s Kingdom
of Futa Jallon, an independent nation in the mountains of today’s Republic of
Guinea in West Africa.
He was sold into slavery, brought to Natchez in the
bowels of a slave ship, and sold under-the-hill to a man his own age who took
him to his plantation north of town at Foster’s Fields on Pine Ridge. He was
held here during the terms of our first six presidents of the United States,
although initially Natchez was then under the rule of Spain.
Forty years later, at the age of 66, he was allowed to
travel north to Washington, D.C. on his return to Africa with his American-born
wife Isabella, but they had to leave their children behind in hopes he could
raise enough money to free them as well.
After a year raising money, he felt compelled to leave
and shortly thereafter died in what became the new nation of Liberia. Two of
his sons, including the family of one of them, also reached Liberia the
following year and intermarried with local people.
Meanwhile his other children were divided among the
slaveholder’s wife, children and sons-in-law in the Natchez District and
southern Louisiana, not to experience freedom for another 35 years.
Generations later in 1977, a young historian, Terry
Alford of Indianola, Mississippi, published a book about his life called
“Prince Among Slaves.” A generation after that, Artemus Gaye, a refugee from
the Liberian Civil War, discovered that book and his own descent from Prince
Ibrahima.
In 2003, Gaye held an Ibrahima Fest at the Natchez
Community Center, bringing together scholars, descendants and most importantly,
an American Muslim filmmaker, Alex Kronemer, who would tell Ibrahima’s story on
film for the American Experience series on PBS. That would renew stories by
other descendants of their descent from an African Prince.
On Wednesday, April 8, at 11:30 a.m., a marker will be dedicated
near the dock under-the-hill to commemorate his life as an identifiable African
who was brought here enslaved and whose family now has a 300-year-old history
which connects them directly to a place and family in Africa. Few descendants
of enslaved African Americans are able to do that because of the anonymity
imposed by slavery.
This marker to an enslaved African represents all of
them, many who remain nameless, for what they did to create and develop this
city, state, and nation. It will greet the many visitors to Natchez who arrive
and depart in comfort on riverboats to see what the labor of thousands of Africans
and their descendants have created here in the Natchez District and neighboring
Louisiana.
