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(My thanks to Dr. Kathleen Wu for bringing the story to my attention.)
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| As he guides the Senegalese delegation through Kingsley Plantation, historian Dr. Daniel Schafer points to Emanuel Kingsley in an informative panel depicting descendants of Zephaniah Kingsley. The other descendants pictured are, clockwise from top left: Osceola Kingsley, son of ZK; MaVine Betsch; Emanuel Kingsley and Perry Francis; unknown person; and Maria Perez Kingsley, my great grandmother and ZK's great granddaughter. (Picture taken from Jacksonville Times Union website: http://jacksonville.com/news/metro/2017-12-06/visitors-anna-kingsley-s-african-homeland-tour-kingsley-plantation-it-s-just ) |
Medoune Ndiaye stood up in a room at Kingsley Plantation and, in his native Wolof language, began reciting, from memory, the names of the rulers of the Kingdom of Jolof. He went on for many minutes: scores of names, covering hundreds of years, beginning in the 1400s.
On that long list was Mba Buri Niabu Ndiaye, one of his ancestors, and the father of the woman who became known as Anna Kingsley.
When he was done, he sat down and dabbed at his eyes with a tissue.
Ndiaye came to Kingsley Plantation on Tuesday to see where Kingsley remade her life after slavers stole her from her home in 1806. Born into the royal family as Anta Madjiguéne Ndiaye, she is also a distant relative of his.
He was part of a 12-person delegation from Senegal that is traveling in her footsteps across Northeast Florida.
Their aim: To take her story back to Senegal, perhaps one day as a film, so people there will learn of the remarkable life of the kidnapped princess.
She is little known in Senegal, they said. Indeed, after she was taken, more than 200 years ago, who could have known what happened to her?
“We had no clue until Schafer came here with his book and that’s how we discovered she was not dead, killed by a lion or a hyena,” said Lamine Sambe, a university professor and adviser to Macky Sall, president of Senegal. “Nobody knew.”
Schafer is Dan Schafer, a University of North Florida historian and author of the 2003 biography “Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner.”
Schafer said Anna Kingsley was a Jolof princess with royal ancestry on both her father’s and mother’s sides. Kidnapped by slavers from a coastal African tribe, she was sold at the port of Rufisque and sold again at Goree Island, an infamous slave-trading post just off the Senegalese coast.
Bound for Cuba, she was sold again to slave trader and Florida planter Zephaniah Kingsley.
By the time she reached Northeast Florida, she was pregnant by the much-older Kingsley. She was 13.
At 18, now known as Anna Madigine Jai Kingsley, she was emancipated and acknowledged as Kingsley’s wife. She lived in Northeast Florida for 53 years, including nearly a quarter-century at Kingsley Plantation. She managed several plantations along the St. Johns River and owned slaves of her own.
She also spent some years at properties in Haiti, where her descendants have many stories about her.
“As she’s described by her descendants there, she would walk to her beach property, always in African clothes, with much gold, with servants,” Schafer said. “This is a woman with a real command and dignity about her.”
That is to be expected, Ndiaye, her relative, said through translator Alioune Cisse.
“She was only 13 when she was abducted. But she grew up in a kingly family,” he said. “She was accustomed to authority, so that determined her behavior, her conduct.”
Dauoda Niang, mayor of Rufisque, the port where Kingsley was sold, said a street there will be named after her this month.
People there need to know her story, he said.
“We didn’t know that the strong social values embedded in our women were transported in her, in the person of Anta Madjiguéne,” he said. “So it’s an extraordinary discovery.”
Still, he can’t help but imagine her as a young girl, enslaved and far from home.
“It’s just so sad,” Niang said, “that she was so alone.”
National park rangers showed the Senegalese delegation around Kingsley Plantation, which is part of the Timucuan Ecological and Historical Preserve. They went from the main plantation house to the barn to the half-circle of ruined tabby slave quarters — tiny buildings where families lived out their lives.
One display shows stocks that were found in the basement at Kingsley, in which slaves judged to have misbehaved would have been confined.
The Senegalese looked at them gravely and nodded: There are stocks much like that, they said, on Goree Island, where so many slaves were sold.
Their final stop: what’s known as the “Witness Tree,” an ancient live oak that stands near the graves of six slaves dating to the early 1800s, two of them children not yet 5.
“I can’t explain what I’m feeling now,” said Sambe, the adviser to the president. “I was prepared to see things like this, but I never think that it was so cruel. I can’t explain what I’m feeling deeply in my heart.”
Part of his mission is to prepare a report for Sall, in preparation for a possible presidential visit to the plantation next year. It’s important, he said, for the people of Senegal to know of the strength of Anna Kingsley.
“We are not slaves of slavery,” Sambe said. “That’s why we came here to talk to you and show you that we are brothers. People are now in the same village.”
On Wednesday, the group will tour Jacksonville University, where one of Anna Kingsley’s plantations once stood. After that, they will travel to see where she is buried in the nearby Arlington neighborhood of Clifton.
She died in 1870, at 77. Her grave is unmarked.
(c) Times-Union. Story by Matt Soergel: (904) 359-4082
