Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division

Gentleman’s Magazine, 1750

Born about 1701 in Bundu, Senegal, to a family of Muslim clerics, Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was kidnapped in 1731. His father tried to ransom him, but the boat had already left when his emissaries reached the coast. Diallo was shipped to a tobacco plantation in Maryland, where he was called Job ben Solomon (the English translation of his Arabic given name) A letter to his father, which was written in Arabic and in which he asked to be ransomed, found its way to London, where philanthropists bought his freedom. Diallo went back to Senegal in 1734.