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

default 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 after the transatlantic slave trade was outlawed. He was one of the last survivors of the Middle Passage when he died on 17 July 1935, and one of the 110 survivors of the Clotilda, considered to be the last slave ship to illegally traffic Africans to the United States. Conspirators burned and sunk the Clotilda – a hull from the ship was not recovered until 2019 – and refused to facilitate the survivors’ return to Africa, even after the civil war. Though Cudjo never saw this homeland again, his descendants have. Earlier this year, roughly 165 years after Cudjo left Africa, his great-great-granddaughter, Cassandra Lewis, returned to receive citizenship from Benin. In doing so, Lewis became the first descendant of the 110 Clotilda survivors to become legally recognized as a citizen of Benin. Lewis’ citizenship acquisition is part of a recent push by several African nations to connect with members of the African diaspora whose ancestors were trafficked and enslaved. *** While still strangers in a strange land, Cudjo and other Clotilda survivors in Alabama retained their traditions and practices. After the civil war, they formed Africatown, a safe haven in which they could maintain their way of life, six miles north of Mobile. Preserving their culture was one of the ways Lewis and others ensured their descendants would understand their legacy. They told their American-born descendants stories of home, making real a place that they knew their children would likely never see. Lewis’s story was immortalized in Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo’. Cass…