Ayuba Suleiman Diallo

Ayuba Suleiman Diallo was born about 1701 at Bundu, in present-day eastern Senegal, a state his grandfather Malik Sy had founded. His father Suleiman was Bundu's religious and political leader — Thomas Bluett's 1734 title calls him "the High Priest of Boonda" — and Ayuba was raised to the same world: he studied the Qur'an and Arabic alongside Sambo, a prince of Futa, married, and by the late 1720s had children by two wives. {cite:source/wikipedia-ayuba-suleiman-diallo-en} {cite:source/bluett-memoirs-job-1734}

In February 1730 his father sent him toward the Gambia River carrying two Mandé slaves to sell and paper to buy. Mandinka traders, in retaliation for slave raids, seized him and his interpreter Loumein Ndiaye, shaved their heads to pass them off as prisoners of war, and sold them to factors of the Royal African Company. He was put aboard Captain Pike's ship Arabella under Captain Henry Hunt, carried to Annapolis in Maryland, and there sold through the factor Vachell Denton to a Mr Tolsey of Kent Island, who renamed him Job ben Solomon. He worked first on a tobacco plantation and then herding cattle. {cite:source/wikipedia-ayuba-suleiman-diallo-en} {cite:source/bluett-memoirs-job-1734}

He prayed in the woods. In 1731, after a child humiliated him at his prayers, he ran away and was caught and held at the Kent County courthouse, where Thomas Bluett — a lawyer and an Anglican clergyman of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel — met him, watched him write lines of Arabic, and heard him pronounce the words Allah and Mahommed; Bluett records that he refused wine. {cite:source/bluett-memoirs-job-1734}

Job wrote a letter in Arabic to his father. Routed to London, it reached James Oglethorpe, a director of the Royal African Company, who had it authenticated by John Gagnier, Oxford's Laudian Professor of Arabic, and bought Job's freedom for £45. He arrived in London in late April 1733, and his supporters raised £59 6s 11½d to complete his formal manumission deed. {cite:source/wikipedia-ayuba-suleiman-diallo-en} {cite:source/bluett-memoirs-job-1734}

In London he worked for Sir Hans Sloane, translating and cataloguing Arabic manuscripts; William Hoare painted his portrait in 1733, with a small Qur'an at his neck and the prayer mark on his forehead — the painting, bought by Qatar Museums Authority in 2009, hangs on loan at the National Portrait Gallery. He copied the Qur'an three times from memory. Given an Arabic New Testament, he accepted Jesus as a prophet but argued against the Trinity. He was inducted into the Spalding Gentlemen's Society. {cite:source/wikipedia-ayuba-suleiman-diallo-en}

He sailed home in July 1734 and reached Bundu to find his father dead, one of his wives remarried, and his country at war; in 1736 the French held him for perhaps a year. He pressed for the release of his interpreter Loumein, who was freed and came home in 1738. The narrative Bluett compiled from his telling in 1734 — among the earliest printed slave narratives — together with Francis Moore's Travels of 1738, carries his story; the Spalding Gentlemen's Society's minutes record his death in 1773. {cite:source/wikipedia-ayuba-suleiman-diallo-en} {cite:source/bluett-memoirs-job-1734}

The encyclopedia's infobox calls him Sunni and Maliki, but on a single citation to an advocacy website; the primary texts attest his learning and his practice in detail and name no school for him, and the museum's record preserves the reading without settling it. {cite:source/wikipedia-ayuba-suleiman-diallo-en}