Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori

Abdul Rahman Ibrahima Sori (1762 – 6 July 1829) was a Fula prince and military commander from Futa Jallon in Guinea who was captured in 1788, sold to slave traders, and spent forty years enslaved near Natchez, Mississippi. His enslaver Thomas Foster called him "Prince", the name by which he became known. Freed in 1828 after the Sultan of Morocco appealed to President John Quincy Adams on his behalf, he sailed for Liberia in 1829 to raise funds to free his children, and died there within months.¹²

He was the son of Ibrahima Sori, the Almami who consolidated the Islamic confederation of Futa Jallon in 1776 with Timbo as its capital. The English article, citing Allan Austin's biography, places his birth at Timbuktu in 1762 and says the family moved to Timbo when he was five; the Arabic and French articles and Wikidata place his birth at Timbo itself, and the disagreement is recorded in the data record. He studied in madrasas at Djenné and Timbuktu and spoke at least four African languages besides Arabic. In 1781 he joined his father's army and became a regimental commander — an Amir. In 1788, commanding 2,000 cavalry on a campaign against the Hebohs, he was ambushed, shot and captured, and sold onto the slave ship Africa.¹³²

Shipped via Dominica and New Orleans, he was sold at Natchez to the cotton planter Thomas Foster. He at first refused field labour, escaped after repeated whippings, hid for weeks, and then returned of his own accord. Over thirty-eight years he became the plantation's trusted overseer of cattle and cotton, permitted to sell his own vegetables at the market in Washington, Mississippi. On Christmas Day 1794 he married Isabella, a woman Foster also enslaved; they had nine children. In 1807, at that market, he met by chance Dr John Coates Cox, an Irish ship's surgeon who had once been sheltered for six months in his father's household at Timbo. Cox tried for the rest of his life to buy Sori's freedom, and his son renewed the attempt; Foster refused both, judging him indispensable.¹

In 1826, encouraged by the newspaperman Andrew Marschalk, Sori wrote in Arabic to his family in Africa. The letter travelled through Senator Thomas Reed to the American consulate in Morocco, whose consul laid it before the Sultan of Morocco; the Sultan asked President Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay to intervene, offering the release of Americans held in Morocco in exchange. In 1828 Foster agreed to free Sori without payment, on condition that he leave for Africa; Isabella was bought free for 200 dollars raised in Natchez. Before sailing, the couple toured northern cities for ten months, raising money to purchase their children and grandchildren. They raised about 4,000 of the 10,000 dollars needed, and sailed from Norfolk on 9 February 1829 aboard the Harriet, an American Colonization Society ship bound for Liberia. Four months after arriving at Monrovia, Sori died of fever on 6 July 1829, aged about 67, without seeing Futa Jallon or his children again. The funds he and Isabella had raised freed two of their sons and their families, who joined her in Monrovia the year after his death.¹³

The English, Arabic and French articles independently describe Sori as a Muslim — a Fulani Muslim prince formed by Islamic study — and the Urdu article calls him a Muslim ruler. The English article also records the texture of his American years: he attended Baptist services with his family, Isabella having joined the Baptist church, while objecting to the doctrine of the Trinity as contradicting the Islamic faith of his upbringing; he raised funds, the article says, through the pretense of having fully adopted Christianity; and as soon as Africa came in sight he returned to the full practice of Islam. No source consulted names a madhhab, branch or order for him personally, so his faith is recorded as unknown in the data record, with this itinerary preserved in full.¹⁴⁵

Terry Alford's 1977 biography Prince Among Slaves reconstructed his life from documents and contemporary testimony; Andrea Kalin's 2007 film of the same name, produced for PBS, carried the story further. His descendants live in Monrovia and in the United States, and held a family reunion in 2006.³¹

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.