In this Article we will talk about the man “Congo Ben”.
Who is Congo Ben?
Congo Ben is an extremely obscure figure in history, with nothing but a brief mention of him in 1909 in a newspaper article called Voodooism in the South.
He sounded like an interesting character, so I decided honor him as an ancestor from the Congo using what information we can glean from the one paragraph written about him in history. As it turns out, there is so much to learn from him, his life, and history.
In Voodooism in the South, written in 1909, Congo Ben was described thusly: “Congo Ben, who only recently died on Bayou Teche, was one of the Africans imported on the Wanderer.
He had all the marks of a Congo warrior on his left cheek, the scars made by deep knife cuts parallel with each other about two and a half inches long. Ben was the possessor of much mysterious knowledge.
READ ALSO: Sanusi Adebisi Idikan – The Yoruba Man Who Paid Tax For the Whole of Ibadan
He could make Voudou fetiches, charm snakes, and do many other things. Besides this he was an excellent gardener, and was always docile, industrious, and faithful.
He was very often affected with “misery” in his back and the only remedy which could be applied successfully was liberal doses of whiskey taken internally.
This always brought him “around all right.” Congo Ben was also a famous hand at curing snake bites, but he would never disclose what he used in the remedies he applied.”
From the 1909 newspaper article, we learn Congo Ben arrived in the United States on November 28, 1858, at Jekyll Island, Georgia on the Wanderer, a notorious slave ship engaged in illegal human trafficking of Africans from the Congo.
Its crew smuggled ashore an estimated 409 enslaved people – most of them teenaged boys. The 19th-century ship was built as an “opulent pleasure yacht with a sinister underside: a hidden deck where hundreds of enslaved Africans were held captive and illegally trafficked into the United States.”
The Wanderer was the last ship to illegally transport enslaved people from Africa to Georgia and one of the final vessels involved in the smuggling of enslaved individuals onto American soil.
Congo Ben fell victim to this criminal conspiracy for human trafficking, and his story is the story of all 409 kidnapped Africans taken from the African Congo to Jekyll Island, Georgia in 1858.
Congo Ben died on Bayou Teche sometime around 1909.
