EBENEZERWorld
Cassandra Lewis’ Benin citizenship reflects a broader push by African nations to reconnect with diaspora descendants
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Culture — Adria R Walker
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’.
Cassandra Lewis, who’s 61, never met her great-great-grandfather in person, but she knew him through stories told to her by her father, Johnny Lewis, who lived with Cudjo for 15 years. Lewis said that Johnny would embody Cudjo in dialect and mannerism, making her feel kinship to a man she never met. She said she felt like both of her elders, her father and her great-great-grandfather, returned to Benin with Lewis when she went, earlier this year, to become a citizen.
“I’m trying to do everything in honor of my ancestors,” Lewis told the Guardian. “When we went over there, we brought our ancestors there. This right here, this citizenship, did it. It took a whole nother change in me. I said, ‘Daddy, I am so happy.’ And it’s like he’s saying, ‘I’m proud of you, daughter.’”
Getting citizenship was “a spiritual thing”, Lewis said. “For me to do all this, I had to have God with me,” she said. “I have been talking to God all this time. [Cudjo] wanted to go home and they didn’t let him go home. They weren’t even giving him money. It was illegal. They were supposed to send all of them home … I felt like I had to bring his bloodline back to Africa.”
Benin is just one of several African nations , including Ghana, Sierra Leone and Guinea-Bissau, that are encouraging people from the African diaspora to establish citizenship. Launched on the Fourth of July last year, the “ My Afro Origins” programme highlights Benin’s role in the African slave trade while welcoming back diasporic Africans who can prove descent from the country.
On the application, Lewis listed her ancestry all the way back to Cudjo, who, for generations, was the last of the Lewis line to see their family’s ancestral home. She could have applied using only a DNA test, but it was important to Lewis that her family be recorded by name. In doing so, she ensured that subsequent family members, including her daughter, brothers and sisters, can follow her lead and easily gain citizenship. It also made sure that family members who passed before citizenship was a possibility were able to be posthumously honored.
“I already knew my lineage. I was born in my family; Cudjo’s grandson was my granddaddy. His granddaughter was my great-aunt. I knew all the people,” Lewis told the Guardian, uplifting her ancestors by name. “I knew all of those people because I grew up with my father, who was the only one that carried Cudjo Lewis’ last name.”
Lewis traveled to Benin in May of this year, where she received her new passport, visa and citizenship. A ceremony made everything official. She brought a large cutout of Cudjo with her, and asked whether it could be placed behind her during the proceedings. Instead, the government insisted it be held prominently. “I was like, ‘Granddad, I got it.’ When I was sitting there nervous, I looked up at him and, like the Lord said, I calmed down. ‘You got your granddaddy with you, and everything will be alright,’” she said. “The minister said, ‘You got your granddaddy with you. We’re so happy you’re here. He got it done.’”
The legacy of the Clotilda survivors is preserved in their descendants, who host the Landing Event and Ancestors Festival (Leaf), in Africatown each year. The festival is sponsored by the Clotilda Descendants Association, which aims to keep the story of the Clotilda alive. This year, when Lewis attended the festival, she did so as a dual citizen of Benin.
Lewis’s cousin and president of the Clotilda Descendants Association, Altevese Rosario, said that Lewis’ new citizenship has a significant importance both for their family and for the larger community of descendants.
“Cassandra has paved the way for our remaining family members to regain our connection, to regain our citizenship that was stolen from us,” she said. “For the broader Clotilda descendants community and African American communities across this nation, it signals a pathway to the citizenship that was stolen from us. That signals to African Americans as a whole that the continent wants to rejoin with us, in community and family.”
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.
This report is published with credit to theguardian.com. Full available text from the wire is above. Read on theguardian.com →
Source: theguardian.com · Adria R Walker. Published 27 Aug 2026, 11:00 am.
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