Omar wrote that he was 37 years old when “infidels” attacked his village. They slaughtered many people and dragged him away to a slave ship that hauled him across the Atlantic Ocean. The ship landed in Charleston, the nation’s busiest slave port.
During the 56 years of captivity that followed, Omar wrote at least 15 surviving texts in Arabic, although nobody around him could read them. They include letters, Muslim and Christian verses, and the only known surviving autobiography written in Arabic by someone still enslaved in America.
Given that perhaps one in five African captives brought to the U.S. was Muslim, the rarity of such texts speaks to a great loss of faith and learning.
Upward of one in five enslaved Africans arrived in America as a Muslim. But that story has gone little told.
Even today, despite its historical significance, relatively few Americans have read Omar’s autobiography. The Library of Congress bought it in 2017, digitized its pages and shared it with the world.
Omar’s story sprang from obscurity.
Spoleto Festival USA, an international arts event held each year in Charleston, then commissioned Grammy Award-winning music star Rhiannon Giddens to write an opera about his life. With a nearly all-Black cast, it will premiere at the 2022 festival amid the country’s reckoning with race and the vestiges of slavery. Several scholarly books about Omar also are in the works. And Charleston artist Jonathan Green created a coloring book about him.
They all seek to answer the most basic question: Who was Omar, really? For two centuries, his story has morphed based on who was telling it. And why.
That question drove the group of guests sitting with Sy, in his village called Dimat Walo, to embark on this quest. If few Americans have read Omar’s words, even fewer Senegalese have — and fewer here in Futa Toro.
Seated around the imam are the two journalists from South Carolina, a professor of linguistics from the Senegalese capital, his French graduate assistant, two Senegalese drivers, and an Arabic teacher who hails from Futa and descends from one of its great intellectuals.
Given Omar was enslaved when he wrote, he wasn’t free to reveal his deepest self, his true faith or wishes. This team embarked on a quest to better understand him — and to bring his writings home.
But where exactly that home was remains a great part of Omar’s mystery.
He mostly wrote religious passages, not personal details, although twice he wrote what looks like a specific place name. Knowing where the place is could reveal much about him: his home, his family, his people, where he was captured and from which Senegalese port a slave ship took him.