Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua; biography; memory; memory places; abolitionist memory.
From Greco-Roman societies to modernity, Western biographies described subjects belonging to the highest social prestige classes, whether they were inserted in the political, economic or religious field. However, from the 18th century onwards, the first autobiographical records of ex-enslaved black subjects in the Atlantic World appeared. The research studies the Biography of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua: a native of Zoogoo, in the interior of Africa, published by Editora Uirapuru, in 2017. Originally published in the United States in 1854, the book narrates the memories of an African, native of the city of Djougou, current region of the Republic of Benin, captured and enslaved on the African continent in 1840, Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua lived as a slave in Pernambuco and in Rio de Janeiro, notably achieving his freedom in the United States, in New York City. The dissertation has as general objective the analysis of memories and memory places of the biographical narrative of Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua for the reconstruction of the individual, collective and editorial memories of the American abolitionist movement of the 19th century. The methodology is based on bibliographical, documentary, descriptive and qualitative research. The concepts of Information Organization (IO) were used to decompose and describe the informational content, the techniques of document analysis guided the reconstruction of memories. The theoretical foundation was built from studies by Lovejoy (2002), Law and Lovejoy (2001), Davis and Gates (1985), Sekora (1987), Halbwachs (2006), Nora (1993), Reis and Silva (1989) and Azevedo (2003). The final considerations point out the contributions of the study to the Memory of Victims of Transaltantic Trade Slavery and to the International Decade of People of African Descent (2015-2024) coordinated by the United Nations (UN) and the United Nations Educational Organization, the Science and Culture (Unesco), to reaffirm memories and places of memories as a cultural legacy for humanity and to strengthen the contemporary identity of subjects of African descent.