1788.  The slave ship Africa set sail from the Gambia River, its hold laden with a profitable but highly perishable cargo—hundreds of men, women and children bound in chains--headed for American shores.  Eight months later, a handful of survivors found themselves for sale in Natchez, Mississippi.  On the slave auction block, one of them, a 26-year-old male named Abdul Rahman Ibrahima made an astonishing claim to Thomas Foster, the plantation owner who purchased him at auction: As an African prince, highly educated and heir to a kingdom, this bedraggled African’s father would gladly pay gold for his return. Foster dismissed the claim as a tissue of lies.

Abdul Rahman, trilingual, a successful military general and true heir to a West African nation the size of Great Britain, did not return to Africa for 40 years.  In that time he toiled on Foster’s plantation to make his owner rich.  He married a fellow slave, Isabella, and they had nine children.  Gradually, he also became the most famous African in America, attracting the support of such powerful men as President John Quincy Adams and Secretary of State Henry Clay. 

Later in life, he and Isabella traveled widely throughout the northern states, where Abdul Rahman addressed huge audiences of fascinated whites, early Abolitionists including Francis Scott Key and Thomas Gallaudet, and sympathetic Free Blacks in an attempt to raise enough money to buy his children out of slavery.  A hero snared in a tragedy for four decades, he returned to Africa at the age 67, only to fall ill and die just as word of his return reached his former kingdom.  Throughout a life of Shakespearean dimensions, Abdul Rahman maintained his dignity and hope for the freedom of his people.

Abdul Rahman’s life story is told in full historical detail in the Oxford University Press book, Prince Among Slaves by Terry Alford, a property under contract to Unity Productions Foundation.

The film PRINCE AMONG SLAVES will be a vivid, dramatic feature film of an extraordinary man in extraordinary times, interweaving universal themes of bondage and deliverance, pride and forbearance, guile and providence with the wild and unruly early years of America’s Kingdom of Cotton.

The characters in this true story are larger than life: a courageous, wily, and educated Prince snatched from his throne; am expansive Faulknerian plantation family riven by alcohol and madness; a conflicted Northern journalist partial to a slave’s fate yet beholden to the interests of slaveholders; the Great Conciliator Henry Clay, U.S. Secretary of State; Andrew Jackson, one-time slaver and Presidential candidate; and his opponent John Quincy Adams, American President.

The Setting is Natchez, Mississippi, a well-preserved antebellum town, where more millionaires lived in 1820 than in New York, where Cotton was King, and where, today, over 200 plantation homes are on the National registry.

Produced by Unity Productions Foundation, the narrator is renowned hip-hop artist and actor Mos Def (The Italian Job, 16 Blocks).  The film is directed by Andrea Kalin (Partners of the Heart, The Pact) with Bill Duke as the Director of Reenactments (A Raisin in the Sun, A Rage in Harlem).  Supported with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Black Programming Consortium, this 60 minute film is intended for broadcast on PBS in 2008.
 

PRINCE AMONG SLAVES is the true story of Abdul Rahman Ibrahima, brought to life in rich, dramatic detail on film, including:

• his life as the son of one of the most revered and fierce kings on the African continent and the tribal battle that stripped him of his rightful heritage;
  
• his journey from Africa to a Natchez, Mississippi, plantation where he successfully escaped—only to return in order to survive;
  
• his role as a man whose education surpassed that of his white superiors and how he used his knowledge to sustain himself and create his master’s wealth;
  
• his accidental reunion 25 years later with John Coates Cox, an Irish immigrant earlier rescued from certain death by Ibrahima’s father in Africa; and Cox’s negotiations to secure his friend’s freedom;
  
• the impact of slavery on Thomas Foster's family as his adult children were saddled with drunkenness, insanity, abandonment and murder;
  
• the colorful characters and important historical figures who peopled Ibrahima’s life, including Mississippi journalist Andrew Marschalk who popularized his story to secure his freedom, only to later turn on him with racially charged editorials;
  
• his release from slavery and the work he would do to launch his celebrity, sparking racial tension throughout the ante-bellum South;
  
• his return to Africa and his death there just days from his former home.