Although the slave trade in the USA was nominally prohibited as early as 1820, when a law was passed declaring the overseas slave trade to be piracy, slaves from Africa were arriving illegally in the American South until the end of the Civil War. A full 40 years after the passing of that law, i.e. in 1860, a landowner from Alabama, Timothy Meaher, according to legend, bet that he could smuggle a ship with 110 African slaves caught in the territory of today’s Benin. The ship with which Maeher really managed to do this was called the Clotilda, and right after he smuggled slaves and sold them to his neighbors, the ship caught fire and sank, and to this day it is not known where the remains of that ship are.
After the Civil War ended, Maeher sold these same slaves, who were now freed, several acres of swampland outside the city of Mobile, Alabama. That area has been called Africatown since those days, and director Margaret Brown, who received a special jury award at the Sundance festival for her documentary “Heirs”, takes us to the same settlement today. In a settlement where the heirs of the last slaves who were brought to the USA from Africa still live. At the same time as we follow the attempts of researchers who are trying to find the remains of Clotilde in the many branches of the delta of the river that flows into the Atlantic Ocean in Mobile, Brown puts together a layered and deep story about a community that shares a common history full of horrific tragedies and violence.
And “Descendant” was an extremely interesting and layered documentary that not only touches on the standard issue of slavery and systemic racism in America, but also the fact that today someone’s tragedy is starting to turn into tourism and entertainment. The fate of the inhabitants of Africatown is tragic even today, because they are people who mostly live in unimaginable poverty, in shantytowns next to which numerous factories and heavy industry have grown over the years, poisoning them and causing health problems. But the most absurd thing of all is that the landowners who rent the land to these plants are the heirs of the same Maeher family from the beginning of the story, that is, the heirs and descendants of slave owners are poisoning the descendants of their slaves today.