Zamba Zembola

Zamba Zembola
The Life and Adventures of Zamba, 1847. The text under the portrait reads "African negro slave".
Born	c. 1780 Unknown
Died	Before 1860 (aged 60–70) or Before 1870 (aged 70–80) or Unknown
Nationality	American
Known for	author of the novel The Life and Adventures of Zamba, an African Negro King.

Zamba Zembola (born c. 1780) is the supposed author of an 1847

Some modern scholarly sources state outright that Neilson was the author of the work,[4]^[5] not without cautioning that Harriet Jacobs' Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, once thought to be fiction written by its American editor Lydia Maria Child, is now accepted as authentic. Graham White wrote of the time gap between the 1820s, when, on Neilson's account, he knew Zamba in the US, and 1847, when the work was published, as raising issues that do not have immediate answers.^[6] Robert S. Starobin stated that the work "provides an extreme example of the problem of antislavery romanticism in a slave narrative", also citing Philip D. Curtin's opinion that it was a "blatant forgery".^[7]

Account of early life and slavery

According to the book, Zamba was born in the Congo. He was in his twenties when he befriended Captain Winton, one of the Western slave traders with whom his father, the king, did business. Winton provided Zebola with an education and, eventually, passage on his slave ship to America. A free man, Zebola recorded the squalid conditions in which the enslaved people were kept. Upon his arrival to the United States, the Captain sold him into slavery and confiscated his possessions. Forced to work for over 40 years on a plantation in South Carolina, he published his autobiography The Life and Adventures of Zamba, an African King in 1847, after obtaining his freedom.^[8]

References