Captured at thirteen on the coasts of Senegal, Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye, daughter of a Wolof chief, was deported to Cuba and then to Florida. There, under the name Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, she became a free woman, plantation mistress, and matriarch of an African American dynasty. Between enslavement, shrewdness, and power, her destiny defies every predictable narrative of servitude.
A queen on the banks of the Saint John’s River
Fort George Island, Florida, 1830. Under the harsh noon light, a Black woman in her fifties supervises the rice harvest. Her calm voice directs a hundred workers. She inspects the accounts, signs contracts, receives white visitors with assurance. Everyone calls her “Madame Anna,” with a tone mingled with respect and astonishment. Few know that before becoming Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, she was Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye, daughter of a Wolof prince from the kingdom of Jolof, on the coast of present-day Senegal.
Her story sounds as if it were taken from a novel; yet every detail is true. Captured at thirteen, sold to a slaver, reduced to bondage in Cuba, she became free, then owner of a plantation and of enslaved workers. Her journey encapsulates the tragedy and complexity of the Black Atlantic: an African woman, born free, who became an active figure in the colonial world.
Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye was born around 1793, in the heart of the kingdom of Jolof, a vast Wolof confederation that once stretched between Senegal and the Gambia. Her family belonged to the warrior aristocracy, related to the Ndiaye dynasty. The kingdom, weakened by civil wars and Fulani raids from Fouta Toro, was then in decline.
The child grew up in a hierarchical but refined society, where education, religion, and music structured court life. Anta learned to speak several languages, to sing royal genealogies, and to carry herself as a déendee, a noble daughter.
Around 1806, everything changed. A raid by Tyeddo warriors attacked her village. The teenager was captured, sold to Moorish merchants, then led to Gorée Island, a major hub of the French Atlantic slave trade. On the docks, slavers inspected the captives: teeth, skin, muscles. The royal child became merchandise.
At thirteen, Anta boarded a slave ship bound for Cuba. The crossing, known as the Middle Passage, lasted more than two months. Chained, starving, she saw dozens of captives die. The ship anchored in Havana, where she was registered under the name “Anna,” with the note bozal; an African-born, non-creolized enslaved person.
There, her fate crossed that of Zephaniah Kingsley, a wealthy British merchant naturalized as Spanish, trader of enslaved people and owner of plantations between Florida and Saint-Domingue. Kingsley noticed the adolescent. He purchased her. But unlike other traffickers, he treated her with unusual attention. According to African custom, he married her — a “country-style” marriage, half-sacred, half-commercial.
Soon after, Anna became pregnant. In 1807, they crossed the sea to Spanish Florida, then a peripheral colony of the Iberian empire. The African slave became the companion of a free and powerful man in a world where racial boundaries were not yet rigid.
Settled at Laurel Grove, on the banks of the Saint John’s River, Anna entered a new world. The plantation held about fifty enslaved Africans, most from the Congo or Senegambia. Zephaniah Kingsley practiced the task system: enslaved workers completed a daily quota and then had access to free time.
Anna learned quickly. She managed the household, supervised the harvests of rice, corn, and indigo. She kept the accounts and, at eighteen, became a respected overseer. In 1811, Kingsley officially freed her through a notarized act: she became a free woman, a citizen of Spanish Florida. The following year, she received ownership of five acres in Mandarin.
Her rise fascinated the colony. At the head of her own workers, she prospered in a world where skin color did not yet entirely determine social status. Spanish colonial society recognized the category of pardos libres — free people of color, often mixed-race or freed.
But peace was fragile. In 1812, the Patriot Rebellion erupted, an uprising supported by the United States against Spain. Laurel Grove was attacked, Kingsley captured. Anna, alone, negotiated with Spanish authorities for the protection of her lands and the release of her husband. She managed to save her children and most of her workers. In recognition, the Spanish governor granted her an additional 350 acres.
After the war, the Kingsleys settled on Fort George Island, at the mouth of the Saint John’s River. The vast estate held nearly a hundred enslaved people. Anna was the one who ran it.
The main house, built in “tabby” (a cement made of shells and lime inherited from African techniques), testified to a blended art of living. Visitors described a spacious home decorated in Creole style, where Spanish furniture, Wolof fabrics, and African pottery mingled.
Zephaniah Kingsley took three other African wives, following a polygamous system inspired by Senegambian customs. Far from the American puritan model, the plantation functioned as a small communal society: each wife managed a house, workers, and income. Mixed-race children received an education; some were sent to Saint-Domingue or New York.
Anna reigned over this universe as a matriarch. European witnesses spoke of “a woman of rare intelligence and natural majesty.” The Spanish governor invited her to dinner. In Jacksonville, people whispered that she was “an African queen.”
But in 1821, everything changed: Florida came under American rule. With it came racial segregation, fear of racial mixing, and the rise of legal racism.
American laws now forbade marriage between white and Black people, limited the rights of free people of color, and restricted land ownership for former slaves. Anna and Kingsley saw their world collapse.
Zephaniah Kingsley, faithful to his ideal of “racial association,” published in 1828 a bold pamphlet: A Treatise on the Patriarchal or Co-operative System of Society. In it, he defended freedom for Black people and advocated a mixed society where “men of all colors would cooperate according to their talents.” His ideas made him suspect in the eyes of American authorities.
Attacks against his family multiplied. Militias threatened properties owned by people of color, and mixed-race children risked re-enslavement. Kingsley understood that American Florida had no place for his utopia.
In 1835, Zephaniah Kingsley, Anna, and several dozen Black workers embarked for Haiti, the world’s only free Black republic. They settled in the region of Puerto Plata (today in the Dominican Republic), on the Mayorasgo de Koka plantation.
There, Kingsley tried to implement his “cooperative system”: former enslaved workers became free laborers, owning a share of the production. Anna managed the harvests and the main house. The experiment attracted foreign visitors intrigued by this attempt at a mixed economy.
But the utopia crumbled. Haiti’s political climate was unstable, and American colonists suspected the settlement of harboring “Black rebels.” In 1843, Zephaniah Kingsley died in New York, leaving Anna and her children facing hostile white heirs.
Returning to Jacksonville, Anna began a long legal battle to have her rights as a widow and those of her children recognized. Armed with her intelligence and the 1821 Spanish-American treaty, she prevailed in court. The judge recognized the validity of her Spanish marriage and confirmed the legitimacy of her mixed-race children.
Anna lived her final years discreetly, near the family plantation of her descendants. She died in 1870, around the age of 77, quietly. Her burial place remains unknown.
The story of Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye does not end with her death. Her descendants became key figures in Florida’s African American community.
Her daughter Mary Kingsley Sammis married a free carpenter; their grandson, Abraham Lincoln Lewis, founded the state’s first Black insurance company and the seaside resort of American Beach, a symbol of freedom during segregation.
Among Anna’s spiritual heirs were also Johnnetta Cole, the first Black woman to lead Spelman College, and MaVynee Betsch, an environmental activist nicknamed The Beach Lady.
Africa at the heart of America
The destiny of Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye is a parable of the Atlantic world.
Captured as a slave, she was able to turn constraint into power, enslavement into authority, loss into creation. A woman, African, Muslim, and free in a world of white domination, she embodied a subtle form of resistance: adaptation and authority through competence.
Her existence overturns the binary narrative of the slave trade: it shows that people taken from Africa sometimes not only survived, but influenced the formation of the New World. Under the name Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley, Anta Madjiguène Ndiaye crossed the Atlantic as a tragedy — yet she left behind a kingdom: that of memory.
Notes and references
Daniel L. Schafer, Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley: African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Slaveowner, University Press of Florida, 2003 / expanded edition 2018.
Zephaniah Kingsley, A Treatise on the Patriarchal or Co-Operative System of Society, 1828 (reprinted by University of Florida Digital Collections).
Jane Landers, Black Society in Spanish Florida, University of Illinois Press, 1999.
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas: Restoring the Links, University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South, University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South, University of North Carolina Press, 1998.
Philip D. Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census, University of Wisconsin Press, 1969.
Paul E. Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, Cambridge University Press, 2011.
Sylvia Frey, Water from the Rock: Black Resistance in a Revolutionary Age, Princeton University Press, 1991.
University of North Florida, Digital Exhibit: Anna Kingsley – African Princess, Florida Slave, Plantation Owner, UNF Digital Humanities, 2021.
Table of contents
A Queen on the Banks of the Saint John’s River
Africa at the Heart of America
Notes and References
