He was born free. Mahommah Gardo Baquaqua, like many other Africans enslaved in the Americas, had a hometown, a family, and in some of his youth suffered from the violence of the war. He was enslaved and exported through the most important slave port in West Africa, the port of Udai (Whydah), in the kingdom of Dahomey. He was then sent to Brazil in a tumbeiro (slave ship) and unloaded on a beach in the north of Pernambuco in 1845. At that time, the transatlantic slave trade was already prohibited in Brazil. Therefore, his status as a slave, by law, would already be illegal.