Zamba Zembola
Zamba Zembola is the supposed author of an 1847 slave narrative, The Life and Adventures of Zamba, an African Negro King; and his Experience of Slavery in South Carolina, which describes his kidnapping and 40 years of labor as a enslaved person on a plantation in the U.S. state of South Carolina. The work was edited by Peter Neilson, a Scottish abolitionist. Some scholars believe the book is not a genuine slave narrative but is fiction written by Neilson. Neilson refused to produce Zamba for inspection by anyone else.
Debate on authenticity of ''The Life and Adventures of Zamba''
On its appearance in 1847, The Spectator took a skeptical view of all the detail in the book; the New Monthly Magazine, however, called it "a genuine and interesting sketch of African domestic manners". A review in the Baptist Magazine raised the question of its authenticity.Some modern scholarly sources state outright that Neilson was the author of the work, 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. 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".