A new biography of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, the Yoruba woman 'gifted' to Queen Victoria as a child, has been welcomed by her great-great-grandson, Bayo Randle, who reflects on her extraordinary life and its complex legacy.
An Extraordinary Life
Born in 1843 in Òkè-Òdàn, south-west Nigeria, Bonetta was originally called Àìná. Her family was killed in 1848 when her town was attacked by King Ghezo of Dahomey's forces. Bonetta, then five, is believed to have been captured by the agodjié – the all-female regiment depicted in the Hollywood movie The Woman King – and held at King Ghezo's court.
In 1850, Frederick Forbes of the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron went to Dahomey – now Benin – to petition Ghezo to sign an anti-slavery treaty. The mission failed, but Forbes asked Ghezo if he could take Bonetta to England.
A Life of Renown and Constraint
Bonetta would go on to live a life of renown, becoming one of the most artistically represented and widely reported African women of her time. But she was never truly free. The new book, Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Yorùbá Woman in Queen Victoria's Court by Prof Henry Lovejoy of the University of Colorado Boulder, describes how, before Forbes arrived in England with her – giving her his own name and that of his ship, the Bonetta – he petitioned for her to be 'the property of the crown'.
This meant Bonetta was 'effectively indentured to Queen Victoria until age 19' under the post-abolition legal structures, Lovejoy said. Bonetta was then married off to James Pinson Labulo Davies, a merchant and philanthropist, of whom she would write: 'I don't feel a particle of love for him.'
A Symbol of Imperial Agenda
Lovejoy's research for the website liberatedafricans.org, developed with Kartikay Chadha, documents how, after abolition, more than 700,000 Africans 'liberated' from enslavers were forced into indentures of up to 14 years 'to pay for the cost of their own freedom' by governments including Britain's. Lovejoy claims Bonetta was at the elite end of this bonded labour system, 'educated to be a missionary who would Christianise Africa'. In her lifetime her image was exploited as imperial iconography, promoting the idea that British colonialism of Africa was a 'civilising mission'.
Lovejoy said: 'Sarah's imagery was used to project the idea of the queen's benevolence – at a time when 'liberated' Africans are being forced into indentures.' Nonetheless, when Bonetta attended the 1858 wedding of Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Royal, American abolitionists saw it as proof that Victoria, then the most powerful woman on Earth, believed in equality.
A Family Legacy
For Randle, a plaster bust of Bonetta sculpted in 1851 by Benedetto Pistrucci, the Royal Mint's chief engraver, symbolises the story's 'duality'. Randle saw it last year after Lovejoy had tracked it down to a private family collection in his research. 'Who gets to see what their great ancestor looked like as a child, the cultural markings on her face? That is amazing. But at the same time it was a bust prepared for phrenological purposes, within a racist framework, where [Bonetta] was shown as an 'excellent specimen',' Randle said.
Randle first learned his family history from his father, Adekunle Randle, a retired lawyer. The family still has the engraved goblet and plate that Queen Victoria gave to Bonetta's daughter, Victoria, who, with the queen's help, was educated at Cheltenham ladies' college. Lovejoy's book challenges the myths that Bonetta was a Yoruba princess, that she herself was Queen Victoria's goddaughter, and that she spent most of her life in England.
Randle, 37, who maintains his family's ancestral ties with Òkè-Òdàn, welcomes research into Bonetta, who was a gifted linguist, musician, travel writer, educator and leading woman in 19th-century Lagos, until her death from tuberculosis in Madeira in 1880, aged 37. 'Whether [Lovejoy's] book is comfortable for me is beside the point,' Randle said. 'It's for the advancement of knowledge and how we learn from the past. Where the real discomfort lies is in what [Bonetta] was the symbol of, what she was used for.'
'But it would be a mistake to paint her story as entirely tragic,' he added. 'My great-great-grandmother was very capable, courageous and dignified through adversity – through the trauma of losing her family, being displaced, and changing like a chameleon to fit into a culture so alien from what she'd known, she thrived. She is an early example of Black Britain.'
