Descendant Tells Sarah Forbes Bonetta's Story in New Biography

When she was just seven years old, Sarah Forbes Bonetta — Bayo Randle's great-great-grandmother — was brought before Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle as a "diplomatic gift" from an African king. Victoria went on to pay for Bonetta's education, approved her marriage to one of the wealthiest men in West Africa, and became godmother to Bonetta's eldest daughter.

According to Randle, a British-Nigerian lawyer based in London, the Queen genuinely took an interest in Bonetta's life, turning the orphaned child into a royal protege and meeting her on several occasions. Yet the relationship, he says, still sat within a larger calculation.

To mark the release of the biography Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Yorùbá Woman in Queen Victoria's Court, Randle shared the story of his family history. He voiced reservations about the word "gift": "I don't think a person with their own free will can be 'gifted' from one person to another. But if she hadn't been given to Queen Victoria, would I be here today?"

The book, written by Canadian scholar Professor Henry Lovejoy, traces Bonetta's journey to England in the care of Frederick Forbes, an officer of the Royal Navy's West Africa Squadron, the unit established to enforce the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Born in 1843 in Òkè-Òdàn, south-west Nigeria, Bonetta was originally named Àìná. Her family was killed in 1848 when their town was attacked by the army of King Ghezo of Dahomey. Aged five at the time, Bonetta is said to have been captured by the agodjié — the all-female regiment depicted in the Hollywood film The Woman King — and held at King Ghezo's court.

In 1850, Forbes travelled to Dahomey, now Benin, to persuade Ghezo to sign an anti-slavery treaty. The mission failed, but Forbes asked Ghezo for permission to take Bonetta to England. From there, Bonetta entered a life of celebrity, becoming one of the most depicted African women in art and widely covered in the press of the day. Yet she was never truly free.

Lovejoy's book describes how, before Forbes took Bonetta to England — giving her his own surname and the name of his ship, the Bonetta — he proposed that she become "property of the Crown". This meant Bonetta was "essentially bound to Queen Victoria until she was 19", Lovejoy explains, under the legal structures of the post-abolition era. She was later married to James Pinson Labulo Davies, a merchant and philanthropist about whom she once wrote: "I do not feel one particle of love for him."

Research by Lovejoy for the website liberatedafricans.org, developed with Kartikay Chadha, records that after abolition more than 700,000 Africans "liberated" from enslavers were forced by governments, including Britain's, into indenture contracts lasting up to 14 years "to pay for their own freedom". Lovejoy argues that Bonetta belonged to the elite tier of this indentured labour system, "educated to become a missionary to Christianise Africa". Throughout her life, her image was exploited as a symbol of imperialism, promoting the idea that Britain's colonisation of Africa was a "civilising mission".

Lovejoy, of the University of Colorado Boulder, said: "Sarah's image was used to showcase the Queen's benevolence — at the very moment 'liberated' Africans were being forced into indenture."

Even so, when Bonetta attended the 1858 wedding of Queen Victoria's daughter, the Princess Royal, abolitionists in the United States seized on it as evidence that Victoria, then the most powerful woman in the world, believed in equality.

For Randle, the plaster bust of Bonetta sculpted in 1851 by Benedetto Pistrucci — chief engraver of the Royal Mint — embodies the story's "duality". Randle saw the bust in person last year after Lovejoy traced it to a family's private collection during his research. "Who gets to see what their ancestor looked like as a child, the cultural traces on her face? That's amazing. But at the same time, it is a bust made for physiognomic purposes, within a racist framework, where Bonetta was treated as an 'excellent specimen'."

Randle first learned about his family history from his father, Adekunle Randle, a retired lawyer. The family still keeps the engraved cup 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 also challenges 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. According to the author, Bonetta was a gifted linguist, musician, travel writer and educator, and a prominent woman in 19th-century Lagos, until her death from tuberculosis in Madeira in 1880 at the age of 37.

Randle, 37, who maintains his family's connection to Òkè-Òdàn, welcomes the research on Bonetta. "Whether Lovejoy's book is comfortable for me is not the central issue," he said. "What matters is broadening understanding and how we learn from the past. What really makes people uncomfortable is what Bonetta symbolised, what she was used for."

Still, he stressed: "It would be a mistake to paint her story as an outright tragedy. My great-great-grandmother was talented, courageous and kept her dignity through adversity — through the pain of losing her family, being separated from her homeland, and having to change like a chameleon to fit into a culture alien to everything she had known, she rose. She is an early example of a multiracial Britain."