Sarah Forbes Bonetta: From slavery to the Queen’s goddaughter
How did Sarah Forbes Bonetta escape slavery in Africa, reach England and become a beloved goddaughter of Queen Victoria?
Image: Sarah Forbes Bonetta | Public Domain
It’s easy to assume that black culture first took root in Britain with the arrival of the ‘Windrush Generation’ in 1948. However, digging deeper into the archives reveals many intriguing stories of black people making their mark in Britain decades earlier.
In the case of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, it was almost a full century earlier! Thought to have been born in the West African village of Oke-Odan in 1843, she was orphaned at the age of five. She was subsequently enslaved by the King of Dahomey, a nearby kingdom.
However, after a British naval captain rescued her from slavery and brought her to Britain in 1850, she became something of a high-society celebrity. Below, we at Sky HISTORY look closer at her extraordinary story — including the affectionate and lasting bond she formed with Queen Victoria.
A young African girl falls into slavery
Public knowledge of Bonetta’s early life is somewhat shrouded in mystery. She is believed to have originally been named either Aina or Ina. It is also said that she belonged to the Egbado clan of West Africa’s Yoruba people.
At the time of her birth, her home village had only recently broken away from the Oyo Empire, which lay in what is now Nigeria. In 1848, a ‘slave-hunt’ war resulted in the Dahoman army killing Aina’s parents and capturing the little girl herself as a slave.
Aina was still enslaved when, in 1850, Captain Frederick E. Forbes of the British Royal Navy arrived in Dahomey. He was on a diplomatic mission to pressure the West African kingdom to abandon its involvement in the Atlantic slave trade.
How the future Bonetta rose from obscurity
As a young child slave at the Dahoman king’s court, Aina caught the captain’s notice. Forbes convinced King Ghezo to give Aina away as a gift to Queen Victoria.
The captain renamed Aina after himself and HMS Bonetta, the ship he used to transport her to Britain. Sarah Forbes Bonetta — as she was now known — soon met an impressed Queen Victoria, who praised her as ‘sharp and intelligent’.
Sarah became the Queen’s goddaughter and regularly visited the monarch, including at Osborne House, her seaside home on the Isle of Wight. However, the Queen was alarmed when, in 1851, Sarah developed a chronic cough.
From one place to another — and another…
In 1851, it was widely believed that the English climate could wreak havoc on the health of Africans exposed to it. So, the Queen decided that a suitable remedy for Sarah’s cough would be to send the girl to Sierra Leone for education.
In 1855, Sarah returned to Britain, where she lived in Kent and then Brighton. In 1962, she married James Pinson Labulo Davies, a businessman born in Sierra Leone.
A happy marriage… or was it?
Sarah’s wedding took place at St Nicholas Church in Brighton. The guests included ‘White ladies with African gentlemen, and African ladies with White gentlemen’, according to the contemporary press.
Despite the lavish nature of the event, the couple at the heart of it all weren’t exactly a love match. Sarah had been reluctant to marry James, but acquiesced after the Queen commanded her to go ahead with the nuptials.
In a letter, Sarah complained that she believed she could never love James, despite others’ insistence to the contrary. She also feared that by marrying him for his wealth, she would be exchanging her ‘peace of mind for money’.
Nonetheless, she went on to have three children with her husband. The first, Victoria, was named after the Queen, who became her godmother. Sarah’s other two children were named Arthur and Stella.
Sarah Forbes Bonetta’s death and legacy
Tragically, Sarah was aged only 37 when she died of tuberculosis in 1880. In the Nigerian city of Lagos, where her widowed husband ran a cocoa farm, he erected an eight-foot granite monument in her memory.
Sarah had passed away in Funchal, the capital city on the Portuguese island of Madeira. Her grave is at the British Cemetery of Funchal.
Even in recent years, popular culture has paid tribute to Sarah Forbes Bonetta. She was played by child actress Zaris-Angel Hator in the 2017 Christmas special of the ITV period drama Victoria. Bonetta also inspired Anni Domingo’s novel Breaking the Maafa Chain, published in 2021.
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