Lovejoy links Bonetta to 700,000-person indenture system

Henry Lovejoy’s biography of Sarah Forbes Bonetta, covered by The Guardian on Oct. 18, places the 19th-century Yorùbá woman within a post-abolition indenture system involving more than 700,000 Africans.

The account matters because it turns Bonetta’s single, high-profile story into part of a much larger system: Lovejoy says she was “effectively indentured” until age 19 after being presented to Queen Victoria at age seven.

The book, Becoming Sarah Forbes Bonetta: A Yorùbá Woman in Queen Victoria’s Court, traces how Bonetta was taken to England by Frederick Forbes of the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron. The squadron was created to enforce Britain’s abolition of the transatlantic slave trade.

Bayo Randle, Bonetta’s 37-year-old great-great-grandson and a British-Nigerian barrister in London, said the history resists simple judgment. “I don’t think a human being, who has agency, could be ‘gifted’ from one to another, but had she not been gifted to Queen Victoria, would I be here today?” he told The Guardian.

Lovejoy, a University of Colorado Boulder professor, says Bonetta’s case sat inside a wider system of indenture, a bonded labour arrangement imposed for a fixed period. His research with Kartikay Chadha for liberatedafricans.org documents more than 700,000 Africans who were “liberated” from enslavers and then forced into indentures of up to 14 years “to pay for the cost of their own freedom” by governments including Britain’s.

Bonetta was born in 1843 in Òkè-Òdàn, in what is now south-west Nigeria, and was originally named Àìná. Her family was killed in 1848 when forces of King Ghezo of Dahomey attacked her town, according to the Guardian account of the book. She was then five.

The book says Bonetta is believed to have been captured by the agodjié, Dahomey’s all-female regiment, and held at Ghezo’s court. In 1850, Forbes visited Dahomey, now Benin, to seek an anti-slavery treaty with Ghezo. The mission did not produce a treaty, but Forbes asked to take Bonetta to England.

Lovejoy says Forbes gave the child his surname and the name of his ship, Bonetta, and petitioned for her to be treated as “the property of the crown.” Queen Victoria later paid for Bonetta’s education, approved her marriage to James Pinson Labulo Davies, a wealthy west African merchant and philanthropist, and became godmother to Bonetta’s eldest daughter.

Lovejoy argues that Bonetta occupied the elite end of the bonded-labour system and was educated for a missionary role in Africa. “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,” he told The Guardian.

Randle said a plaster bust of Bonetta made in 1851 by Benedetto Pistrucci captured the dual nature of the story. The sculpture showed Bonetta as a child, including cultural markings on her face, but Randle said it was also made for phrenological purposes within a racist framework.

The book also disputes accounts that Bonetta was a Yoruba princess, Queen Victoria’s goddaughter, or a woman who spent most of her life in England. The Guardian said Bonetta became a linguist, musician, travel writer, educator and leading woman in 19th-century Lagos before dying of tuberculosis in Madeira in 1880 at age 37.

Randle said the research is valuable even where it is uncomfortable. “But it would be a mistake to paint her story as entirely tragic,” he said. “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.”